Adam Barker-Mill’s sculpture “LAMP”, a sort of artificial glowing moon made from a converted stainless steel milking tank, is perched on an 8-metre-high tripod outside his home near Southampton. It’s an apt welcome for visitors. The Barker-Mill family have long been landowners in this corner of Hampshire and this was once a working dairy farm. Today, in the care of the veteran cinematographer and sculptor, the house has evolved over 40 years into something entirely new. Otherworldly, even. “Light is everything,” says Barker-Mill, who has exhibited his minimal, glowing artworks from Bristol to Nagoya.
“Our house has been in the family since it was built in Tudor times, I guess the 1480s. We moved in about 500 years later, in the 1980s,” he says of the rambling whitewashed farmhouse. When the couple first arrived, “they still used to take all the cows across the road every day to the fields, which obviously would not be possible now because the road has become too busy”. It was the move here that accelerated his transition to art.
Now, with Barker-Mill’s study at one end of the warren-like, rustic building and his wife Carolyn’s painting studio at the other, the home is a canvas for the couple’s visual props — call them art, call them debris, call them 3D poetry. Alongside sculptures and paintings, their own and by others, there are salvaged timbers from Harmondsworth Barn, the “cathedral of Middlesex”; a millstone; assorted stones and pebbles; monstrous cacti and rare Japanese ceramics. It’s a glorious riot of high and low that also includes curious still-life arrangements: a large Fat Lava ceramic from Germany, with a dramatic bubbling red and black glaze, sits under a traditional antique cuckoo clock, next to a vase of dahlias and a Christian Furr painting of cheddar cheese.
Barker-Mill, who has just turned 85, seems more in demand as an artist than ever, with a solo exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, a brilliantly lit sculpture in the window of Mayfair gallery Belmacz and work in a forthcoming show at the National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavik, which opens in January. His work can be delightfully varied. “I like to construct meticulous [yet] simple structures. I suppose you could call them ‘minimalist,’” he says, “but I also like to use the most ordinary materials: cardboard boxes, fruit and veg cartons, plastic buckets, domestic containers, bleach bottles, packaging.”
Barker-Mill’s fascination with light started early. He became a keen photographer at school, and at Oxford university created photo essays for the student magazine Isis before enrolling at the London School of Film Technique. After directing his own video about Screaming Lord Sutch, the 1960s musician and later maverick politician, he went on to become a cinematographer, working on features including the 1969 cult working-class drama Bronco Bullfrog (recently re-released), directed by Barney Platts-Mills, and the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident directed by James Scott (son of the painter William), which went on to win an Oscar. As a director of photography for 1980 mockumentary The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, Sex Pistols singer Sid Vicious “called me Captain Normal”.
There’s nothing normal about the Barker-Mill farm. Its unusual location, sandwiched between what has become a thundering arterial road and the busy docks of Southampton Water, is noisily dramatic. And while the farmhouse has traditional bones — stone flag floors, an ancient Aga generating warmth in the kitchen, an old oak dresser complete with Gaudy Welsh and Willow pattern ceramics, and traditional Tudor beaming — both Barker-Mills have unleashed long love affairs with modern furniture.
There is a surprisingly comfortable modernist sofa by Eileen Gray, elegant lamps by Jasper Morrison, classic mid-century nesting tables by Gordon Russell and an eclectic selection of chairs, including a groovy moulded red plastic Verner Panton design, a veneer Eames seat and one by fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. “I like spaces which manage to be both traditional and yet proto-modern, the rigorous simplicity of an ancient farmhouse or monastery,” says Barker-Mill. “I delight in a certain purity of line.”
The rich, dark wood-panel bathrooms are reminiscent of a vintage ship, with hornlike Philippe Starck lamps, a deep Japanese-style wooden bath in one and even a sumptuous marble font by architect Claudio Silvestrin that’s used as a basin. Barker-Mill’s study features a painting of the Bronco Bullfrog title in Icelandic colours, next to one of Barker-Mill’s own distinctive lamps made from a commercial market crate.
