Lakes Ignite 2016: rainbows, Ruskin and real talk

Feature by Sacha Waldron | 02 Jun 2016

On a visit to the Lake District for this year's Lakes Ignite programme, our Art editor discovers flickering rainbow bridges, 700 types of water and creepy sculptures playing hide-and-seek. She reflects on a festival that deserves a future.

The view from Brantwood, former home of writer, artist and social reformer John Ruskin, looks down towards Coniston Water and across the lake to The Old Man, a fell which, at the time of my visit, is unseasonably covered with snow.

I have made my way through Ruskin’s gardens, from the wild laboratory of the Professor’s Garden where Ruskin conducted experiments with plants and flowers, down through the ‘Zig-Zaggy’, a tiered plot based on Dante’s seven deadly sins. The sun is beginning to set and people are gathering in the meadow by the lake below. Out on the water a small boat is leaving tiny dots of light attached to small sticks in its wake. As the number of lights increases, they create a mass which glows rainbow on the water.

[Charles Monkhouse - Seven Nocturnal Rainbows]

This is the first night of Seven Nocturnal Rainbows, a site-specific temporary sculpture created by Charles Monkhouse for 2016’s Lakes Ignite programme. The work takes JMW Turner’s famous 1798 landscape of a rainbow over Buttermere Lake as its starting point, but rather than suggesting something in the air, the 250 LED lights seem to be emerging from beneath – much like phosphorescent algae disturbed on the surface of the water.

As the sunlight fades to black night, the mountains disappear and the lights on the lake grow in vibrancy. The installation is unexpectedly beautiful, and made a little magical by the fact that people of all ages have congregated after dark by the shores of the lake to see it. There is a slight festival vibe; you just need a hot dog and a flask of tea to ward off the cold while the rainbow flickers on the lake like a bonfire.

Art for the Lakes (and land)

This is now the second edition of Lakes Ignite. The format is roughly the same as 2015, with artists being invited through an open call to propose site-specific (or perhaps landscape-specific) projects for the Lake District. Last year saw a group of artists brought together to create Point to Point, an audio guide that took visitors on a sensory journey along one of the famous Wainwright walks across Walla Crag. Combining storytelling, poetry and music, the guide could (and still can) be downloaded from the Lakes Ignite website.

Another key commission was Steve Messam’s PaperBridge, a bridge which people could walk across, spanning a little river near Patterdale and constructed of red paper – the same paper used for the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal. 

[Steve Messam - PaperBridge, Lakes Ignite 2015 commission]

Both these works invited audiences to experience them while being immersed in the Lakes landscape, and Lakes Ignite 2016 expresses the same intention.

Headed up by Aileen McEvoy, who is also involved in Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival (17-26 June), the theme chosen for this year’s Lakes Ignite is, imaginatively, ‘water’ (the festival is actually sponsored by United Utilities). However, the water theme has taken on a rather more poignant and politicised context given the recent extensive flooding in the Cumbria area.

Driving around, you can see that many properties still have sandbags protecting them, and a key section of road – the A591, which connects Grasmere and Keswick – was almost completely washed away by Storm Desmond and remained shut until the end of May, disrupting movement in the area at a key time in the Lake District’s tourist season.

Cumbria working as one

The Lakes Ignite festival seeks to present a series of outdoor-based commissions, or ‘art experiences’, but it also – and perhaps more importantly – draws together and promotes other cultural activity that already exists in the area.

If you have ever visited you will probably be well versed in the quality of Cumbria’s heritage offer, most notably Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, the Beatrix Potter Museum or Blackwell Arts & Crafts House. The visual art or contemporary offer is, perhaps, less well known (although saying that, Grizedale Arts in Coniston is arguably one of the most interesting and progressive contemporary art organisations in the country – they are, however, notably absent from this Ignite programme).

Collecting all this activity under one umbrella or ‘offer’ for cultural audiences, and also promoting a sense of joined-up thinking between cultural organisations and touristic amenities such as transportation and accommodation across the whole district, is what the festival is all about. It aims towards providing a united front for potential visitors, and also towards fixing the Lake District in public consciousness as more of a player within the arts landscape of the UK.

There are three main commissions, or experiences, this year. Alongside Seven Nocturnal Rainbows, Museum of Water from artist Amy Sharrocks is presented with the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal. Sharrocks first installed the museum in the basement of London’s Somerset House and it is composed of more than 700 samples received in a call-out from the artist for the public to send her “precious samples of water”. Everything from baby tears or water from the Venice Grand Canal to 129,000-year-old Antarctic glacier water is included, all accompanied by little labels telling you the story of that particular sample.

