Children of Grizedale's new Youtube channel has been offering some technical challenges / professional development opportunities (delete as preferred) to Adam lately as he grapples with years of unlabelled tape and a tenuous grasp of iMovie, to bring you rarities from the Grizedale archive.

There's some fantastic stuff going up - witness the spine tingler from 2004's Romantic Detachment'....

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 21/02/08 at 22:55 : 0 Comments

In this week's show on Friday 15th from 4pm - 5pm:
David Johnson of Coniston, former farmer and milkman, will be talking about the history of local farming, how and why to lay a hedge, and the cool new solar panels on his B & B.

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 14/02/08 at 15:08 : 0 Comments

Hayley Skipper is the Forestry Commission's New Arts Development Officer in Grizedale Forest Centre - she joins us to chat about what its like to move up here from fashionable London and have to wear a FC fleecy, and how and why to keep the old Grizedale sculptures in good nick.

Karen introduces the Lawson Park Collection and Lisa updates us on whether the building is still standing or if the webcam is a hoax.

Alistair reads from the local media: a copy of the Whitehaven News 1902, found in the Lawson Park walls.

And Karen talks about gardening. Again.

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 08/02/08 at 13:10 : 0 Comments

Lawson Park's webcam

Live at
www.lawsonpark.org/webcam

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 31/01/08 at 12:07 : 0 Comments

We kick off this Friday 1st with a visit from Bryan & Laura Davies on their The Wonderful North roadtrip, some discussion on turning Lawson Park from drab to fab, gardening chat and advice and much much more, that's as long as we can get the microphone working....
It'll get archived here as a downloadable MP3 once we get round to it.

Posted by Dorian Moore on 28/01/08 at 00:00 : 1 Comment

Kerry Stewart's Grieving Swan

We finally handed Lawson Park to the builders – Leck, a local firm who will be here for 9 months stripping and rebuilding the interiors of the house and barns. Day one coincided with torrential rain - combine rain and builders and you get knee deep mud , and the impression the building is just a pile of stones sliding down a muddy hill – which I guess it is - all its significance and meaning evaporated like it never was. It really brought a lot of memories back to me of people and dinners, events and extraordinary happenings, it was nice to be reminded and to think about how much had come from the house and the location.

Here’s a few moments that sprang to mind
6 wives of Henry the 8 reversing into the ravine
Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson fighting and crying
Emily Wardill’s black dinner
Jesse Rae’s radio station
Olaf Breuning listening to a chainsaw artist singing a song about a cat
Damon Packard’s table manners
Juneaus burning a radio over a camp fire and the radio just kept going and going
Mark Wallinger repeatedly talking over a particularly boring dinner guest who kept mentioning Andy Goldsworthy
Karen in animated discussion flanked by Robert Woof and Ken Russell
The Japanese villagers of Toge changing into my giant checked clothes following a very wet mornings work
Gelitin partying in the meadow
Rose Lord, Adam Chodzko and Clio Barnard walking down the drive dressed as the 3 pigs
Kerry Stewart’s giant swan being mistaken for a real swan
Jon Ronson dancing hard, alone, to ELO in the barn after the Festival of Lying
Sarah Staton re-appearing in her car, hours after a dinner party ended, having been lost in the forest
Nina & Karen locked into the dining room for a week sewing elaborate Tudor costumes
Robert Woof (shortly before his death) walking slowly through the wild flower meadow to see the rare orchid

If you have any of your own please add them via the comments

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 18/01/08 at 14:41 : 1 Comment

The Barn Stripped bare

Raise high the greasy pole

Pleased

Very pleased to say that Karen and Nina won the Northern Art Prize last night!

Photo's of the glittering event to follow

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's first public art work is opening in Egremont tomorrow

Photo's of the glittering event to follow

Lawson Park has been stripped to the bones

Photo's of the glitering event to follow

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 18/01/08 at 10:01 : 0 Comments

Posted by Kathrin Böhm on 07/11/07 at 15:38 : 0 Comments

From an e mail conversation between Kathrin and Adam:

E MAIL FROM KATHRIN

HONESTY BOX
I left quite a few Höfer Goods and Horsemilk products with Michael last Friday for the Rochelle School Honesty Box. Also left green myvillages.org frames with a brief introtext to go into the box together with the produce.
Michael wants to put things in today, and watch how fast which product sells.
We made some Shoreditch prices and let s see if it sells.

I like the multiplication of the HONESTY BOX, e.g. as Wapke suggests at the Witte de WIth in Rotterdam, and in her village.
I also would like to start one in our office at public works, and maybe one next spring in Höfen.
There could be some very simple guidelines for the extension of those boxes:
- they happen at places where we are active ( a similar rule that Wapke has for her soil drillings)
- they are made from recycled material on location

The growing number of boxes can also be seen as an extension of the "Village Kiosk" proposal.

E MAIL RESPONSE FROM ADAM

Karen and Nina are doing an Honesty Stall in their Northern art prize show in Leeds next month and are bringing/making a bunch more Japanese stuff.

Name and network would be good to formalise, maybe 'Pay what you think is right' is a term we have used.

I am making some japanese styled tea bowls centred around the idea of adding value to objects based on the Japanese concept of Meingei - very close to the idea of value in art. So the idea is the bowl is valueless until it is selected by a collector, it then becomes high value. The rules of mingei are all about how the object is produced in the first place, ie anonymous, part of mass production by hand, in normal use etc. I am interested in the idea that the purchaser basically pays what they think they are worth, ie how much value they bring to the object - sort of like therapy language, invest in yourself etc.
So maybe the honesty stall could be called 'pay what you are worth'

Also local to us there has opened an honesty cafe, pay what your wallet can afford or exchange work in the garden - seems to be working very well.

I had a chat with the design museum the other day I think they would be interested in having a stall too - maybe we need to put a cap on the number as it gets hard to service so many in an interesting way.

RE product: I would like to start to generate some cross over products, I am doing a schnapps bottle with Christoph Keller. Should we try to make this for Rochelle?

This thing of value starts to get complicated though even for example the rice has to be expensive, it is anyway and with shipping its unreasonable expensive so?

Posted by Kathrin Böhm on 07/11/07 at 15:34 : 0 Comments

A weird night last night at the Royal Academy – a dinner for the sponsors club to generate interest in the ‘Contemporary Season’ – some discussion on a title for this with Sir Norman Rosenthal suggesting ‘Unique, Unique’ so unique they named it twice actually his suggestion was only the first bit, problem there is that contemporary art is very far from being unique and it sounds like a hairdresser in Kirby Stephen – I quite liked the ‘In Season’ suggestion - bitches on heat, an opportunity for hunting something and fashion. The complexity of the event was kind of interesting, there was a lots of congratulating each other for getting knighthoods, married to ideas about bohemian creatives rocking out. Several people were wearing medals, very cheap looking medals, looked like they bought them at a fair and were wearing them for a joke but I think they where in fact the officer bearers for the RA, like president and so on. At the beginning of the evening there was a standing toast to the Queen, then there was the use of the word fuck and then some standing toasts to the secretarial staff of the Sponsors Club. Tracy Emin appeared to be hosting the evening and as one toast master stated – ‘later on Tracy will be doing some very exciting things with David Thorp’ what like folding him into a swan. Or as it was in reality prompting him to mention money – which was what the dinner was about – actually Tracy was very responsible and seemed more like arts administrator than any of the professionals.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 03/11/07 at 23:44 : 0 Comments