Grizedale Arts: myvillages.org blog
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No building. No trouble.
One of the things I like best about Grizedale is the fact that it isn’t a building, and how it spreads across spaces. It might change with the redevelopment of Lawson Park into a live/work research place, but I hope it will keep its character, which for me is a space for quite accidental but very particular encounters, which then spread again, and might site and manifest themselves very clearly somewhere else.
Grizedale is going to places, which keeps it open and fragmented – and with very different access points, which is a huge advantage that most buildings are lacking.
Just to list some of the local Grizedale spaces:
Grizedale has storage space in Coniston, fund-raising dinners on the terrace of the Lake Café, Japanese cooking at the Library, Boat Dressing on the lake, radio stations in the forest, etc just to mention very few.
And it has the dinners at Lawson Park – very impressive and extremely memorable, not just because of the amazing food and the stories that come with it, but also because of the reasons why you are there and who else might be around accidentally. As if accidentally was the right term to describe the fact that one is sitting in a dining room some 6 miles from the next village and a few hours away from other art hubs associated with networking.
A spatial and relational analysis of Grizedale would be interesting.
What’s happening where and why, and how and why do those links come together and how to they move on?
During our time in Grizedale we went to see the Lantern House from Welfare State International (www.welfare-state.org) in Ulverston, now called Lanternhouse International (www.lanternhouse.org).
It’s public money for a public building which feels to have no general public.
Local gossip knows that it’s all a clique.
Wapke and I are still puzzled by the building and what it is for. It was kind of public but not, kind of welcoming but nothing to do. Kind of friendly but we didn’t want to stay. I strongly felt that it was an example for how an organisation gets trapped in a building, not just physically but also programmatically. Who is filling all those spaces and who is coming to them? The clearest memory are small arty/crafty interventions (such as the tiled edges of the staircase) in the building which were somewhere else claimed as artist/architect collaborations. That’s “functional” art at its worst, and has nothing to do with creating an innovative and functioned ground for shared cultural practice.
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