COUNTY DURHAM.- The Bowes Museum continues its 125th anniversary celebrations, opening two extraordinary exhibitions simultaneously this summer for the young and the young-at-heart.

Leading contemporary artist Gavin Turk and The House of Fairy Tales, the imaginative children’s arts charity, inspire symbolic stories of horticulture in these captivating shows.

Turkish Tulips is an exhibition woven through the decorative halls of The Bowes Museum as an exquisite art adventure. It presents new works by contemporary artist Gavin Turk, in collaboration with a host of renowned contemporary artists including Damien Hirst, Michael Craig-Martin, Cornelia Parker, Sir Peter Blake, Fiona Banner, Mat Collishaw, Adam Dant and Yinka Shonibare MBE. Interwoven amongst The Bowes Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition delves into the complex and paradoxical story of tulips as the artists mine the rich vein of secrets behind this iconic bloom, provoking new perspectives of The Bowes Museum’s collection. The exhibition visits The Bowes Museum on a grand tour of the museums of Europe and the Middle East, recently arriving from Amsterdam – the symbolic home of the tulip.

“The exhibition provokes curiosity - challenging us to see things in a new light – the familiar becomes unfamiliar as the tulip’s important role in history is presented through tales of romance, beauty, obsession, inequality and extravagance as well as scientific discoveries through the enlightenment,” explained Dr Howard Coutts, the Museum’s Keeper of Ceramics, and curator of the exhibition.

Gavin Turk and The House of Fairy Tales were drawn to The Bowes Museum as an important site for this ambitious show because of its historic relationship with the aesthetic arts of Europe and its influences from the East. The extraordinary variety of floral designs with hidden tulips woven through the patterns of furniture, ceramics, silver and paintings – revealing the symbolic power of this humble flower.

Gavin Turk articulated his reason for choosing the museum, “I love the fact that Joséphine and John Bowes travelled Europe gathering cultural artefacts, as the traders did with tulip bulbs hundreds of years before. As a Turk by name, the Turkish origins of these iconic flowers make them all the more playful and relevant”.

This is not the first time this observation has been made about the Bowes collection. Without realising it, one of founder Joséphine Bowes’ protégés, the young French botanist and glass maker Emile Gallé, wrote the same thing to her more than 100 years before . . . ‘As an ardent botanist, I hunt only plants. It is the passion that competes in my life with that, perhaps less happy, of ceramics; when I pick a flower, I pick a model and an idea. Sometimes, when I am turning the pages of my herbarium I seem to see only vases, and perhaps one day, when I visit your beautiful faience collection I will think it is a collection of marvellous plants . . .’

The Bowes Museum’s complementary exhibition - The Clockwork Garden – is a bewitching show promising a magical experience for all ages from The House of Fairy Tales. Flying in from a planet far away, a strange mechanical seed has landed in our main exhibition gallery which will be filled with a beautiful, interactive exhibition. The seed needs to learn the secrets that make gardens full of life and beauty, so it can take them back to its own planet, which has no gardens.

Carrying on the theme, in the Museum’s more Earthly gardens and grounds there’ll be a chance to probe further into the magical story through A Clockwork Garden Adventure Trail. Follow a curious, illustrated map to find tendrils of the mechanical seed, completing tasks and challenges and solving clues left by the wondrous characters of the ‘Museum’s founders’, both historical and fictional.