Artist Es Devlin's installation at Castle Howard celebrates architect John Vanbrugh and the joy of reading

It was one of his last major works, alongside Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, completed in 1725, a year before his death and was originally used as a place for refreshment and reading. Devlin has responded to that by creating her work The Library of the Four Winds, a beautiful piece that takes over the interior of the building and the surrounding area. The installation also honours the National Year of Reading this year, a campaign designed to inspire people to discover, or rediscover, the joy of reading as part of their everyday lives.

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“The Temple of the Four Winds is a beautiful four-sided pavilion and it really invites a response,” says Devlin. “When I first sat inside it, it felt very peaceful and quiet. On my initial visit to Castle Howard it was a rainy November afternoon, I came with one of my old friends and we had a lovely day. With Castle Howard you are entering into another world, looking at the way people lived and built castles in a very different time and enjoying the landscape, really engaging with it. So, I started to think that actually it would be nice to create a place to sit and quietly focus on and absorb those things.” That was the starting point for her design which features a central rotating, reflective oval-shaped sculpture, made up of hundreds of books.

“I did experiment with a few different forms,” says Devlin. “I tried a triangle, for example, but my instinct was that I liked the idea of an expanded egg shape. I liked the notion of a world in a circular bookshelf and the idea that you can encompass whole world views within it. Plus, and this wasn’t necessarily intended, but there is a lot of very pure geometry surrounding it, so this was a nice contrast.” Working on the early stages of the design, Devlin made a series of sketches, trying out different versions. “I then worked with the team at my studio, discussing with them and making decisions about focus, materials and so on,” she says. “Then we looked at the logistics of what’s possible and started to refine it – they are brilliant engineers.”

Vanbrugh, often referred to as ‘the Shakespeare of English architecture’, was a talented polymath who in addition to his renowned work as an architect had concurrent careers as a playwright, adventurer, soldier, spy, diplomat and garden designer. “The installation draws on his dedication to literature, architecture and political activism,” says Devlin. “Visitors will hear a soundscape of my voice reading passages from some of the books featured in the installation and outside there are curved tables around the pavilion, laid with a selection of my books. People are invited to come and read and draw. There will be regular drawing classes throughout the length of the installation’s stay at Castle Howard and people are encouraged to meet with strangers and draw together with people they don’t know. I wanted it to be an encounter of strangers, a shared experience and as an opportunity to create this sense of community that will hopefully remain.”

That focus on shared experience, collective endeavour and public participation runs through much of Devlin’s work as an artist. Recent installations include Congregation (2024) in which she made chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who brought their gifts to the city having experienced displacement, in 2018 she painted one of the stone lions in Trafalgar Square red and invited visitors to feed it words that became a collective poem that was then projected onto Nelson’s column and at the UK Pavilion at the World Expo in 2021 gathered the words of millions of visitors into a global collective poem.

All the books in the Library of the Four Winds are selected from Devlin’s own book collection. “I just sat down with my books for a day, looking through my bookshelves, and thought about all the things that have impacted on or influenced me,” she says. “What are the books that I have read and reread that have really left a lasting impression? Umberto Eco said that a good library is one that has many books in it that you haven’t read yet. So, I really just selected all those books where I felt I could remember those moments of feeling a shift in the architecture of my brain. I sat quietly with books that were important to me at different times in my life, books I read as a child, at school, at university, through to books I read last week.” She then went to a recording studio in Peckham to make the recordings of her reading selected sections from the books. “The passages I am reading are very short and digestible,” she says. “Jewels of quotes that might resonate.”

Devlin hopes that the installation might prompt visitors to view the building and its original designer in a different way. “I would love people to get a fresh perspective on Vanbrugh and his last work,” she says. “It is a beautiful place in beautiful surroundings that encourages reflection. My real hope is that perhaps a community begins to grow there, maybe some kind of bonds might be formed, and who knows where that might lead to.”

The Library of the Four Winds is at Castle Howard until September 27. There are drawing workshops every Saturday with materials provided until September 26. Details castlehoward.co.uk