Tuesday 28 February '12
(from Lawson Park Blog)

Orchard finished!

Lawson Park's new orchard of UK-wide heritage fruit varieties has been finished, with the last few trees from Irish Seed Savers - a heritage nursery in Co. Clare, from whom we have the deliciously named Cavan Sugar Cane, Keegan's Crab, Armagh, and Yellow Pitcher.

I've also pruned the trees that went in last winter and added a quince, Serbian Gold.�

Every tree has received ample well-rotted manure and / or garden compost, and we are trying a biogegradable fibre mulch mat around each to keep off weed growth for as long as possible.

Originally posted at www.lawsonpark.org/blog/5925/orchard-finished on 28/02/12 at 20:13 0 Comments

Thursday 16 February '12
(from Lawson Park Blog)

Chips growing in the wild

From potato guru Alan Romans�we have ordered this year's seed potatoes for planting in the Paddies in early Spring. We like to use my nieces for the job as they don't seem to mind all the bending.

Here are the varieties we are growing this year:
Beauty of Bute,�Cara,�Highland Burgundy Red,�Pentland Squire,�Picasso,�Red Duke of York,�Sarpo Axona

Originally posted at www.lawsonpark.org/blog/5881/chips-growing-in-the-wild on 16/02/12 at 14:30 0 Comments

Thursday 16 February '12
(from Lawson Park Blog)

Chips growing in the wild

From potato guru Alan Romans�we have ordered this year's seed potatoes for planting in the Paddies in early Spring. We like to use my nieces for the job as they don't seem to mind all the bending.

Here are the varieties we are growing this year:
Beauty of Bute,�Cara,�Highland Burgundy Red,�Pentland Squire,�Picasso,�Red Duke of York,�Sarpo Axona

Originally posted at www.lawsonpark.org/blog/5881/chips-growing-in-the-wild on 16/02/12 at 14:30 0 Comments

Friday 10 February '12
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

The Spiral of Success

Currently enjoying the light airport novel by Maxine Berg: The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815 - 1848. It includes this marvellous illustration by Burnett from 1826 to be hung in every Mechanics Institute in the land. It shows the King in the middle and spirals out through fifteen layers of revolution with the paupers in the workhouse at its tail: "the best informed and the most industrious will always, in their exertion to get forward, thrust out the more ignorant in the rear". Like an aspirational colon. Should be made into an app for for Art Facts. Nominations please for who's in the middle and who's left in a blue pastic doggy bag in a roadside hedge.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 10/02/12 at 17:04 2 Comments

Friday 10 February '12
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Der Uberkunstfarmfactory

Art factories in the snow

The print studio is the hangar on the left and the tower was used to imprison peasant farmers who didn't pay enough tax.

This week travels bring me to a wintery (-12C) Breugelish Hildersheim in the middle of Germany to meet up Charles Esche and his team from the Van Abbe Museum and Prof. Thomas Lange of the University to discuss 1848, the usage of art, agriculture, the Zombie of modernism, cluelessness and edutainment (that word has, worryingly no spell check alert), among other things we are plotting to crowbar into an exhibition to change the world, or at least change how we see it .

The art school here is like the Mercedes version of Lawson Park’s Vauxhall Chevette. The arts school is built around a gargantuan 13^th century mega farm-cum-fortress, surrounded by the most fertile soil in Germany. It’s very notable as you travel through this country by train that, in contrast to the UK, this is a land dedicated to productivity. Trackside in England reveals and a parade of retail hanger parks, malls, industrial wastelands, leisurelands and factories converted to go-kart tracks; a country given over to consumption. In Germany everyone seems to be at work, factory chimneys have smoke coming from them, the countryside is heavily farmed, not set aside and an engineering aesthetic pervades all, even at the Choco Leibniz factory.

Back at the art school we go to the student cafeteria which serves homemade café und kuchen. In fact it trumps pretty much any restaurant the Lake District has to offer and I gaze down at my 90 degree slice of subsidised patisserie and remember less fondly the Ginsters and scalding milky tea of the Goldsmiths’ refectory. But this is interrupted by a request from an art history student who is doing her thesis, startlingly, on Grizedale Arts and has heard that I am in town. “Are you sure?” I say. Apparently this website is read avidly in Europe, so we’d better get our act together. This is subsequently confirmed by Grizedale alumni and current Hildersheim artist professor Antje Schiffers who complains that we need to maintain the joke count on the site. Although, she says, we might be doing that but just not in a way she finds funny.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 10/02/12 at 14:16 1 Comment