THERE are spaces that demand silence – and then there are those that invite it. Compton Verney‘s neoclassical chapel, designed in the 1770s by Lancelot Brown, has long been such a place. A Palladian marvel perched on the north slope of the house, with an interior once home to tombs of Verney’s family and now, has undergone restorations to showcase an exercise in restrained elegance. From 9 October to 2 November 2025, serenity will tremble.
Yulia Mahr and Compton Verney Speaking in Dreams. Photograph: © Compton Verney and Jamie Woodley
Speaking in Dreams, a new installation by the Hungarian-born British artist Yulia Mahr, transforms the chapel into a tactile and dreamlike space where time collapses. The work inaugurates Mahr’s long-term collaboration with Compton Verney, setting the tone for a series of interventions that will entwine the site’s 300-year-long history with her own distinctive language: both poetic and psychological.
Mahr’s practice – spanning multi-media disciplines like sculpture, photography, and immersive installation – has always balanced on the threshold between intimacy and myth. Employing chiaroscuro, monochromatic tones, and still-life compositions, her works feel suspended in an almost devotional hush. In Speaking in Dreams, she brings that sensibility to the heart of Compton Verney.
Within the chapel’s pristine white geometry, Mahr introduces natural materials (charcoal, taxidermy, and ash) to stage a meditation on anxiety as the defining hum of our age. Her installation doesn’t disturb the space so much as converse with it, echoing the way Capability Brown’s own design blurred boundaries between art and nature, control and wildness.
Yulia Mahr and Compton Verney Speaking in Dreams. Photograph: © Compton Verney and Jamie Woodley
A key motif of the work is the crow: a dark, intelligent sentinel of folklore. At Compton Verney, where the birds are a familiar presence, Mahr elevates them into symbols of communication between worlds. “I was born in an era and in a culture where dreams and folklore were still relevant. Hungary has one of the most symbolically rich and spiritually ambivalent folk traditions in Europe, where dreamworlds are saturated with longing, threat, and metamorphosis,” explains Mahr. “
“Actually, throughout my whole childhood – but especially after my mother and I moved to the UK – I lived more in a dream world than the real world. I became semi mute for a couple of years, my dream world becoming a tool of self-preservation that allowed me to navigate a national and linguistic change that I found so utterly overwhelming and alienating. Crows – which appear in my piece – symbolise warning almost universally across folklore traditions. Their urgent call couldn’t be louder.”
For Compton Verney, Speaking in Dreams marks the beginning of an ambitious partnership with an artist uniquely attuned to the site’s poetic possibilities. Over the coming years, Mahr will respond to the estate’s 120 acres of art and nature, weaving together its layered histories and her own meditations on spirituality, ritual, and renewal.
by Imogen Clark