In-situ in Pendle: When Will We Three...
As six new artists are announced for Pendle's in-situ residency, The Skinny travels to Brierfield to catch up with the founders and find out what's next for the organisation
Brierfield feels very far away. I was in London the day before so it has, in fact, taken me eleven hours to get to the East Lancashire town; an overnight Megabus, a chilly chain-smoking wait outside the coach station and a winding two-hour bus journey on the Witch Way from Manchester through foreign lands: Strangeways, Prestwich, Burnley. I’m excited to visit Pendle, famous of course for the witch trials, and an area once described (albeit in the 16th century) as “fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the church was honoured without much understanding of its doctrines by the common people.”
The theft, violence and sexual laxity are, however, not the only reasons I have made this journey. Brierfield is home to the ‘in-situ’ residency programme which annually invites artists to work on projects around Pendle and functions as a conversation platform for artists and makers to share ideas and experience. The programme was set up in 2002 and is the brainchild of three artists, arts administrators and friends: Paul Hartley, William Titley and Kerry Morrison. Each brings particular skills to the in-situ mix; Hartley has extensive experience of working as a cultural arts coordinator in this area of Lancashire, Titley is a practicing artist and lecturer at UCLan and Morrison has been working as an artist and ecologist for many years on projects from Liverpool Biennial and Grizedale to Korea and Japan. Why in-situ exists is simple. “We want,” the three state on their website, “to find out more about how art and culture works for people and the place it has, and could have, in their lives. Through this experience, we as artists want to deepen our understanding of art practice in the natural and built environment and how we live our lives to create socially engaging art of the highest calibre.”
The context of Pendle and East Lancashire has been key. This is an area not known for its contemporary art; it's “a bit of a cold spot for the arts council,” says Hartley, and an area still suffering the effects of the UK’s failed Housing Market Renewal Initiative. I’ve gone into the details of this in previous Skinny articles, so I won't bang on about it too much, but, for the uninitiated, this is how it goes: the Labour government deems some areas in the UK too shit and poor, decides to knock everything down and start again (better houses, more rent, higher house prices, better tenants), starts bulldozing, the scheme runs out of money and a new government arrives anyway. The result is half-empty, half-built neighbourhoods and entire communities destroyed. Unfortunately the situation is so rubbish we have to adopt an Adam Curtis approach and just say, ‘Oh dear.’ If you want to see for yourself and engage in some disaster tourism head to Anfield in Liverpool.
“We had all worked together at different points over the last ten years,” says Hartley, “in areas that we’re subject to this kind of Housing Market Renewal and regeneration. I was working in Accrington, one of the towns that was affected, and Kerry has done a lot of work around the environment in Liverpool which seemed, to me, a very different way of working as an artist. It opened up this other world of socially engaged practice and of artists who were approaching their work in a very different way. Not just in a community arts way, or participatory arts way. That, for me, was a bit of a journey as I got more into that kind of approach to making work.”
The three, who now all live in the area, were also frustrated by the type of art and work that was being supported and commissioned. “Commissions were set up very much on a fixed short-term basis,” Hartley tells me, “and also the commissioner would generally have something in mind that they wanted from the artist. It had got to the point where we all just wanted to take back some control.”
"I really believe in the difference of the artist and what artists can bring and do" – Kerry Morrison
Support came in the form of another Paul. Paul Kelly had previously worked on the public art programmes and partnerships developed by Liverpool Biennial including projects such as artist Jeanne van Heeswijk’s Anfield Homebaked. Now he had moved to Lancashire and was working for the council as a senior arts development manager and had both vision and, crucially, some money. “Paul put some money on the table from LCC as seed funding,” says Hartley, “and we knew we could really do something with this.”
And so they did. With a bit of match funding from the Arts Council, in-situ began to formulate what it was and how it would operate. “We wanted to think about something that could be long-term and embedded,” says Hartley, “not just jumping from one project to another.” The trio took inspiration from other artists and projects that were happening of a similar nature all over the world. “Early on,” he says, “we made a trip to Amsterdam to see some talks that were happening there and one of the speakers was Rick Lowe from Project Row House based in the Third Ward of Houston, USA. That was a real inspiration.”
Project Row Houses, for those that have not come across it, is a community-based arts and culture organisation established in 1993 by artist and community activist Rick Lowe and a small group of his friends and collaborators. Based in one of the oldest African American communities in Houston, the project initially bought and renovated 22 abandoned houses and transformed them into sites of cultural activity and community events, as well as artists’ spaces. “We already knew about the project,” says Hartley, “but not really in detail. After the talk, we started chatting to Rick about what we were trying to do in Brierfield and he said, Well why don’t you just come over to Houston and see? We managed to get some funding and ended up spending a week there. We took a few members of the community, a couple of local teachers and youth workers and our team. I think, in the end, ten of us went. It was an active example of what we were trying to describe about the kind of work we wanted to do long-term. It was all about being artist-led and putting art into the mix of the community, of art being part of everyday life really.”
In-situ built from there and the international links the organisation have made are impressive. Rick Lowe (one of Obama's ten lead cultural advisors) ended up coming to speak at the symposium organised by in-situ held between Brierfield and UCLan in 2014, and an artist working with Project Row Houses, Autumn Knight, has already travelled to Brierfield for a residency. The talks and ‘in-conversations’ that in-situ organise operate beyond, or parallel to, the residency programme and are a good opportunity to connect with the general ethos and activities of in-situ. Prior to my visit, Suzanne Lacy, artist and author of the seminal book Mapping the Terrain, has just been to visit. “In-situ,” says Hartley, “is really about connecting, and Suzanne really pioneered this particular way of working. She did a talk and spent three days here with us.”
In-situ’s residencies, however, are central to the organisation and have been attracting applicants from all over the world. The package they offer is attractive. Residents receive £3000 and a small material budget for their time either here at Brierfield library – the base of in-situ, which functions as part studio, part office and part exhibition space – or at their satellite shop space in Nelson. Non-brief applications are invited in March each year and this idea – that the artist’s practice should lead the residency rather than a distinct proposal – is important and also fairly unique. “When you have an open brief,” says Morrison, “it’s amazing how people don’t know how to respond to that. The amount of applicants we get that say, for example, they are planning this and that they want to do a workshop and we’ve never asked for a workshop… We want artists to apply because they are artists. Not because they feel like they are applying for a job and that they have to deliver certain things. I really believe in the difference of the artist and what artists can bring and do. Artists should be passionate about their art, about the work they make. We don’t want anything formulaic here.”
This non-brief structure also keeps it interesting; unexpected outcomes are an important part of the process. Artists, whether recent graduates or established, arrive with a fresh page and with everything possible. Past residencies have included projects touring visitors to Pendle by way of sound, powering clocks by water wheels and poetry performances linking Pendle to Blackpool by rail. As we go to print the six new residents have just been announced. In Brierfield you will find Lahore-based artist Zoya Siddiqui, who works in video and sculpture; Lydia Heath, who works with ideas of imagined or dystopian futures; and photographer and researcher Ingrid Pollard. In Nelson you might come across Reet So, a group of designers who create unique experiences in the public realm; performer and artist Lydia Cotterall; and letterpress print-maker David Armes.
You heard it here first. The Skinny will also be catching up with all the artists during their residency, finding out what it means to be in-situ.