Grizedale Arts

Blogs

Through these blogs we are trying to make the organization and our way of working more accessible.
Please contribute ideas, information and criticism.

Saturday 28 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

Were building a bridge

Day 2 was wet but bearable and the work pace furious again �?? with this troop we could scalp the site in a week. I have now noticed that using equipment is the principle joy. There is an antipathy for the spade, I didn�??t see one of the village pick one up for a moment, or a hand saw. Principle achievements were felling timber and clearing fallen trees. The afternoon we managed to �??plant�?? mushrooms (in logs) and build a new and rather substantial bridge. There was little time wasted on aesthetics, just practical decisions about longevity and usability.
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Saturday 28 April '07
(from Lawson Park Blog)

Sad to miss bracken season

Shortly after the village arrived they explained that they were sad to miss the bracken season in Japan – we showed them the hills covered in bracken shoots which everyone would be very happy for them to pick. Their sadness lifted as they began to plan how they could carry it home. Michgo-san suggested she might move to the Lake District and set up a business exporting bracken to Japan.


Friday 27 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

Japanese cafe open!

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Thursday 26 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

お料理教室

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Tuesday 24 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

雨の中での作業 2日目

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Monday 23 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

雨の中での作業

今日はロウソンパークでの作業の日。折角いいお天気が続いていたのに、昨日から雨。聞くと4月の湖水地方は雨が多いらしい。普段は霧雨のグライスデールも、今日は本格的に降った。しかしそれでもやるのがイギリス流。森の木を切り、片付けの作業を峠村の男性陣で行った。グライスデールはロウソンパークに棚田風の畑を作ろうと計画している。峠村の男性陣にアドバイスをもらい、ユンボで掘り起こす。湖水地方では、塀、羊の柵など石を重ねて作られている。それはこの地域一帯、掘り起こせばすぐにゴロゴロとたくさんの石が出てくるからという理由。去年の11月に私はこのロウソンパークの石垣作りのお手伝いをした。本当に掘ればすぐに石。その石を使い立体パズルを組み立てるように石を重ねていった。

棚田畑を作ろうとしている場所も、20センチも掘ればゴロゴロの石。山岸前区長さんのアドバイスで、表面の土の部分を別の場所によけておき、石部分を掘って平らにし、平らになったら表面の土を戻すことになった。

13時頃作業が終了。私も含め、皆さん防水のジャンパーなどは持参しなかったため、皆ずぶぬれだった。皆着替えも持ってきていなかったので、アダムのズボンを借りた(私も借りた)皆でチェックのズボンを履き、記念撮影。

光子さん、コミさん、純子さんが用意してくれたランチを食べ、ホテルへ戻った。その後、皆さん明日の外の作業の為にレインコートを買いに行った。

Ame


Monday 23 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

雨の中での作業

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Monday 23 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

Dressed up

After the day everyone sat around the fire warming up and talking, Kimio-san commented on a Christopher Dresser teapot on the mantel piece, surprised that I owned a Japanese wedding sake jug. The design was an exact copy of a relatively rare object. I explained it was designed in the 1870�??s and was considered a cornerstone in the development of modernism (these teapots fetch in the 200k region at auction �?? not the one I have it�??s a unsigned copy). Checks_and_tartan
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Sunday 22 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

峠ハウスの打ち合わせ

�??�??�?��?��?��?��??峠�?��??�??�?��??�?�??�??�?��?�?��??�?��??�??�??峠�??�?��?��??�?? �?�?��?��??�?��??�??�??�?�試�?�??�??�?�?��??�??�?��??�??�??�?��??�?��?��?��?��??�?�( ̄�?� ̄)�?? �??�?�人�??�??�??�??�??�??�??�?��??�??�??�?�声�??�?�??�?��??�??�?��?��??�??�??�?��?��?��??�?��??�?��??�?��??�??�?��?��??�??�?��??細�??�??�?��??�??�?��?�工夫�??�??�??�?��??�??�??�??�??�??�??�?��??�?�??�??�?��??�?��?��?��?��??�?��?��??峠�??�??�?��?��?��?��??�??�??�?�販売�??�?��??�??�?�?�??�?��?��?��?��??�?��?��?�家�??�?��?��?��??�??�??�?�販売�??�??�??�??

