keith and karen in the best kept garden centre on earth

art bags

Made a brief visit to Keith Singleton nursuries to do an interview for Egremont Radio. Keith is a very do it yourself kind of guy, he's building his own resturant as he can't find a good place to eat locally. He's imported a Tuscan pizza oven to get the pizza right.
He also famously (amongst giant leak producers) produces his own composts and potting mixes with his own designed bags - now thes ebelong in the folk archive.
http://www.cumbriagardensandpetsdirect.co.uk/

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 03/03/07 at 18:38 : 0 Comments

Scatter art

Farm works.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 03/03/07 at 10:37 : 0 Comments

massed farmers considering the merits of a roll of barbed wire

One of the rag rugs

Attended a farm auction at the weekend, a spectacular gathering of farmers, there were pick-ups and land rovers for miles parked up along the lanes. The massed body of people dressed in wellies and overalls was a phenomenal sight, very uniform, a specialised group that you rarely see on mass. The auction covered everything from the most dilapadated sheds and piles of timber to quad bikes and tractors. We bought some odds and ends, rag rugs and pottery (very tasteful).

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 28/02/07 at 14:46 : 0 Comments

Constance in the face of adversity

The winter cherry makes a nice contrast with the forest lichens in this Denby three legged dish? I wonder what it was designed for and by whom. Maybe an ikebana craze in the 70's, sounds plausible. I went to an Ikebana class in Tokyo last year, much to the shock of a lot of tiny delicate women. It's a simple system, painting with flowers. There is a system for getting proportions right, 2 x diameter + 2 x height of vessel = height of subject, 1/3 height of subject = height of object. The rest is just an asymetrical fill within the sphere of the subject and object, just like trad landscape painting Well actualy its a whole lot more complicated but that was the basic begginer bit and its seems to work).

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 27/02/07 at 20:42 : 0 Comments

The Eldest Man in the Village (92)

One of the farmers in Japan (nicknamed by us as pants man due to him only wearing y fronts when we first met him) has sent through the portraits he made of the villagers that Barnaby had painted (on white velvet). The idea of the project was to do with ownership of image and copyright. Barnaby gave the portraits to the sitters, the images that pants man took could be Barnaby’s art, or he could have the portraits translated again - for example copied by reproduction painters in China. This could run for ever and everything belongs to Barnaby or the sitter or the other interpreters, it’s all in the contract.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 27/02/07 at 14:33 : 0 Comments

On the way back from town (London) I stopped over in Manchester to record a discussion or rather a response to a series of questions about public art. I did have the worst hang over and was suffering from acute sleep deprivation – not because I had partied so hard – I don't do that - but because hotels in London clearly do not consider themselves as places people might want to sleep in – noisy – err yes. It does slightly beg the question what do these buildings thing they are offering?

Back to public art, the discussion was with the Freee Collective, Dave Beech (who has great hair) Mel Jordan and Andy Hewitt. My reading through of the questions had left me thinking who the fuck cares – I mean you’ve got to be in academia to really give all this ‘is it public, realm, sphere, art, government’ shit any time. I ve attached the list of questions and my jaundiced notes (in italics) if you want to see what was to be answered and what I thought.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 27/02/07 at 14:17 : 0 Comments

A pile of knitting on legs

Alistair and I attended the Giles Deacon catwalk thing during London fashion week (we are planning a project to design a land uniform for Lawson Park). This sort of performance has got a lot to be said for it, it’s very short - each incredibly ill looking teenage model just walks the length of the catwalk, their arms hanging like dead fish, their faces bearing the expression of a depressed teenagers bedroom and showing an apparent indifference to where they are and what they are wearing. I was a bit surprised by how generally un glamorous the whole thing was - there was little glamour in the audience, almost less than at an art opening. The clothes were pretty great though, although I have never and I suspect will never see anyone wearing such things, (i dress fairly conservatively and I get more verbal than I want). I was left trying to work out why fashion is such big business, how this all translates into actual money and if there was a way to make performance art perform a similar PR role for other product.
I was interested to note how many businesses were sponsoring aspects of the event, even the model agency (Storm) was being sponsored (by Alfa Romeo), where does this sponsor the sponsor thing end. In this instance this sponsorship meant there were a lot of men in smart red cars picking up girls in darkest Shoreditch which one might say looked a bit interpretable.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 27/02/07 at 14:10 : 0 Comments

