The mind-bending Nevada desert festival – full of crazed hippies and post-apocalyptic sculpture – has colonised one of Britain’s greatest stately homes. Is the Duke of Devonshire going psychedelic?
Climbing the inside of Christina Sporrong’s gigantic head, I look up towards the books that are escaping through the top of its open skull and fluttering out into the perfect blue sky. I have to watch my step – there are some gaps in the railings – until I reach the eye socket and get to peek out at my surroundings.
Back in 2019, when Sporrong’s Flybrary sculpture was first unveiled, this would have given me the chance to take in Nevada’s famous desert festival Burning Man. I could have watched naked hippies and spaced-out ravers dancing amid colourful sculptures and bursts of pyrotechnics. Today, however, I’m getting a rather different view: the glorious park estate of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.