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Saturday 21 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

峠村 イギリス生活2日目

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Saturday 21 April '07
(from Lawson Park Blog)

The Return of the 7 samurai

Friday night at midnight 6 of the villagers from Toge arrived in Coniston along with Jamie and Aiko Goodenough and Junko an artist that was working in toge. To keep up with events check into the blog at http://adamsutherland.typepad.com/grizedale_arts/

Upcoming events include fish and chips in Keswick, selling at the Coniston car boot sale (homemade slippers, pickles and things), Terracing, mushroom logs, pruning and planting a bonzai forest, Chefs masterclass in edible weeds, Japanese cafe and a whole lot more


Saturday 21 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

The return of the 7 Samurai

6 of the villagers from Toge arrived in Coniston shortly after midnight on Friday night. After 28 hours of travel they were raring to go. Vast amounts of rice appeared from suitcases, scores of pairs of home made slippers, pickles and mountain shoots straight from the toge hills spilled onto the table. The British holiday home was adapted for Japanese use, cups for bowls, the novelty of the handle, actually no batted an eye at not taking off shoes. Karen had prepared a 'comfort' mini meal of rice, miso soup and omlette. On Saturday we are taking them out for fish and chips in Keswick, let the adventure begin.


Friday 20 April '07
(from Seven Samurai)

峠村の皆さんイギリスに到着!?

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Friday 13 April '07
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

A visit to London town – Artist's TV station and new land uniform for Lawson Park

Olivia Plender in Kibbo Kift attire (1930's camping uniform)
Olivia Plender in Kibbo Kift attire (1930's camping uniform)

Train horror as ever, who designed these trains? 4 empty 1st class carriages and 5 packed others stinking like a sewage pipe on wheels filled with impossible luggage that doesn’t fit in the store (clearly the designers didn’t imagine people would want to carry heavy suitcases onto a train and quite right they were too, I am sure they don’t, but they do), the toilet alarm being pressed every 5 minutes - still after 3 years of these ‘new’ trains that problem hasn’t been ironed out. And of course the staff who might as well wear a uniform emblazoned with slogans, like 'it’s got nothing to do with me, I didn’t design it, I don’t work for Virgin, I hate you, there’s nothing I can do about it, die passenger scum' and my favorite Cumbrian catchphrase ‘I ve got absolutely no idea’ and of course the perennial torturous, mean and vindictive ‘is everything alright?’ a question which one never answeres in anything but the affirmative - it's all part of the pain and the zen of acceptance.

Alistair Huson (deputy director Grizedale, Fiona Boundy (director of the A Foundation) and myself spend the 2 days explaining and rexplaining what the TV project we are planning is all about. By the end of it we have refined a much clearer idea of what we are doing and provoked several arguments amongst ourselves - so that’s useful. We also have a long chat with YES the graphics company that Fiona wants to work with. They are arch minimalists, concerned with paper weights (not that kind) and qualities and unusually for graphic designers very upfront about their own critical process with material they don’t personally like. I had suspected as much as they did a fantastic and clever job of destroying a series of 4 pages we did for the A Foundation newspaper in 2006 – I had wondered if it was accidental but clearly not, quite impressive, they made us look like idiots. It’s going to be a challenge working with them but they are nice, perverse and sharp people so whatever, it’ll be engaging.
Giles Deacon (designer for uniforms) is busy but we say hello and meet briefly also with Jeremy Deller (he is working with Alistair on replacing the Greasy Pole - a folk event that requires the climbing of the aforementioned). He - Jeremy - is his usual slightly abstract self, off to look at a colony of greater Horseshoe bats in Devon (they of the nose shaped like a horseshoe), he’s making a bat house! The man doesn’t knowingly go with the money projects.
The interviews for a project manager (TV project) are interesting of course. It's always interesting to hear what people are up to, one interviewee has a particularly remarkable job developing online discussion space for voluntary sector and local government groups, fora for cross fertilization – government funded! We all get really interested in this but sadly we can’t really employ her as she has little experience of working with artists and their ilk and the project has a long and difficult list. We end up in the usual horns of dilemma trying to decide between two people with very different but excellent experience and all that.