DJ huddle - Barry, Mark and Michael

Spent the day making jingles with the people of Egremont at the opening of the radio station. There were quite a few people that turned up plus a bunch of lads who were rather thrilled by the helium balloons (re voice adaptation). Their obsessions with Nazis/violence, homosexuality and peer pressure reminded me of the horrors of being a male teenager, however they did manage to do a jingle albeit with the aid of helium - hear it on the web site - www.egremontfm.com

The station will run over the weekends, from 8am to 2am Friday to Sunday, pretty ambitious, however there are lots of keen radio enthusiasts and DJ’s all dying to do a drive time show and even a breakfast show.

The local staff were a bit freaked when the local bad boy hard man came in to offer his services, he is honoured as the best local rapper, he did nt quite manage a jingle but it was touch and go! He left promising to put together a show without swearing, now that might be a bit of a challenge!

It has been quite a struggle getting the show working (a bit of an understatement) but everyone has really pulled out the stops, especially the volanteers without whom it just would'nt have happened, so I am listening to it now on line and it sounds great - maybe too professional!

The show can be listen to on www.egremontfm.com the site has a listen again facility as well.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 17/02/07 at 11:09 : 0 Comments

Grizedale got asked to do an oyster card wallet (some sort of travel pass thing) - a part of celebrating 60 years of the Arts Council. Not quite sure if I get the connection but I guess they wanted something from the ol’ countryside, nice to asked though. Kinda hard thing to do, so little space, we would have liked to do something a bit promotional but it didn’t really seem possible within the constraints. The other idea was to crusade a new set of morals, a code for social living. The Arts Council ambition is to promote the idea of a ‘right to art’ . I like the idea of what you might have a right to but didn’t know or care, or that was not of any relevance, i.e. a right to luxury goods ‘err like thanks yeah’. So anyway we did a code for the country which referenced many other codes of behaviour all of which have been horribly abused, misused and re interpreted. The text is accompanied by an elysian fields like image of Langdale valley in the Lake District sourced from the internet. Langdale was the site where the London bombers allegedly trained for their attacks, allegedly running up and down this idealized UK landscape wearing heavy rucksacks.

I think the message of the code and image we finally produced was fairly clear, hinting at various interpretations but fairly clearly saying something about the degeneration of social living, the over emphasis of individual rights over the common good, our twisted and overblown concept of freedom and the kinds of reaction this position is likely to generate.
Anyway after everyone (commissioners, designers, Arts Council) had had thier say, it was maybe slightly more ambiguous (or less) so here for anyone interested is a version I thought worked - (on advice I was happy to take out a rather pompous quote about freedom being a licence).

A Code for the Country
Rights of Persons
To say anything in private and nothing in public
To feel superior in a variety of ways
To inflict themselves and or any parts of themselves at any time upon another or others
To be right unequivocally
To shrug off the burden of others
To ‘whatever’ by any means necessary
To wander

With sincere thanks and regrets to:
Privacy laws, The Declaration of Independence, Legal Rights, Paris Hilton, Malcolm X, 10 Commandments, Islamic principles, Green Cross Code, Rights of Man, Burgess Meredith/Mickey Goldmill, William Wordsworth, The Country Code, Lager ads of the 1970’s, various Christian doctrines, the Highway Code, Tony Blair, Milton, Raymond Babbitt

Twisted pulled and hurt …..

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 17/02/07 at 10:43 : 1 Comment

Trailer Trash

Finally Summerhill is sold and today we cleared all the ghastly B&B style crap into a skip. I've waited 5 years to do this. The sale now releases money to start on the building of Lawson Park.
Anyone with fond memories and in need of a momento can pick up a souvenir on ebay - floral everything.
The house has been bought in association with the Baptist church down the road, they will be using it as a religous study centre.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 08/02/07 at 21:27 : 0 Comments