Arts & Antiques: Five ways in which we are living in a material world

These articles appear on page 124 of the September 17, 2025 edition of Country Life magazine. Some copies of this issue suffered from a printing error which affected this page, so the full articles are reproduced below. You can also download the PDF of the original page here.

Material World, the new art, fashion and culture festival at Kew Gardens

trousers and a giant T-shirt made of fungi star in a new art, fashion and culture festival at Kew Gardens in London, which explores the links between plants, textiles and sustainability (September 20–November 2; www.kew.org).

Held in the Temperate House (pictured above), ‘Material World’ is split into five areas:

1. Between earth and sky: wing-like shapes made from organic cotton, hessian and cheesecloth float above the glasshouse’s plants in a new installation by artist and environmentalist Nnenna Okore.

2. Global threads: designer Lottie Delamain created a garden from plants that can be used in sustainable fashion, from cotton to indigo. As a counterpoint, the beds are bordered by waste from fast-fashion textiles

3. Fashion: young designers from the London College of Fashion present sustainable collections made from plant material. Together with the sea-weed trousers and mycelium T-shirts, there is a ‘growable’ yarn and garments made of pineapple fibre or dyed with nettle

4. Threads of the canopy: embroidery, printing and a huge collaborative effort have helped create a huge textile dye map of Kew Gardens

5. Audio installations: artist Michael McMillan explores the history and environmental impact of cotton and the League of Artisans celebrates worldwide artisans using plant fibres

'She painted because she absolutely loved it, it was her raison d’être': The life and work of Rose Hilton

Rose Hilton would paint a picture, roll it up and put it under her sofa. Her gallerist, David Messum, would pull it out and, recounts the gallery’s associate director, Patrick Duffy, ask her: ‘Shall we sign the back of it? Shall we go and put it on the wall? Shall we sell it?’ The young Rose Phipps had shown great promise as a student at the Royal College of Art, but after marrying Abstract artist Roger Hilton, she had stopped painting to bring up her family. Once he died, however, she returned to her brushes: ‘She painted because she absolutely loved it, it was her raison d’être,’ explains Messum’s sales director Cheska Hill-Wood.

Because she was so prolific, however, there were many of those rolled-up pictures in the nooks and crannies of her Botallack house, the ‘magic, welcoming place’ that was her home and studio. When she died in 2019 and David Messum Fine Art was asked to take on her estate, ‘things were under the bed, things were in drawers, nothing was signed or titled—it was a lot of work making sure that everything was documented correctly,’ recalls Ms Wood.

That Herculean effort has since allowed the gallery to hold regular sales of her work, including the current one, which encompasses a broad selection of abstract and figurative pieces. Femininity shines through her paintings, whether in her choice of colour palette or the ‘female gaze on females’ of her nudes (such as Sally, above)—although much of her inspiration came from male painters such as Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard: ‘You can view their elements in her work, but she’s feminised all of that,’ believes Mr Duffy. ‘It’s wholly hers, a true transformation into a new vocabulary.’ ‘Rose Hilton’ is at Messum’s, London SW1, until October 3.