On this visit I am particularly shocked by the price of things in London and actually how bad they are. One bar we are in charges 32 pounds for a jug of margarita, a jug entirely filled with ice and charmingly served in a lightly worn/milky plastic jug. The poisonous hotel run by understandably suicidal Poles offers a motorway service station styled breakfast at 17.50, a coffee and a warm flannel of a croissant comes in at a very reasonable fiver. All this after paying 200 for a room in a cardboard warren with a broken TV. Maybe I just don’t get it and this is all an ultrastyle statement reclaiming the 70’s dog eared chic of my youth (Crossroads, The Brothers etc).
The way the UK economy seems to work is that everything is massively ramped up cost wise to provide everyone with huge surpluses of money to buy endless houses around the world. The cost to us being the lowest quality of life in the known world (if you include how vile we all are to each other).

The train return revisits the horror – 2 hours standing on a platform waiting for the delayed train and then having to sit opposite my least favorite thing, a couple who’ve just met (on the platform) and are trying to get to first base by talking incessantly about the minutia of their lives, portraying themselves as the worlds most reasonable, observant and caring people, Jesus 10 minutes into this and if I was them I would be considering a joint suicide pact. ‘The thing with me is I really like old people, call me weird but I just think they’ve got so much to offer, I mean you know they really have experience of life’ and this moments after they had refused to give up a seat to an elderly woman who seemed a little lost. It’s strange conversation, kind of intentionally super dumb so as not to threaten/scare off one another, mating morons.

Fiona tells me Virgin Trains are sponsoring the project.


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Friday 13 April '07
(from Lawson Park Blog)

Georgie’s back

Very glad to see the return of George - garden buster. Of course Karen and I had worked ourselves stupid trying to get the garden in a good state before he came back and actually I am now desperate to get a few more vital things finished before the Japanese visit – to avoid the humiliation of them thinking I am a bit lazy – this farming thing is tough re peer pressure, no escaping the reality of what you have and haven’t done, (unlike art which is much more of a fudge).
Despite spending 12 hour days (weekends) in heavy labour in the garden Karen still feels I need additional stomach flattening exercise in the gym – which I truly hate. I can’t stand all that waste of energy, just seeing people exercising to no useful purpose – to arguably look better. The gym is like a receptacle constantly filled with wasted energy, thousands of hours that could have been put to a useful purpose – maybe rather than calories burnt those machines could show numbers of spades lifted, walls walled, weeds weeded, nails nailed.
The other interesting thing in the gym is the sight of an exercise class, entirely filled with in-shape women that clearly think they look more or less ok, like relatively good looking. Obviously these are the functional people of the area, happy enough to exercise, confident enough to wear a leotard – Karen tells me they are extremely shy in the changing room, changing in the showers and generally dicking around playing towel curtains, clogging the system up and making me wait an age, and as Karen says ‘who the f... is looking’.


Friday 13 April '07
(from Lawson Park Blog)

Give me the eye

Dem bones
Dem bones

On Friday Grizedale hosted a lunch for some Chinese Artists who were taking part in the Liverpool Tate show that had opened the night before. The artists were the most interested people to ever visit the site, gripped by the plants, food, collections and other - particularly - land related stuff. None spoke English but their interest and excitement was very visible. They were accompanied by Zhang Whey from Vitamin, sadly we had to little time to talk about the forthcoming Grizedale troop residency in Nanling planned for November 2007 (see Alistair’s China blog entry)
I cooked a whole turbot for lunch but left the bones and the head in the kitchen as is the British fashion. I found the artists gathered round it talking excitedly, they were worried the best bits of the dinner were going to end up in the bin –throughout lunch I could tell they were thinking of the lost delights of the cheeks, jaws and eyes (bones are a Chinese culinary obsession).
Tom Trevor from Arnofini also came along and was interested in discussing Lawson Park as a venue for an art project involving growing Tea, something to do with import-export colonialism, sounds a bit like international agri conceptualism, but hey people seem to like that stuff. An interesting addition to our patchwork approach to land use and curation, anyone can do whatever.


