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Archive

Guardians of the Areng Valley Symposium

Dawn Yoxall

14 November 2014

The exhibition Guardians of the Areng Valley launches at Grizedale Forest during a fortnight of art exhibitions, music and events taking place to launch Lakes Culture, an exciting new project to establish the Lake District as the UK's leading rural cultural destination.

As part of this celebration we are proud to be hosting a symposium supported by Lakes Culture. Luke Duggleby will introduce the exhibition and will be joined by guest speakers Angus Nurse, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Middlesex University and David Pritchard, international consultant; arts & environment.

 
 
 
categories Past Events

Atkins CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year 2014

Dawn Yoxall

19 July - 2 November 2014

Atkins CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year is an international showcase for the very best in environmental photography and video. The selected works examine issues such as innovation, sustainable development, biodiversity, poverty, climate change, human rights, culture, natural disasters and population growth. Honouring amateurs and professionals of all ages, it provides an opportunity for photographers to share images of environmental and social issues with international audiences and to enhance our understanding of the causes, consequences and solutions to climate change and social inequality.

The Environmental Photographer of the Year, launched by CIWEM and sponsored by Atkins, has steadily attracted an increasing number of photographers, of all ages and from all over the world. The images in this year's exhibition were selected from over 10,000 entries and judged on impact, composition, originality and technical ability by the esteemed panel comprising Paul Horton, Director of Membership and Development, CIWEM; Brigitte Lardinois, Deputy Director of Photography and the Archive Research Centre at University of the Arts London; Tim Parkin, landscape photographer and Editor of On Landscape; and David Tonkin, Chief Executive Officer, UK & Europe, Atkins.

The exhibition comprises a wide range of photographic responses to their subject, from the immediately shocking to the beautiful and humorous. Each photographer’s work is evidence of a determined commitment to capture and present the stories of people and places on the front line of environmental and social change. We hope that you find the exhibition engaging and thought provoking and that this platform provides an opportunity for increased learning and understanding about the critical environmental challenges faced by communities and how together we might respond.

The project is supported by Forestry Commission England, through a regional exhibition tour and for the first time this year a solo exhibition award selected by Ian Gambles, Director, Forestry Commission England.

 
categories Past Events

Lost & Found?

Dawn Yoxall

Artists’ geographies of the landscape-archive: Trace, loss and the impulse to preserve in the Anthropocene Age

Edwina fitzPatrcik

12 April - 29 June 2014

Edwina fitzPatrick’s Arts and Humanities Research Council funded practice-based PhD with Forestry Commission England and Glasgow School of Art has investigated how national and international approaches to sited art in the landscape have changed over the last 50 years, including how this (often temporary) artwork might be archived. The Lost & Found? exhibition focuses on Grizedale’s part in this history and how the sited artworks have resisted the preservation impulse, often disappearing back into the landscape leaving seemingly little or no trace.

Creating a comprehensive timeline of the 37 years of artists’ residencies and projects in the Forest has proved remarkably difficult, so trace, loss and our impulse to preserve, have been recurrent themes in fitzPatrick's attempts to archive this rich history which is manifested through The Lost and Found digital archive and the Missing Persons Files.

The Lost and Found archive is an interactive digital archive, featuring all known artworks sited in Grizedale Forest for a week or more, since 1977. It deliberately fuses the artworks with the place that they were created for. The Missing Persons’ Files display the chronology of the Grizedale artists’ residencies from their beginning in 1977, initiated by Peter Davies from Northern Arts (the then Regional Arts Association for northern England) in liaison with Bill Grant from the Forestry Commission at Grizedale Forest.

The Anxious Roots and Routes videos aim to visualise how a city dweller who is new to the Forest, might feel when entering it for the first time. Would they feel exhilaration, or anxiety? The videos visualise her attempts to enter the Forest accompanied by a 5½ foot (1.6 metre) red balloon. She continued this over the cycle of a year, simultaneously shooting these attempts from two perspectives: one of the camera suspended in a harness under the balloon, the other sited on the ground.

 
categories Past Events

CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year 2013

Dawn Yoxall

25 May - 1 September 2013

Having received wide acclaim at the Royal Geographical Society in London, the Environmental Photographer of the Year 2013 Exhibition tours for the first time to Grizedale Forest in the heart of Cumbria’s Lake District.

The annual competition has become an international showcase for the very best in environmental photography and video, honouring amateurs and professionals of all ages. Since its inception in 2007, the awards, organised by the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM), has used the power of stunning imagery to highlight the plight of the land and people to global audiences.

The exhibition features over 100 astonishing images by international photographers who narrate a poignant story about the fragility of our planet, the pressures on land and resources and the people who are pushed ever closer to the margins by the persistent drive of globalization. Compiled from the very best of 3,000 plus entries, the exhibition of shortlisted images and films provide an opportunity for photographers to share images of environmental and social issues with international audiences, and to enhance our understanding of the causes, consequences and solutions to climate change and social inequality.

 
categories Past Events

Art Roots

Dawn Yoxall

ART ROOTS

Art Roots Grizedale was a research and development programme for a major new commissioning programme at Grizedale Forest led by Forestry Commission England. This Research & Development programme was supported by Arts Council England to develop high quality and artistically innovative feasible future works, providing opportunities for leading and emerging artists to deliver excellence in public art in a forest environment. Delivery of these works will re-establish Grizedale Forest as a centre of international excellence for art and sculpture in the environment.

