An Easter Break at Grizedale Arts

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by Rocca Gutteridge, 1 May 2011

The Mobile Dairy School
Cheese Making Course for Enthusiasts

Read the flyer… I have to be honest I am not a Cheese Enthusiast but had traveled from Edinburgh to Cumbria, alone, sleeping in the back of my beaten up white van, over the Easter weekend, to fulfill a too long term ambition of getting to know more arts organisation, Grizedale Arts.
web link

Grizedale Arts aims to be “a new idea for an art institution which exists as a growing network of projects and ideas”. I’ve only previous come in touch with the project via it’s website and feel like its the sort of project that needs to be peeled like an onion, layer by layer.

Speaking of onions, Grizedale Arts’ mother hub, Lawson Park, has the most beautiful vegetable garden one can imagine. Lovingly tended to by all that live and work at Grizedale the garden feels like a sanctuary and an immaculate, stunning art work all at once.

Grizedale’s history is with the UK land art movement, it used to be the now Grizedale Sculpture Trail, a decaying sculpture wood full of Anthony Gormely’s etc. Adam Sutherland joined as director over ten years ago and exchanged the sculpture wood for a farm.

Over a tea of home grown pig cheek, Adam gave me a quick look into the centres’ philosophy. It made immediate sense that they would opt for the farm, a much better way to engage with the Lake District environment and public. It also felt incredibly genuine Adam and cos. love of the area, their land, what and who they were engaging with.

GA believe Art could and should be useful. By this time I was quite sleepy from all the cheese but I think Adam was telling me- a long time ago art had a choice to be useful or to be art for arts sake. We choose to make it for arts sake but GA wishes it was useful. This blog post by Deputy Director Alistair Hudson, explains
http://grizedale.org/blogs/blog//8361/.13

By the end of the weekend I still didn’t totally ‘get’ Grizedale Arts (and I hadn’t become a complete cheese queen) but my experience did make me see the Arts part of GA in a more wholesome, full bodied way. It made sense that art did things, was a cheese course, a stunning vegetable garden, a farm. I liked the way that I was still left staring through my artists eyes at an organisation that confused me a bit, challenged me and didn’t sit totally comfortably with me right away.

Below is a little photo diary of my weekend.
Thank you to Grizedale Arts, Fernando, all the course attendants for a very special Easter weekend.

The Coniston Institute

The cheese making course took place in the Coniston Institute. Grizedale Arts are trying to restore the Coniston Institute for the town. It was a mechanic institute. A centre for alternative and informal education. A life long learning centre.

The Coniston Institute used to hold museum objects selected by John Ruskin. They’ve now all been taken our and put in a lottery funded, snazzy but possibly a little bit soulless museum around the corner.

Artist and Cheese Maker, Fernando Garcia Dory is commissioned by Grizedale Arts as our cheese master

Fernando García-Dory ´s (b. 1978) work engages specifically with issues affecting the relation between culture-nature now, embodied within the contexts of landscape, the rural, desires and expectations related with identity aspects, crisis, utopy and social change. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology in Madrid, Spain. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages such as drawing to collaborative agroecological projects, actions, and cooperatives

http://www.fernandogarciadory.com/