Soho Farmhouse

The Soho Farmhouse art collection features 180 artworks on permanent display across the club spaces and bedrooms. In response to the surrounding Oxfordshire countryside, there are several site-specific commissions, including the largest outdoor installation in the global art collection – a meditation structure by Yinka Ilori. Entitled ‘Beacon of Dreams’, this work was created as part of the Soho Visionaries series, powered by Porsche, and unveiled at the inaugural Soho Summit in 2022.  

 The collection was refreshed in 2024 to introduce local artists and those who graduated in Oxford, including Araminta Blue, Claudia Sarnthein, Zelga Simone Miller, Danny Augustine, Gommie, Hira Gedikoglu, Nicola Yeoman, Saad Qureshi, Tom Croft, and Yingfei Lyu.  

 The refresh included two site-specific commissions by Annie Kevans and Darcey Fleming. Kevans created a series of eight portraits entitled ‘The Women of Great Kew Circle’ for the reception Gatehouse. A piece of revisionist history, she highlights the women who were pioneers of their time and members of The Great Tew Circle – a liberal intellectual group of theologians, philosophers and poets who met regularly in Lord Falkland’s house at Great Tew, near Oxford, from the early 1630s until around 1639. 

 As Kevans, who lives locally, describes, ‘several women were involved in the Great Tew Circle, but their achievements are not recognised or celebrated in the same way as their male counterparts. As with so many fields, the women are not even listed as members of the Great Tew Circle on websites such as Wikipedia, despite the fact that one of them co-hosted the gatherings. Here I bring them back into view in the local area.’  

 For the Main Barn, Fleming created a large-scale tapestry from discarded farmer’s twine sourced locally. The various colours were preserved and refashioned into ‘32 Squares’, which in total measures 6.4m by 3.75m, making it the largest single piece of work in the permanent global art collection.  

 The Mill Barn presents a focused selection of landscape-inspired artworks ranging from the specimen-like photographs casted in resin by Almudena Romero to Emiliano Maggi’s folkloric pigment on wood. The Hay Barn includes a colourful selection of art by emerging talent, including Aimée Parrott, Leo Fitzmaurice, and Megan Plunkett. The bedrooms feature commissions from Danny Augustine and Eliza Hopewell, among other works.