(me) selecting photos to work from

Studio assistant Yvonne preparing items for a display case at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, on show from Easter

Desk with an early model of the ‘geography’ pavilion in progress

Photographing finished models ready for the website

Before we set of on our trip we kept getting asked ‘What is so wonderful about the North?’ this was a bit annoying due to the open-ended nature of the question, however I think we have actually worked it out. We found over the last 28 days time and time again people honestly and critically identifying the problems of their community, town or city and dedicating themselves to finding solutions to them with outstanding ingenuity and creativity. That seems pretty wonderful.

Here are just a few examples:
Urban Splash’s re-invention of Manchester’s terraced housing.
Grizedale Arts appreciation of the implications of tourism on local communities.
The miners at St Helens understanding how to remove a negative image of the once ex-mining community and create a symbol for the future.
Wayne Hemmingway and Wimpy Homes building new affordable family houses with an eye for better design in the wake of overbuilding of city apartments.
Liverpool’s Tenant Spin in creating a community and voice for those in high-rise flats, and a thriving media stream made by active older people.

I hope that these projects and the others we have written about so far go a little way to demonstrate this overwhelming ‘problem identifying and solving’ spirit we have encountered, often as a ground up response to the decline of heavy industry and farming. If as our trip has demonstrated, all of us think of narrowing the ‘wealth gap’ in it’s wider sense, including the wealth of community, culture and creativity the North will continue to be a unique and inspiring a place to live.

We are now working on the exhibition that comes out of the road trip and five weeks banging our heads together in the studio, I keep telling myself that Picasso painted Gurnica in five weeks so it cant be that bad. The exhibition will visually elaborate on and add to the things already on the web, on our blog and the suggestions. Using some of the footage that we havn’t shown on the site and profiling the ideas that have really interested us from the trip. We will also be posting the ones that got away – the things we wanted to go and see but didn’t have a chance to this time round.

Keeping up the blood circulation

Wakefield is it seems on the up. Despite not previously internationally associated with cutting edge art despite its strong links to Hepworth and Moore, soon it will hold a huge multi-million pound art gallery, designed by that clever Sterling prize fellow David Chipperfield, this will sit alongside a new David Adaje market hall, and Will Alsop’s Orangey for the public art commissioning centre – Beam. Jeepers! How come this kind of culture and sophistication hasn’t rubbed off on it’s neighbour Leeds? This is surely going to re-invent Wakefield with already existing proximity to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as the centre of culture for the region. Nino Vella from Wakefield Art Gallery showed us the plans for the new ‘Hepworth Wakefield’ including a look at the construction site. We also saw the current show at the Wakefield Art Gallery about art and architecture called – Grand Designs’, which predominantly contains artwork loaned from the Arts Council Collection.

Site of the new ‘Hepworth Wakefield’ art gallery

Following this lead in the afternoon we visited the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park meeting with Natalie Rudd from the aforementioned Arts Councils Collection. Natalie showed us the library and conference facility located at the Longside Gallery way up on the hill above the parkland. Here in peaceful silence curators can come to research the Arts Council’s works available for gallery loan, one can find the details of the thousands of artworks collected since 1946. They have a cavernous office, built in a kind of agricultural shed at the top of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and internally designed by Tony Fretton who created London’s Lisson Gallery. For some reason it seems odd but exciting to have this blue chip outpost of the Capital’s art scene (in fact an outpost of the Hayward gallery) here amongst the Northern sheep and agricultural concrete (The full Arts Council collection is available to see online).

Tony Fretton designed interior for the rural offices of the Arts Council Collection

Bauman Lyons Architects office and garden in Chapeltown, Leeds

The M62 is a glorious structure and people will always tell you that it is the highest motorway in Britain as it cuts through the Pennines between Leeds and Manchester. It is an amazing feat of engineering, akin to the great wall of China, possibly it can be admired from space – 107 miles of beautiful asphalt that took huge commitment to build against terrible weather conditions, boggy peat and rock strata. When I am the sole survivor of the apocalypse this (and Angel of the North) will be one of the first things I shall go to, to see if it is still standing, with its lines of derelict army tanks.

