The new way to view modern art? In a stately home
, The Sunday Times
The pin-drop silence, the perfectly groomed gallery assistant, the label-light walls devoid of any clue as to price. Buying from a traditional “white cube” art gallery can be nerve-racking for a newbie. Which is where the former interior designer India Montgomery, founder of The Dot Project, comes in. The 37-year-old’s unconventional approach, displaying emerging artists’ work in historic houses across the country, is opening up the art world to a new generation of collectors.
Partnering with her friend Violet Manners (otherwise known as Viscountess Garnock) last year, Montgomery launched an artist-in-residence programme, matching contemporary creatives with historic locations, setting up the artists Nick Jensen, Heath Wae and Tais Rose Wae, Jack Penny and Sebastián Espejo with four British statelies: Belvoir Castle (family seat of Violet’s clan), Elveden Hall, Kelvedon Hall and Drumlanrig Castle. The country houses benefited from increased footfall, the art events drawing a younger cohort than the houses would habitually attract; the artists were inspired by their temporary homes.
Violet Manners and India Montgomery
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The Hand That Feeds You by Jack Penny, at a Dot Project exhibition at 14 Cavendish, 2024
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“Residencies give the artists time immersed in a world that they would never otherwise experience in that way. It gives them access to archives, visual history and incredible landscapes. Sebastián, who we had in residence at Drumlanrig Castle, spent the majority of his time outside,” Montgomery says. “At the end the artists donate a painting to the house as a thank-you for hosting them. When you’re in these spaces, you’re surrounded by old masters. I like to think of the new works as the next chapter in their history.”
History was Montgomery’s first love. She studied history at Leeds University and then gained an architectural interior design diploma at the Inchbald School of Design. She worked as an interior designer in London and New York and then segued into fine art. “I was about 24, 25, and I was really green and had no idea what I was doing. I had been sourcing art a lot on the interiors projects. But I’d noticed that clients were leaving art until the very end of projects. I knew it wasn’t right to have art as an afterthought.”
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Spiral by Nick Jensen, 2025, in the library at Belvoir Castle
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Among the Flowers by Jack Penny, from his residency at Elveden Hall
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The Dot Project founder India Montgomery at Elvedon Hall
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In the early years Montgomery felt like a gatecrasher at the private party of the established art world. She rented a space in Chelsea and tried to conform. “It felt like we had to show the work a certain way, and it had to be this particular artist, and we had to change the show every six to seven weeks, which financially was insane. You’re spiralling into debt, effectively. The art world really wasn’t working for young galleries. I was a fish out of water!”
In 2019 she began to show from the living room of the Ladbroke Grove home she shared with her husband, Max Montgomery, a director of photography. “I was meeting the collectors again, seeing how much better people were responding to the work, especially younger buyers,” she says. “I realised I didn’t need a permanent space.”
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The couple moved from London to the Cotswolds, then back to Barnes, with two boys in tow (Rafferty and Marloe, now three and four). “When we put on a show at 14 Cavendish, a Georgian building on Cavendish Square, that was the first time I really saw contemporary art within a historic context. I was like, OK, I understood that I loved history, but I hadn’t realised where I was going to use that in my future until now. And then in January of last year I saw that Violet Manners, who is an old friend of mine, had started a company called HeritageXplore. She was effectively representing the independent historic houses around the UK. I said, are you free for a coffee? Within three weeks we had the first three houses sign up [to The Dot Project’s artist-in-residence programme].”
The Memory Undresses the Myth by Tais Rose Wae, 2024
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A Dot Project exhibition called Permission to Touch?, featuring works by Dominic McHenry, Thom Lowry and Joshua Taylor
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Montgomery’s mission is to make collecting more accessible, but Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire is surely at least as intimidating as any Cork Street gallery. Why does she think her collectors feel more at ease discovering art in a grand country pile? “They are homes. I spent time at Belvoir when Nick was artist-in-residence there, and had dinner with the girls [Violet and her sisters Alice and Eliza] and with the duke [the 11th Duke of Rutland]. They have what they call a flat within the walls of the castle. It’s not as if the families are still living how families would have 100, 150 years ago across the whole castle with staff running around them. There’s a little kitchen and we all chip in and cook dinner. You sit around a six-person dinner table. It feels pretty normal, like you could be in someone’s flat in London and you’re just visiting friends. It feels a little bit less normal when you walk from the flat area. I was in the most incredible bedroom with this bed that looked like something out of The Princess and the Pea, with a crown on top of it!”
The Australian artists Heath and Tais Rose Wae, outside the pool house, during their residency at Kelvedon Hall
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Aside from her passion for history, Montgomery cites her 96-year-old grandmother’s Norfolk home as her inspiration. Known affectionately as Bambam, Dorothy [hence The Dot Project] is an avid collector of art and antiques. “My grandma’s house is like a miniature museum. You actually can’t move for how many little trinkets and antiques and paintings there are. So she has got a very, very, very miniature version of one of these historic houses, I guess. And she has catalogued everything, like a gallery. On the bottom of every teacup, every candelabra, she has got a little sticker with the information written perfectly in her very old-school handwriting about the piece. Every single thing in her house, she has a story to go with it.
“I do understand that there is an investment aspect with purchases of contemporary art,” she continues. “But I also really love the idea that when people are building a collection, it’s not all about the money, it’s also about building something for your future, your children’s and grandchildren’s future, that is going to tell the stories of this period in time.”
The gallerist delights in helping clients find artworks to which they feel an emotional connection. So what is her own best-loved buy? “It’s a piece by Rose Wylie, a work on paper, which we had in a group show called In Paper We Trust. It has got the word “Epiphany” written across the bottom. Every single morning I see that work and it brings me lots of joy and still gives me the chills that I own it.”