The eccentric also runs riot. One sitting room is cast in fluorescent blue light by a striking arrangement of illuminated jerry cans by fellow light artist Bill Culbert. Despite his inclination towards “minimalism”, “I also love to be surrounded by objects, by the actual stuff of life”, says Barker-Mill, “and I am constantly inventing and developing new forms and objects for myself — lights, toasters, gadgets — and incorporating them into our house”.
Family and familial traditions are honoured. The impressively hefty art deco moderne table, designed by Barker-Mill’s father Peter in the 1930s, is matched by Barker-Mill’s own Memphis-style table, and another created from his father’s once cutting-edge 1974 Bang & Olufsen lacquered television set. Drawings, abstract paintings and woodcuts by Peter hang around the house, as do colourful gouaches by his mother Elsa Vaudrey. There are paintings by Henry Cornell, an “outsider” rural artist discovered by his parents, and an impressive Peter Lely portrait of their ancestor Lady Sandys. “Our family has always been very proud of such heritage, our long role in preserving the land,” says Barker-Mill, “but also we have a long history of cultural patronage, including the most ‘contemporary’ art of every era.”
Outside, the gleaming cranes and winking lights of the docks — built on land compulsory-purchased from his father by the Southampton Docks Board in 1938 — suit Barker-Mill’s high-modern avant-garde tastes. Vast cargo ships can be seen loading and leaving to travel across the world, glimmering with a seedy glamour worthy of an art house movie.
The late architect Richard Rogers also loved this industrial vista, once bringing his whole office here for an alfresco picnic across from the cranes. Rogers would visit with chef Rose Gray, who founded the west London restaurant River Cafe with Rogers’ wife Ruth — Gray was an old friend of Barker-Mill, and gave him cavalo nero seeds imported from Italy so he could grow produce on his land for the restaurant. “Rose used to come and stay with her family and the day was centred around foraging for mushrooms in the woods and cooking,” says Barker-Mill. “She baked whole leeks — including the roots — in our bread oven and then doused them in homemade pesto, all from our garden.”
These gardens stretch out from the back of the house over some 2 acres before meeting fields, and then woods, which extend to 10 acres near the New Forest. Both are in the process of being rewilded, explains Carolyn, a keen gardener. “We started recently after a visit to [West Sussex rewilding project] Knepp,” she says. “We like the contrast in style between our highly formal, biodynamic vegetable garden and the very wild, naturalistic woods and park.”
Here are the vegetables and abundant fruits, as well as the spectacularly lavish flowers she loves to paint, from David Austin roses to zinnias, via rudbeckia, scabious, violas, pansies, Spanish Flag, Nicotiana and Nigella. And many, many dahlias, which make their way into the home. Her work can also currently be seen at Belmacz gallery.
A greenhouse, potting shed and large polytunnel provide vast onions, tomatoes, ranunculus and anemone. An ingenious compost system is designed by Barker-Mill almost as a work of “land art”, where the wheelbarrow goes up a ramp to deliver its loamy load. “We have enough flowers and fruit and vegetables to be entirely self-sufficient, and more,” says Carolyn.
The grounds are also host to a sculpture park of monumental objects built over the decades by the couple, as well as international artists such as Wolfgang Nestler, Owen Griffiths and Vittorio Messina. There is a chiselled stone fish by designer Theo Crosby, and bronze columns by artist Alan Johnson — known for his minimalist interventions, such as the café ceiling at Tate Britain. (A longtime family friend, Johnson has also created wall drawings throughout the house.)
Even the swimming pool is a design curio — a jazzy postmodern pavilion with triangular openings designed in 1986 by Lachie Stewart of Scottish homewares company ANTA. More prosaic is the tennis court, a music room where Barker-Mill plays the piano every morning, and his own standalone studio.
“I suppose we are not so much of a working farm today,” Barker-Mill concedes with his chalk-dry wit. “Despite the 11 goats we have just introduced, our three new pigs, the chickens and cows, but we do seem to be breeding an amazing amount of art.”
Work by Carolyn and Adam Barker-Mill is currently on show at Belmacz gallery, London; Adam’s sculpture ‘PhotoSynthesis 2’ is at the Fruitmarket Warehouse, Edinburgh
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