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The M62 crosses the countryside in an uncompromising manor, whisking you (ish) from Liverpool to Hull, in no time at all if you are very lucky. I wish they would use Will Alsop’s crazy super city plan and build a monorail above the middle, which would reduce the journey time to a mater of minutes. Between Leeds and Manchester there is a legendary split in the motorway betwix the eastbound and westbound carriages. The land in the middle is occupied by Stott Hall farm – apparently for geological and topographical reasons, not because the farmer wouldn’t sell. It is undoubtedly one of the best known sites in the North, and would make a fantastic place to buy an over priced sandwich. I highly recommend the wikipedia entry on the M62, it has been meticulously edited with great history, details of key dates and extensions. It has a huge library of links. This level of amateur dedication to a stretch of motorway is surely worth noting.

If you enter Leeds on the M62 making your way onto its little brother, the M621, and then into the city centre you pass under the railway bridges, a huge expanse of Victorian tunnel known as Neville Street, (or more appropriately: Dark Neville Street). This will be the site for a massive art and design work by German artist Hans Peter Kuhn, Bauman Lyons Architects and Andy Edwards Design. As well as a technical design solution to the problems of overcrowded pavements, wind, traffic noise and light, it will be a daily changing light installation that is testament to the 15000 visitors that use the tunnel on foot every day. It has not been installed yet (Nov 08), so we met with Irena Bauman of Bauman Lyons Architects at her Chapeltown based office in Leeds and asked her about the Light and Sound Transit and her general approach to designing buildings. By the way Bauman Lyons architects have a rule that they don’t work on a job unless it is only 2 hours from their office, just as well they built that M62.

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Video interview with Irena Bauman uploaded soon

We went to an auction they had set up and were filming at FACT, they were incredibly friendly, welcoming and it was one of the most enjoyable days on our road trip. More later….
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Tenantspin team in our video: Dolly Lloyd, John McGuirk (on the spoons), Stephen Graham and Vera Cook

Vera Cook on camera

The auctioneer

Post auction offers

The Wonderful North lot – now on e-bay!

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Richard Wilson’s architectural work ‘Turning the Place Over’ is one of the key public art projects in Liverpool for it’s year as the European Capital of Culture, and it is a fitting tribute that a combination of art and derelict space has been commissioned as an icon for the celebrations. Derelict buildings and cheap rent are key components to any avant-garde, and this has been witnessed and utilised throughout the 20th century – 1970’s New York and London’s East End in the 1990’s. Gordon Matta-Clark was part of the New York scene of that period and his work is the obvious source for ‘Turning the Place Over’, where Wilson cuts a circular disk into the facade of a building and rotates it, both inside and out. In 1975 Matta-Clark made ‘Conical Intersect‘ in empty houses earmarked for demolition by de Gaule as part of the regeneration scheme of Les Halles, Paris around the Pompidou Centre – a conical shape cut through houses that pierced the exterior wall at the widest point.

Liverpool is changing and is already very different from when I first came in 2000. It has become the most established art centre in the North of England with the Biennial, the Tate (housing the National Collection of Modern Art in the north of England) and the art institutions/galleries: FACT, the A-foundation and Bluecoat amongst others. We picked up our slab of a programme for the Capital of Culture in Waterstone’s and although the usual suspects are there (Atomic Kitten, Yoko Ono and all things Beatles related) the overwhelming impression is one of the civic commitment to culture, out of the derelict warehouses have come galleries with wi-fi cafes and a whole tribe of creatives using them.

FACT, FACT cafe

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The idea of the sculpture is partly to help regenerate and change the identity and image of St Helens. It will be a work about the future on a site that is vital to understanding this area of the North’s past and present. The actual look of this sculpture though is still secret and we wish them best of luck with it. We hope that it will be unique and as interesting an experience as meeting the miners at their old social club.

