One Lives in Faith
Preparations have begun for Sculpture at Kingham Lodge 2027 — from choosing new work in Zimbabwe to imagining what thousands of schoolchildren might create next.
The last couple of months we have started the process of planning the next Sculpture at Kingham Lodge, which will open to the public from 21–31 May 2027.
May seems a long way off. Looking at the desiccated garden this summer, I wondered whether it would ever recover sufficiently to become somewhere people might actually want to spend a day. But one lives in faith and the grass has started to recover, the rhododendrons and azaleas will flower on schedule — and we will put on a good show.
So the hard work has begun.
We have written to past English exhibitors, as well as quite a lot of new people who have heard about the show and asked to take part, or whose work we have simply seen and liked enough to invite ourselves. The forms are coming in, and it is already clear that there will be a good variety: sculptors who have shown here many times alongside some new and younger faces.
Back to Zimbabwe
Delphie and I have also just returned to Zimbabwe, where we have been choosing sculpture for next year’s exhibition.
This has become an important part of preparing for Kingham. Before each show we visit the sculpting communities at Chitungwiza and Airport Road, which we have supported for many years, buying work directly from the sculptors and shipping it back to Kingham.
It is always exciting to go back and see what has been made since we were last there.
When I first started buying work in Zimbabwe, I felt that quite a lot of what I saw was repetitive and made principally for the tourist market. There is still some of that — and no doubt we will continue to bring home some of the frogs and tortoises which our visitors collect and which so many people love. But what is particularly exciting now is seeing younger sculptors learning from the extraordinary tradition around them while developing ideas and styles of their own.
This time we spent our days talking to sculptors, looking at finished pieces and work still being carved, and deciding what should make the journey back to Oxfordshire.
Some of it will eventually sit in formal borders at Kingham. Some will appear beside ponds, beneath trees or unexpectedly around a corner. And it will be exhibited alongside work by British sculptors and, importantly for me, work made by children in local schools.
That combination is part of what makes Sculpture at Kingham Lodge rather unusual.
Where Cotswolds Arts Through Schools began
It was, in fact, the decline in school participation in this very show that first alerted me to the damage being done to the arts in schools — years before CATS existed as an idea, let alone an organisation.
We have encouraged local schools to exhibit at Kingham since 2014. By 2021, six schools were taking part with the support of professional artists. In 2023, 20 schools exhibited with support from what was becoming CATS.
By our last show, in 2025, that had grown to 34 schools, with more than 4,000 children coming to see the exhibition before it opened to the public. Their enthusiasm is infectious, and their work joyful, surprising and frequently very funny. To me, it brings a whole extra dimension to the show. One visitor once remarked that the schools’ work made the whole thing feel more like a fête than a sculpture exhibition. She was very much a lone voice.
The vast majority of the paying public seem intrigued and delighted by what the children have made, and I have no doubt they will be looking forward to seeing what appears in May 2027. I am certainly looking forward to it myself. I know the children’s work will be creative and original — some of it fun, some of it beautiful and some of it genuinely puzzling. Most of all, I look forward to the sheer noise and motion of thousands of children running around the gardens. Some will be checking the prices on the professional pieces. Some will be asking how on earth something was made. Some will simply feel, without quite knowing why, “I like that.”
What I hear back from teachers afterwards is that the coach journey home, break times for the following week and no small amount of class time end up given over to chatter about what they saw. And that, surely, is part of the point.
When a dragon takes on a life of its own
The art the children make doesn’t necessarily disappear when a workshop or exhibition is over. The great red dragon created by children at Burford Primary School with CATS artists is a particularly glorious example. It has acquired something of a life of its own.
This weekend it was out again, joining children from the school at Charlbury Street Fair — processing through the town in all its enormous and slightly alarming glory.
Then there are the paper flowers that decorate a school hall; painted ‘stained glass’ covering classroom windows; a mural running along a school wall; charcoal birds perched along a hallway tree. These things become part of the arts-rich fabric of a school year.
And next spring that fabric will be joined by whatever the children create for Sculpture at Kingham Lodge. Local schools will once again exhibit their work in the gardens alongside established and emerging professional sculptors. Much of what the children make will return to their schools afterwards, where it may remain on walls, in corridors and in playgrounds long after the exhibition itself has closed.
May 2027
So, by May there will be new work throughout the gardens: sculpture brought back from Zimbabwe; work by established and emerging British artists; and creations by children who may never previously have imagined that something they made at school could be exhibited alongside professional sculptors.
Sculpture at Kingham Lodge has been doing this for years. But what began as a relatively modest schools programme has grown into something rather larger.
Cotswolds Arts Through Schools now works with more than 70 state primary schools and over 13,000 children across Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire.
In many ways, the sculpture exhibition and CATS have become intertwined. One helped create the other, and every two years they come together again in the gardens at Kingham.
I don’t yet know exactly what the children will make. I don’t know precisely which sculptures will end up where. And, after the summer we have just had, I don’t entirely know what the garden will look like either.
That’s part of the pleasure. One lives in faith.