Arts Roots Exhibition

2 June - 2 September 2012

The resulting exhibition Art Roots presented the work of the 9 established and emerging artists who were commissioned to produce proposals for works responding to the unique environment of Grizedale Forest for the first time. 

The 9 exhibiting artist are Jill Cole, Laura Ford, Tania Kovats, Jo Lathwood, Jessica Lloyd-Jones, Charlotte McGowan-Griffin, Andrew Ranville, Andrew Sabin and Keith Wilson.  All artists in the exhibition consider the landscape, our relationship to it and interaction with it as fundamental components of their research and making. Their proposed commissions respond to many aspects of the profound heritage of Grizedale Forest.

Find out more about all the artists working with us on Future Commissions.

categories Past Events

TERRA

Dawn Yoxall

11 February – 29 April 2012

Jerwood Visual Arts presents TERRA, the forthcoming Jerwood Encounters exhibition exploring the relationship contemporary sculpture practice shares with the environment and landscape beyond the gallery itself. The exhibition is curated by Hayley Skipper and Antony Mottershead of Forestry Commission England based at Grizedale Forest, and features work by Jonathan Anderson, Edwina fitzPatrick, Luke Jerram, Anne-Mie Melis and Owl Project. The artists each explore contemporary sculpture practice through their own sensory relationship with the environment and the artwork exposes these ideas through a multiplicity of unique works.

Physical form, materials and conceptual intent are often the primary languages used to interpret contemporary sculpture, however as a discipline sculpture also has an intimate relationship with our wider sensory experience. The strategies and processes employed by each of the artists translate information from one form of sensory experience into another. The range of practices included within the curatorial selection are an expansive definition of sculptural practice covering performative and installation based work that engages all of the senses including sound and smell.

Jonathan Anderson works with coal dust and other elemental substances. His work expresses the cyclical nature of things and provides an ideal vehicle for the exploration of poetic metaphor and transformation. It talks about shutting off, making still, stepping out of sequential time and ultimately death. Anderson has exhibited his work widely across Wales and in April 2010 he was the recipient of the Richard and Rosemary Wakelin Purchase Prize at The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea.

Edwina fitzPatrick explores living environments that involve mutability and change and reflects upon how climate change may affect this delicate balance. Her work also celebrates narratives and conversations, which are often deeply informed by the history of place. Fitzpatrick often collaborates with experts across a range of disciplines including horticulturalists, biodiversity experts, architects, perfumers, foresters, and composers. Fitzpatrick is currently completing a Ph.D. with Glasgow School of Art in collaboration with Grizedale Forest and developing practice based research in relation to the development of the environmental art archive at Grizedale.

Luke Jerram creates sculptures, installations, live art projects and gifts fusing his artistic sculptural practice with his scientific and perceptual studies. Jerram’s ongoing research of perception is fueled by the fact that he is colour-blind. He studies the qualities of space and perception in extreme locations, from the freezing forests of Lapland to the sand dunes of the Sahara desert allowing new ways of seeing. A multidisciplinary artist, Jerram develops extraordinary public projects and is currently working on a number of complex and ambitious new works. His celebrated street pianos installation Play Me I'm Yours is currently being shown in many different cities around the world.

Anne-Mie Melis’ work explores the visual nature of plants and their role in an increasingly technological world. Combining sculpture, animation and drawing in innovative installations to ignite our senses and expose her questioning of the environment, the engineering of nature and our changing climate. The collaborative nature of Melis’s practice brings together art and science, the twin engines of cultural evolution. She recently completed a Leverhulme Trust supported Residency at the School of Bioscience, Cardiff University.

Owl Project consists of Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons. Working collaboratively they create musicmaking instruments and machines that combine electronics and software with traditional techniques such as green woodworking and wooden water wheels. In 2009 they won Urbis' Best of Manchester Award and their proposal for a floating waterwheel driven musical instrument was selected for Arts Council England's Artists Taking the Lead North East commission, one of 12 commissions for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

 
categories Past Events

"Like Nimrod's Tower the Tree Stretches Skyward"

Dawn Yoxall

Keir Smith an archival exhibition

9 April - 31 August 2011

This exhibition is the first to draw on a collection of archival material held by the Forestry Commission at Grizedale, and explores the incidental encounters Keir Smith experienced during the time he spent in the forest during two residencies and the influence this special place had on his later practice. In a text reflecting on the forest, he wrote: “So you see in this place no man really dies. Death is merely a translation into a different kind of growth.”

The exhibition will include Running from Eden, a sister work to Last Rays of and English Rose originally developed in 1986/87 and installed at Grizedale on the Silurian Way in 2009. A further 18 never before exhibited wall-mounted pieces, including watercolours in homage to Paul Nash, rust iron filing drawings; a technique developed by Keir, as well design lead ink drawings, made as project drawings to the development of later sculptures will be on show.

categories Past Events