Regardless of how the success of the piece is eventually measured and by whom, it will be a statement of civic pride, similar to how a cathedral spire of an old English town would act as a landmark, symbolising the aspirations, monetary and cultural wealth of the local people. Like a church it will be a place for community and reflection about the impact and demise of mining. I imagine that the current wave of desire for landmark sculptures across the North to be in some way analogous to the desire for tall church spires of a previous century, if the St Helen’s sculpture is a success, every town will like to have it’s own big sculpture. Some will be great and unique, others like the multitude of churches will more standard and less remarkable.

The Channel 4 big art project will be worth watching to hear more from these chaps and there amazingly straight forward way of explaining art, I even learnt a new word – to Skit someone – meaning to take the Michael.

An off shore wind farm; below – Antony Gormley’s cast figures on the beach

English Romanticism, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin all spring to mind when wandering like a cloud through the hills of the English Lake District. But you are rarely lonely here and such inspiring scenery creates a place of mass tourism to the tune of 14 million visitors a year! This is clearly a big industry and the local economic reason d’etre, and as such it doesn’t come without its problems for the local inhabitants. Despite appreciating the stimulating landscape of the Lakes, it is important as an artist (or thinking person) to get a better understanding of how your own visit can add to the gradual paralysing of rural places into a mono economic existence, stifling diversity and fracturing village communities.

Grizedale Arts might be described as an organisation that is particularly interested in how art can be useful/ provocational within these problem areas. It works with artists to raise awareness alongside the local communities, with an understanding of, but detachment to, the outstanding romantic beauty of the landscape. It organises artist’s residencies, local projects and fetes, public sculptures (see the Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane’s Greasy Pole post – 20 January) and international exhibitions.

The art organisation embraces the weirdness of contemporary art, contradiction and conflict as part of its lot, and the list of artists it has worked with reads like a summary of subsequent Turner, Beck’s futures, Tate triennial shortlists. It operates a kind of ‘home and an away’ program, bringing critical distance from international artists to the area, drawing links between the urban and the rural projects as well as working in similar economic or social situations in other countries such as Japan and China.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/665958[/vimeo]

Adam and Karen’s cats – Tomas and Morris, photo by Karen Guthrie.

General Notes:

Grizedale Arts is also becoming a working farm. It has just started its own ad-hoc farmyard radio show, broadcast live between 4 and 5pm live from its temporary office building on the hill above lake Coniston. You can listen to it here.

The arts organisation is undergoing a £1.2 million new building, Lawson Park, inside a 13th century ex-monastic charcoal burners hovel. The new building is designed by Sterling prize-winning Sutherland Hussey Architects.

Their latest project is a web TV station called agrifashionista.

Carbon Offsetting our road trip

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We asked the arty boffins at Grizedale if we could attempt to carbon offset the Wonderful North at their art farm, to try and find out for ourselves what this phenomenon actually entails. We worked out that we needed to plant at least 3.2 trees to carbon offset 1.1 tonnes of co2 that the motor home will omit for the 1500 miles of our trip. Plus a lot of hedging to deal with the food miles, extra unpredicted mileage, and the carbon footprint of the preparation and planning/ computers etc. Three artists, ourselves and the staff of Grizedale spent the day rotivating, digging a trench and planting.

After this experiment, I can’t help but think that the neat and incredibly cheap carbon offset packages that one can buy for a flight to New York (about £5) or for 4 years driving in your car can’t really be dealing with the whole picture and the labor it takes to plant the trees (it took 9 people a day to plant a relevant number for our short motor home trip). Then there are costs for tending to the said trees and the chance that they might die, blow over etc within the necessary 20 year life cycle. Finally when the trees die, rot or burn they put the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere?

Anyhow if you would like Grizedale Arts to offset your art world jet set lifestyle, huge museum heating bill, or over production of art invitation flyers then give them a ring. At least you’ll be putting that money back into art, and can visit and see the actual trees yourself over the next 20 years, you can even dig the hole they go in if you want.

Breakfast at Lawson Park with Grizedale Arts – Adam, Alistair, Lisa and artists Karen Guthrie, Ruth Hoflich, Maria Benjamin, Jay Yung, Bryan and Laura, who have come to help plant trees.