Every year, Cranford Collection invites an artist to create a special project for the spectacular link room designed by David Chipperfield. Each project is presented alongside a new exhibition of artworks from the Collection displayed throughout the house.

In 2023, Cranford Collection has invited Italian artist Isabella Ducrot to conceive its project for the link room. Isabella Ducrot’s work is invested in breaking down hierarchies between the decorative and fine arts. Her art has grown from a deep fascination for old fabric, cloth and weaves, and their underlying patterns. For many years, Ducrot gathered an extensive collection of textiles from the countries she visited while travelling throughout Asia. Beginning her artistic career later in life, the fabrics she collected became inspirations and even part of her own artworks, finding a balance between expressive forms and respect for the material’s origins. Her vocabulary oscillates between repetitive patterns of dots and squares, the shapes and colours of the natural world, dancers and lovers, and everyday objects. At Cranford Collection, Ducrot will present two monumental works conceived to wrap the architecture in a night garden. Delicately painted on parchment-like sheets of handmade paper, a horizontal work displays a landscape of flowers under the stars and moon framed by a frieze reminiscent of majolica ceramic, while the other piece is a triptych inspired by Chinese vertical mountain landscape paintings. The paper material is both extremely light and resistant, and the artist uses its undulated texture to give life to her dream-like garden, highly stylized and subtly organic.

Photography: Richard Ivey


About Isabella Ducrot

Born in Naples in 1931, Isabella Ducrot lives and works in Rome.

Ducrot uses textiles and paper both as an artistic medium and as an artistic thread. The raw material, from which her fascination originally emanates, and its characteristics, determine the motif for which it becomes an immanent carrier. The same applies to the technique with which the motif is created. Ducrot does not violate the colour of the textile or paper with her chromatic scheme; instead, she allows the material to become part of the images.

Ducrot’s work has been exhibited internationally since the mid-1980s, including at the Venice Biennales of 1993 and 2011. She is the author of numerous philosophical and art-historical essays.