Compton Verney presents Xenolith (2026), a new sculptural installation by multidisciplinary artist Yulia Mahr (b. 1967) and the second chapter in a long-term partnership between the artist and Compton Verney engaging with over 300 years of history to create art that illuminates the present. Set within a secluded, yew-lined copse on the banks of a lake within Compton Verney’s 18th century grounds, the work explores textures of place and the possibility of overlapping temporalities to question how we understand the relationship between past, present and future. The installation will remain in situ for two years.
Working across many disciplines, from lens-based work to sculpture and installation, Hungarian-born British artist Yulia Mahr has constantly embraced innovative and experimental creative processes. Her work has been exhibited and performed around the world. Xenolith is the second instalment in a series of exciting new works by an artist at the forefront of invention and interdisciplinary exploration, which began with Speaking in Dreams (2025), a large-scale sculptural and photographic installation responding to the rare Capability Brown-designed chapel at Compton Verney. The focal point of Xenolith is a two-metre-high mirrored sphere, beaten and heat-warped until its perfect geometry has partially collapsed. Rather than presenting a stable reflection, the distorted mirrored surface folds and buckles back upon itself, fragmenting and multiplying reflections of the surrounding woodland, lake and sky. Like satellites encircling a cosmic body, three sculptural figures surround this central element; at their feet, a deer lies asleep.
Drawing on the conventions of photographic and sculptural representation, Xenolith takes the form of a tableau or diorama: a moment held in suspension, in which figures, objects and landscape come together across time. The installation is immersive, inviting visitors to walk through it, interact with it and inhabit the space. As viewers encounter their own reflections in the distorted sphere, they become integral to the work itself, entering its shifting relationship between past, present and future.
Yulia Mahr says: “The figures occupy an intentionally ambiguous temporal space. They might be adolescents from a prehistoric nomadic community witnessing an extraordinary celestial event, or equally they could belong to a distant future contemplating the remains of a lost civilisation. This deliberate ambiguity is central to the work's meaning, encouraging viewers to question conventional understandings of chronology and history.”
The work emerges from Mahr's research into the history that lies beneath Compton Verney's eighteenth-century grounds. When Capability Brown restructured the estate, creating the lake and building the chapel that stands today, he demolished an older worshipping-place set within an ancient cemetery. While Brown may have tamed the landscape, the burial ground remained and continues to lie beneath the parkland – hundreds of people are buried there, their identities and stories largely unknown. Today, only eight tombstones and the entrance to the family tomb remain visible traces of a cemetery whose origins reach back to ancient times.
During the works at the site, three Saxon skulls were excavated, accompanied by two pendants embellished with strangely futuristic designs. Mahr's figures reimagine the unidentified individuals as revenants of both past and future, while the installation’s composition alludes to a trace of the pendants' design. The work brings these fragments of history into dialogue with the present, allowing what has been buried or displaced to re-emerge in a new form.
Western culture has traditionally understood time as linear, progressing continuously from past to future. However, concepts such as hauntology and Einstein's theory of the "block universe" challenge this assumption by suggesting that past, present and future may coexist. Taking its title from the geological term for a fragment of pre-existing rock that becomes incorporated into a foreign igneous body, Xenolith gives physical form to this idea, creating a space where multiple temporal narratives overlap and where visitors are invited to consider their own place within them. Through its reflective surfaces, the installation brings the viewer into the tableau, collapsing the distance between observer and observed, and between the historical traces of the site and the people who encounter them today. Proposing that we do not inhabit a singular present, but exist within a continuum where past, present and future coexist, the installation asks a fundamental question: is it possible that the past and the future are already here with us?
Oli McCall, Senior Curator at Compton Verney, says: “The location of Xenolith has been carefully selected by Mahr to reflect a sense of non-linear time, where past, present and future overlap. The artwork occupies a part of the landscape where natural, cultural and human histories are already deeply layered. The yews are associated with longevity and remembrance, the surviving gravestones evidence of former human occupation, and the continually changing yet cyclical rhythms of the surrounding landscape together create a setting that supports the conceptual intentions of the artwork.”