Goats in the drawing room

THERE are a handful of people in the world who, if offered a suite in a five-star hotel, would murmur polite thanks and head for the campsite down the road. Mark Neville might just be one of them. Given a chance to make art at Mount Stuart, the luxurious neo-gothic palace of the Earls of Bute, he headed straight for the nearest farmyard.

Glasgow-based Neville, the latest in a line of acclaimed contemporary artists to take part in the estate’s annual visual arts residency programme, cheerfully admits that his tenure has involved a lot of mucking in with local life on Bute – sometimes with an emphasis on the “muck”.

A glance at his prevailing concerns – his interest in the power structures which belie images, his rage against the class system – explains his eagerness to seek out the grittier side of life. He is perhaps best known to date for his Port Glasgow Project, in which he spent a year documenting the former shipbuilding town in photographs.

“When Sophie [Crichton-Stuart, the project curator and sister of the current Marquess] asked me to make work at Mount Stuart I thought that was really brave of her,” he says. “I didn’t want to do a Marxist deconstruction of the aristocracy, but I was interested in making work which had a relationship to the working-class community. For me it was also a chance to work in a rural community for the first time.”

Since the residency programme began in 2001, artists have responded to it in different ways: Moyna Flannigan mingled her paintings with the house’s historic art collection; Christine Borland investigated its wartime use as a military hospital; Anya Gallaccio silvered the trunk of a tree in the pinetum (it still sparkles on sunny days).

The seeds of Neville’s work on Bute were planted in the dining room at Mount Stuart, home to a collection of portraits of past Earls and their families by the likes of Raeburn, Gainsborough and Reynolds. More than just likenesses, they are statements of power and authority, reinforcing the order of landed, inherited wealth.

“I think we’re all victims of the class system in Britain,” Neville, 41, says. “Whether you’re the aristocracy or the farmer, our identities are extraordinarily defined by it. I was interested in the way in which wildlife cinematography today is essentially an updated form of the 18th century portrait. It’s a big insight into our value systems.”

He came up with an ambitious plan to film animals and birds in the grounds of Mount Stuart and on local farms against backdrops taken directly from the dining room pictures – a lamb is born against the fringes of fabric worn by Mary, Countess of Bute in a portrait by Reynolds; seagulls land and take off in front of a section by Raeburn.

In practice this meant using his high-speed 16mm camera to film outdoors using a complicated scenery rig with photographs taken of the paintings. “Imagine filming in a farmyard in the wind and rain, with smells and all kinds of excrement to contend with,” he says, grinning. “And animals. You can’t tell animals what to do.”

At the same time, he was also making a series of still images – portraits and still lives – with farmers and estate workers, which is exhibited as a slide show. Meticulously framed and shot, they depict the frequent vicissitudes of farming life, but also its dignity.

“I’ve got access to aspects of life on Bute you would never see as a tourist or an outsider, but that’s not built up overnight,” he says. “In a way I also see it as a kind of very elaborate performance art, sleeping over at farms, getting out of my comfort zone.”

Four of the images have also been installed in the Family Bedroom at Mount Stuart, among the heirlooms. These deliberately reference paintings: a supper scene with Caravaggio lighting; an elderly couple surveying their land which nods to Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews.

It was important, he says, to show the work in proximity to the pictures in the dining room. Though he considers the farmers his main audience, to see the pictures they need to come to Mount Stuart, the home of the project’s patron, which in turn has its own place in the art world. “There is a very complex relationship which I hope I’m making evident through the images,” he says.

Neville arrived in Glasgow in 2001 after the city was recommended to him. A graduate of Goldsmiths College in London, he was best known for minimalist light sculptures which he had shown with Martin Creed. “I have no real connection with the art scene here; I don’t write about art, I don’t curate shows, I didn’t go to Glasgow School of Art, I’m not in a band. But I enjoy working and living here, I’m able to produce ambitious projects here.”

In Scotland he became drawn to lens-based media, in particular to social documentary photographs. “I really enjoyed them, and then I suddenly thought: what am I doing? This English middle-class boy taking voyeuristic pleasure from these photographs of working-class communities? Maybe it’s a bit dramatic to say it’s exploitation, but it can be seen as based on a framework of power.”

This gave him the idea for the Port Glasgow Project, to create a beautiful coffee table book which would be distributed free to every household in the town, and nowhere else. Some in the town loved it, others loathed it, but copies are now so sought after that they change hands on eBay for high prices. Two of the Port Glasgow images are being shown in Munich this month as part of an exhibition of social documentary photography, and Neville has been nominated for this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography Award.

He is aware of the contradictions inherent in creating meticulous documentary images despite his deep unease about the genre. He continually subverts it, mixing styles and playing conceptual games. For Bute, he was imagining himself documenting peasant life in Soviet Russia “the clichéd destination of every social documentary photographer”, then showed some of the images to local senior school pupils and asked them to produce a soundtrack with a Russian theme.

“It’s a reflection of the way in which I’m simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by social documentary photo– graphy,” he laughs.

“By looking at the way the images are distributed, I hope to be able to explore these themes of lies and exploitation, but also other positive things like celebration.”

• Mark Neville: Fancy Pictures will be on display at Mount Stuart until 30 September. For visitor information, tel: [phone] or visit www.mountstuart.com