The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth

The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth

Exhibition details

15 March - 5 October | entry included with all house and garden tickets

‘Botany, the science of the vegetable kingdom, is one of the most attractive, most useful, and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is, above every other, the science of beauty.’

James Main, Popular Botany, 1835

Flowers in all their forms take centre stage in The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth, our 2025 exhibition in the house and garden.

The exhibition features both historical and contemporary works of art from the Devonshire Collections, and is supported by key loans from national and international museums, and new artist commissions.

Inspired by the estate itself, The Gorgeous Nothings builds on the work of an important lineage of landscape designers, gardeners, scientists and botanists who, over the last six centuries have planted, gathered, foraged, researched, collected and preserved an array of botanical treasures at Chatsworth, from rare botanical volumes and illustrated manuscripts in our library to coveted specimens in our garden and grounds.

The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth is curated by Allegra Pesenti and designed by Pippa Nissen from Nissen Richards Studio.

Tickets

Artworks and artefacts connected to the exhibition are on display throughout the house at various points on the visitor route, and in the garden and glasshouses.

Access to the exhibition is included with all house and garden tickets, you do not need a separate ticket. 

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Which artists are featured in the exhibition?

The Gorgeous Nothings brings together works of art by historical and contemporary artists, including:

• Eileen Agar (1899-1991)
• Ruth Asawa (1926-2013)
• Anna Atkins (1799-1871)
• Frank Bowling (1934- )
• Chiara Camoni (1974- )
• Hussein Chalayan (1970- )
• Dorothy Cross (1956- )
• Maurizio Fioravanti (1952-2022)
• Simryn Gill (1959- )
• Gluck (1895-1978)
• George Graham (1881-1949)
• Donna Huddleston (1970- )
• Elliott Hundley (1975- )
• Cozmo Jenks
• Konstantin Kakanias (1961- )
• Christopher Kane (1982- )
• Kapwani Kiwanga ( 1978- )
• Michael Landy (1963- )
• Cecily Lasnet (2000- )
• Liza Lou (1969- )
• Jonas Mekas (1922-2019)
• Alessandro Michele for Gucci (1972- )
• Chris Ofili (1968- )
• Alessandro Piangiamore (1976- )
• Ana Prvacki (1976- )
• Elias Sime (1968- )
• Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)
• Emma Tennant (1943- )
• Lilla Tabasso (1973- )
• Philip Treacy (1967- )
• David Wiseman (1981- )

Gatherings of 'gorgeous nothings'

Gathering – to bring together and take in from different places and sources – is an act of preservation and often of survival. The practice of gathering is engrained in the history of Chatsworth and the Devonshire Collections, and it underlies the choice of artists and selection of objects featured in this exhibition. 

Specimens of scientific nature, such as flower fossils and minerals collected by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, or the over 400 species of British algae catalogued and photographed by Anna Atkins in the 1840’s, find visual echoes in the works of contemporary artists such as Simryn Gill, Elliott Hundley, Liza Lou, Alessandro Piangiamore and Elias Sime.

The practices of collage and assemblage feature prominently in the exhibition. Modulated surfaces and found items converge on the canvases of ‘scavenger’ painter Frank Bowling, while the sculpture of a regal female figure by Chiara Camoni is composed of myriads of components of botanical elements in clay.

The Gorgeous Nothings explores the parallels between botany and humanity, with a particular focus on the contrasts and complexities of human nature.

Hunters and gatherers, beauty and horror, permanence and the ephemeral, sexuality and the senses, mythology and magic are some of the themes encountered on the visitor route. 

The masked silhouettes in British surrealist artist Eileen Agar’s Figures in a Garden are at once haunting and seductive, bold yet fleeting, and interchangeably male or female. The painting is displayed alongside a group of seventeenth-century Delft flower vases assembled by William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire – coveted collector items during the reign of Mary II – and a topiary dress by Hussein Chalayan.

In Kapwani Kiwanga’s immersive installation The Marias, reconstructions of flowers depicted in Suriname by the seventeenth-century botanist Maria Sibylla Merian points to the slavery and persecution of women during colonialism.

Berlin-based artist Ana Prvacki is taking inspiration from the Goddess Flora, and the sculpture of Flora by Caius Gabriel Cibber that resides within an outdoor temple in the Chatsworth Garden, for her cinematic interventions filmed throughout the garden route.

The mystery and wonder of the botanical world are evoked in commissions by Konstantin Kakanias, David Wiseman and Maurizio Fioravanti.

The exhibition title 'The Gorgeous Nothings' is taken from a poem by American poet Emily Dickinson and references the author’s habit of composing poetry on assembled scraps of paper and used envelopes. The ‘gorgeous nothings’ she refers to in one such poem are vital and existential matter to her.

They are not dissimilar to the specimens of ferns in one of the albums on display, which represented a world unto its own to the specialist who assembled it in the 1900’s. Female botanists such as Elizabeth Blackwell, who have historically remained in the shadow of their more famous male counterparts, are featured in this context, together with an extraordinary and newly-discovered eighteenth-century herbarium which is a unique intersection of science and fiction.

Gorgeous Nothings is supported by Sotheby’s, Chatsworth’s Arts and Exhibitions Partner.

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Main image: Christoph Jacob Trew

Supporting images: 

Delft Vases with Flowers from The Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth
Still life of flowers by Jean Baptiste Monnoyer (1636-99) & Jakob Bogdany (1660-1724), 
Philip Treacy orchid hat, © Victoria & Albert Museum
Portrait of a lady, possibly Margaret of Parma by Alonso Sanchez Coello (1532-1588)
Portrait of a man by Corneille de Lyon (1500-1575)
A Shepherdess, follower of Hendrick Bloemaert 
Madonna Della Rosa by Domenichino (1581-1641)
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, Thomas Gainsborough  (1727-1788)

All © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth House Trust unless noted.
Allegra Pesenti © Laura Hodgson

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