Flowers in all their forms took centre stage in our 2025 exhibition The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth, which ran from 15 March - 5 October 2025.

Curated by Allegra Pesenti and designed by Pippa Nissen from Nissen Richards Studio, the exhibition was inspired by the estate itself, from the rare botanical volumes and illustrated manuscripts in the library to its garden and grounds.

The Gorgeous Nothings built on the work of an important lineage of landscape designers, gardeners, scientists and botanists at Chatsworth over the past six centuries.

The thematic display featured historical and contemporary works of art from the Devonshire Collections, supported by key loans from national and international museums, and new artist commissions. 

Scenes from the exhibition can be revisited in this short video:

'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 underlay the choice of artists and selection of objects featured in the exhibition.

Specimens of scientific nature, such as flower fossils and minerals collected by Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806), or the over 400 species of British algae catalogued and photographed by Anna Atkins in the 1840’s, found 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 featured prominently in The Gorgeous Nothings. Modulated surfaces and found items converged on the canvases of ‘scavenger’ painter Frank Bowling, while the sculpture of a regal female figure by Chiara Camoni was composed of myriads of components of botanical elements in clay.

The Gorgeous Nothings explored 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 were 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 was displayed alongside a group of seventeenth-century Delft flower vases assembled by the William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire (1640-1707), coveted collector items during the reign of Mary II.

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

Berlin-based artist Ana Prvacki took 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 were evoked in new commissions by Konstantin Kakanias,  David Wiseman and Maurizio Fioravanti.

'...the gorgeous nothings..'

The exhibition took its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson and referenced the author’s habit of composing poetry on assembled scraps of paper and used envelopes.

The ‘gorgeous nothings’ she referred to in one such poem were vital and existential matter to her. They were 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 1800s.

Female botanists such as Elizabeth Blackwell, who historically remained in the shadow of their more famous male counterparts, were featured in this context, together with an extraordinary and newly-discovered eighteenth-century herbarium which is a unique intersection of science and fiction. 

“The eclectic charge of the installations in this exhibition voice[d] the urgency of the environmental condition in the world today, but also the resilience and persistence of nature. Each flower represented [was] associated with deep-rooted myths and symbolisms. Individually, they may be considered gorgeous nothings, but together, they manifest life and endurance against all odds.”

Allegra Pesenti, Curator of The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth

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

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All images taken by India Hobson, © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth House Trust unless noted.