Autumn descends on us yet again bringing to end an abundant year at Lawson Park farm with a vulgar amount of sunshine engourging the garden produce to prize-winning stature. In uncanny simultaneity, it seems our years of sowing seed and nurturing the artistic programme and its population of artists and public have produced more invitations and opportunities than you can shake a dead geranium at. However a big slug could quite easily snaffle it up overnight and put paid to all that graft - metaphorically and for real. (To whom can you possibly be referring? Ed.).

* Have you ever been to a Harvester before? (As they say, you wouldn’t be here if you had. Ed.)

Laure Prouvost’s work Wantee – home grown, built and crafted in Coniston - got her nominated for the Turner Prize, so now we have been shaking a leg here with Laure to create components for her exhibition in Derry this October. Peter Hodgson has painted himself into a surreal corner with Adam firing off suggestive teapots like a chimp in a cage. Our local team of creative entrepreneurs aka Coniston Youth Club will be running the ‘Want tea?’ tea room at CCA Derry. Anna Pickering, a recipient of one of our Artists Re-orientation Awards is working on a costume with suitable bibs and capes.

The first Coniston Home Grown Show and International Raised Pie Competition was held at the weekend in the Coniston Institute. The show was organised by the new Coniston Institute Programme Manager, Pippa Martin – possibly the only arts worker to be paid from the pockets of a small village (“Kidney Dialysis Machine?” “No thanks, can we have programme of cutting edge contemporary art?”). The concept of an entirely non-competitive garden show was just a light radical step too far, so prizes were offered and pitchforks duly lowered. Winners included Karen Guthrie in the International Raised Pie Competition and Maureen Fleming in the heaviest vegetable class. And in the public vote section Lawson Park won the laurels for a basket of fungi, fruit, nuts and berries from the wild garden. For full results go the website.

Grizedale Arts will be delivering projects in the Museum of Arte Util, a collaboration with the Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven and artist Tania Bruguera opening in December (are you sure that’s a prize? Ed.). This historic, era defining, game changing, blockbuster (pimple on a pimple. Ed) of a show will feature the Coniston Honest Shop as a prime example of Useful Art fulfilling all the criteria set to sort the effective wheat from participatory chaff – the criteria are listed here but essentially the idea is things that actually work. The project is part of our long-term collaboration with the Internationale confederation of museums – The Uses of Art: The Legacy of 1848 and 1989.

The Office of Useful Art – a sort of new dockside press gang centre to get people to see what the real value of art might be – will be present within the exhibition where you will also be able to survey the archive of the Museum of Arte Util if your ‘Go See Grant’ won’t get you as far as Eindhoven. The Office is brought to you in collaboration with John Moores University Liverpool, Van Abbe Musuem and Tate Liverpool.

Marcus Coates has been shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth commission. You might say Marcus has had a sluggish career but it seems to be paying off now - fourteen years since he first started working at Grizedale. His Leopard Slug Portrait if selected will overlook GA Director’s great grandfather, (couple more greats, a couple of uncles and a spray of cousins in there somewhere. Ed) a Napier standing forlornly at the lower right hand corner of Trafalgar Square (even I don’t know what he did. Ed.). It might have been the shamanic channelling he did with us in the recent Anchorhold Project in Finland (no it definitely wasn’t that, Ed.).

Three architecture practices have been shortlisted by the Coniston Cricket Club Selection Committee to further develop proposals; they are Larissa Johnson & Mervyn Rodrigues, Ullmayersylvester and the The SCHTIP Collective. All three have been visiting Coniston and meeting with the straight talking club members (“You're the wild card, you know that?”) to advance the designs. Final schemes are submitted in November and the successful scheme will be announced shortly thereafter. (Has anyone done the bat survey joke re the old pavilion? Dep. Ed) (Looking forward to it already. Ed)

GA has been invited by the Anyang Public Art Programme to go and do a Grizedale over there. After building up a landmark selection of large scale public sculpture in the urban landscape, they’ve decided that’s a bit pointless. So they wondered if we might go design a room to encourage artists in other directions and make one or two of their plaza hugging behemoths a bit more useful. If this catches on it could go really good for business – Naum Gabo clothes dryer, Angel of the North wind turbine, Andy Goldsworthy kindling, Robert Smythson Straight Jetty, Jaume Plensa…Jaume Plensa…Jaume, er….

This year’s Greasy Pole event (as in the public sculpture of the Egremont Greasy Pole by Egg Throwing Prize winning artists Jeremy ‘Turner Prize” Deller and Alan Kane) will be held on Saturday 21 September at 10.30 am in the Market Place, Egremont. First Prize is a leg of lamb sponsored by Wilsons the Butchers of Egremont. If you are unable to climb up a slithery 30ft vertical pole, other Prizes are available all weekend in the Crab Fair Sports including World Gurning Championship Prize, Pipe Smoking Prize, Cumberland Wrestling Prize, Egg Throwing prize, Drag Queen in a Wheel Barrow Race Prize, Hound Trailing Prize and assorted vegetable and animal prizes. A fun family weekend for all - until it goes dark. Very dark.

Glad to announce Anna Pickering and Rosalie Schweiker were selected from a large application to be GA’s first Artist Re-orientation awardees – their precarious paths tread lightly on the soil of change. Due to the interest and impossibility of the selection process further residencies were also offered to Amina Abbas-Nazari, Kristin Luke and Kasia Depta Garapich who all attended a week long intensive induction week with a view to developing proposals for future work. Also visiting on the back of the call Bristol Diving School and We Colonised the Moon are spending time at Parkamoor. Re-touchin’ my base residencies also went to Dominic Allen and Ben Coode Adams.

The lengthy feature on the Lawson Park lifestyle is now in the current issue of House and Garden magazine – please do not look at it if you are inclined toward simmering bitterness, tack spitting or bile oozeing. (NB the magazine you should not look at is House and Garden, which is read by Individuals of Private Wealth not Homes and Gardens which is read by Individuals of Private Car Registrations. Other things you should not look at is the feature in The Guardian on how it’s now ok to live and make art outside of that there London, even in tourist trampled vegetative wastelands like Grizedale Arts. And anyway if you think that’s bad you should definitely not look at this media coverage of Dep. Ed and Coniston Ed. with a Giant Cabbage.

Surely won by Grizedale Arts with rooms coming up in the Turner Prize show with Laure Provost, Derry; Art Turning Left and the Office for Useful Art in Tate Liverpool; Honest Shop and Cloakroom at the Van Abbe Museum, Netherlands; Anchorhold Therapy room, Hai-Arts Finland; Common Room, Anyang Public Art Programme South Korea; Wind Dinning Room , Maebashi, Japan; A Room for the Ideal Man – Ancoats Manchester and another room in Burnley somewhere. And all before Christmas – yehay.

Thanks and prizes go to the many people who have helped us to date this year in supporting the programme, especially including the resident volunteers and interns who will, all going to plan, later be harvested as fully functioning creative citizens: Rebecca Page, Rose Parish, Amy Leung, Yoko Sato, Rose Adler, Susanna Pires, Rachel Ashcroft, Laura O’Leary, Charlie Hill, Rosa Faber, Helen Savage, Anni, James Slicer, Graham Taylor, Jane Lawson. (it’s been a good year for the Roses.Ed.)

Turnips and Giorgio Agamben texts on their way to you all.