Friday 13 April '07
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

I want to teach the world to sing

You need big hands
You need big hands

Café Artistique in Leeds aims to get conversations going about art and art making - see www.axisweb.org. Artists in discussion is becoming of a bit of an end in itself, practically ‘the work’. This one is in a pub and is aimed at being a conversation started off by me – my week had been fraught and my time strained so I hadn’t written anything (so ashamed) – although I think such strategies don’t really work to stimulate conversation - probably better, (which is what I ended up doing) to ramble incoherently about various of your current ‘ideas’. So a mini diatribe from me against freedom, dishonesty in art practice (especially language – please no more hyperbole for events in far flung corners of nowhere Ville – no more use of words like major, innovative, pioneering, ground breaking, international for events in backwaters attended by a local pebble artist and a bored council officer). Also touched on a new moral code and artists becoming embedded useful members of their home communities - no more roving art star ambitions. It all ended up a bit me, me, me, a kind of audience with Dame Adam Average, in an extended question and answer session – mainly courtesy of me holding the only mic and rumbling into it at every opportunity. Actually I would like to have know more about the people I was talking to and to have initiated more discussion with the crowd – it’s a hard one to make happen, we all easily revert to the norm, i.e. one person going on a bit.

During the discussion Laura Quarmby from Artist House suggested that Grizedale favoured the underdog and why was it we did’nt work with the over dogs, these in Leeds being the sublimely happy property developers and their friends, maybe these people are just the truly functional people of the world – it was a poin. I have to say I am drawn to/identify with the underdog, it is such an ingrained component of art culture, all in there with the romantic notions of being an artist that I so abhor, but on the other hand working for the powerful and happy is normally called the luxury goods sector and how would a publically funded organization rationalize that sort of behavior.
After the talk another of the questioners raised the point again with more reference to the notion of well being, to reinforce wellness/happiness. I admitted that at heart, the ambitions I am too embarrassed to express publically are pretty much those of a Miss World contestant - to make everyone happy, end war and world poverty, unfortunately I could not reasonably expect to achieve this by wearing a bathing suit (might start somthing though). It’s hard to find a comfortable way to be positive, to sustain that direct forward propulsion of wellness without the odd caustic aside. There seems so little complexity to happiness, so little opportunity for wit - Feed the greedy not the needy.


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Friday 13 April '07
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Raise high the roof beam

Framed
Framed

It’s going up, the new site office for the building project at Lawson Park gets its ribs. Parkamoor is also under the builders, it’s all springy and exciting, seeds germinate and leaves open, the miracle is on us again like a slow rolling mist the transformation unfolds, or as Christopher Lloyd used to rather more rudely say ‘the snouts go shooting’.

My Villages (see blog) are staying in Coniston in a classic holiday home we rented for them, it’s a perfect mix of materials and styles, a kind of flotsam of stuff nobody would want in their own home, all there and all wrong in some way, too old, too bright, to knobbly, too woody, too low, high, fat or furry. There’s a certain consistency to it all which I‘m starting to read and find rather attractive.

Kathrin Bohem and Wapke Fenestra along with Kathrin’s son Lawrence are researching Grizedale the organization, with whom and where we work. It’s a lot of fun to have them around being funny and interested in all things village and rural. Their own work with the villages they come from and their descriptions of those communities is fascinating, very different from an English and especially lakes experience of a village community. It makes me think about how extraordinarily disjointed and complex Coniston is in terms of actually being a community. All factions pushing in differing directions and all dealing with this bizarre sycophantic body of people called visitors, all that ‘your so lucky’ etc it's bad for you.


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