3:20pm Wednesday 1st July 2009
By Adrian Mullen
TATE director Sir Nicholas Serota gives his seal of approval to Grizedale Arts’ new creative home at Lawson Park next week.
Mr Serota, one of the most distinguished names in the arts world, opens the radical arts organisation’s fresh headquarters on July 10, following the recent more ‘locally focused’ opening by highly regarded broadcaster and author, Eric Robson, who is the chairman of Cumbria Tourism.
Grizedale Arts deputy director Alistair Hudson said that they’d enjoyed a good relationship with the Tate.
He thought that Mr Serota was very keen to show his support for a regional arts organisation that was very much at the centre of things and a hot house for new talent. Lawson Park is a historic hill farm that has undergone a £1.3 million makeover.
The architectural design by Edinburgh-based Sutherland Hussey retains the exterior of the farm buildings, which date back to 1338, while inserting a complex contemporary structure into the body of the house and barns.
Located 200 metres up a farm track, on the western edge of Grizedale Forest, the arts organisation’s newly-developed pied-a-terre is a stone’s throw from the one created in the 1970s by the late, great Bill Grant, which went on to gain international reputation for its award-winning landscape sculpture programme scattered around the forest area.
Alistair explained that Lawson Park really encapsulated Grizedale Arts’ move “out of the forest” and into the world at large.
Several artists from the Grizedale stable have been commissioned to create works for the site, including Adam Chodzko, Ryan Gander, Jeremy Deller and Olaf Breuning.
And the new look buildings will house the Lawson Park Collection of furniture and decorative arts that tells the story of British design and its relationship with local vernacular from 1820.
Adam Sutherland was appointed visual arts director for the Grizedale Society in 1999 and given the task of developing the society's existing visual arts programme.
As a result Grizedale Arts was set up as a curatorial project with Adam and his deputy Alistair at the helm.
The Forestry Commision took over the sculpture park in 2006 and Grizedale Arts moved its office to the semi-derelict Lawson site in January 2007.
“I think one of the best things about Grizedale is that it has managed to adapt and change over its 32-year history, to keep thinking up new ways to work in a rural environment and adapt to the changing conditions,” added Alistair.
Grizedale Arts works with culture, people and landscape in innovative new ways, in a similar way to one of Lawson Farm’s former owners, John Ruskin.The land that goes with the farm will provide an arena to work with artists and communities on exciting new projects to do with food, agriculture, horticulture.Inside, the building will provide facilities for the artists’ residencies, education, meetings, conferences, and above all taking part in the creative process. “This isn't a place to come and look at art,” Alistair pointed out, “it's a place to come and get involved in its making” .
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