[Amy Sharrocks - Museum of Water]

In early May, visitors were able to visit the Museum at Wray Castle Boathouse, Windermere, donate their own particular choice of water sample, and drink from the free tap water bar (yes, ha ha). Sharrocks chose one of the Cumbrian samples as the final entry to the Museum, and the work was complete. Although Sharrocks has closed the UK collection and will continue to tour and use it for research, she is currently building an alternative collection in the Netherlands and is spending time there visiting different locations, gathering further samples over the coming years.

The third and final commission comes from digital artist Joseph Connor, who led two instalments of his ‘21st Century Landscape Art Class’ in mid-May. As a reaction to the idea that we consume landscapes more than we actively respond to them, Connor teaches the basic principles of landscape painting as well as the features of the ArtRage app, and invites participants to go into the Lakes landscape and create. (One missed opportunity here, however, seems to be not promoting the aforementioned Point to Point, one of the 2015 commissions, which as noted earlier is still available to download. This work doesn’t really have a shelf life and could have been re-invigorated as part of the 2016 programme.)

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Beyond the commissions: more to discover

Highlights from the rest of the programme which are still open to view include the rather great Laura Ford exhibition Seen and Unseen, shown across two sites, Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Blackwell House.

Installed beautifully in Abbot Hall, an arts and crafts house, Ford’s creepy sculptural figures lurk in corners or play out unsettling narratives within the space; ninja cat-rat figures stalk the lawn outside the house and a small girl sits on a wall, head in hands, crying, with her back to the lake and mountains. (This exhibition runs until 25 June.)

Blackwell House, meanwhile, is showing a selection of Ford’s prints and works on paper until 4 September.

[Laura Ford - Seen and Unseen]

Back at Brantwood, there is a small but nicely formed show from artist-designer Stuart Walker entitled Design for Life: Radical Objects for Sustainability (running until 6 June), which conceptually explores a conversation between Walker’s own practice, sustainability, nature and Ruskin’s work.

Among the other nice discoveries from my specific trip to the festival was the sculpture trail at Grizedale Forest. Artists have been invited into Grizedale since the late 70s to create sculpture which then remains to sink back into the forest itself. After being quite informal about their programme for many years, Grizedale Arts have announced a major new programme of contemporary commissions and projects involving artists such as Tania Kovats and, again, Laura Ford. You can walk/cycle a number of trails around the existing works and have both quite touristy, family-day-outy experiences or something quite special and solitary. You can also then go to Go Ape, which looks like non-art super fun.

I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed the Heaton Cooper Studio, which is not only a really lovely art supply shop but also a print shop and gallery. Currently on show is an exhibition of landscape artist Alfred Heaton Cooper who, along with his family, obsessively painted the Lakes landscape and other landscapes around Europe as an artist and early travel guide illustrator. A highlight is his meticulously annotated sketchbooks and postcards but also the realisation of how you attempt to express a feeling, atmosphere or sense of place in a time when people did not have access to the wealth of world imagery we do today. This show is on until 12 June.

So, there is a lot to still see, despite the festival’s particular experiences having come to an end.

The future for Lakes Ignite

The whole Lakes Ignite festival, even only in its second year, is also coming to an end, which seems a little daft. This is because the consortium 'Lakes Culture', a partnership set up between a number of organisations and other festivals in the area, gained its funding from the Arts Council England and VisitEngland ‘Cultural Destinations’ project. This awarded £3 million to ten destinations across the UK to develop their cultural partnership-working and touristic-focused offer. The allocated money only covered two editions of the Lakes Ignite festival, and the organisation will go into evaluation mode later this year with no 2017 festival currently planned.

This seems a shame. Projects and festivals of this scale need time to percolate and settle into their own skin, and improve and learn from themselves through different approaches and experiments. Other initiatives have come and gone in Cumbria over the years, each intending to promote this idea of mutual support between venues and activity, and it must be frustrating for those involved to have to keep starting, in some ways, from scratch.

You can only hope that the legacy of Lakes Ignite will be clearer aims and an increased drive to create a sustainable model for culturally specific collaboration in the Lake District.


Laura Ford: Seen and Unseen, Blackwell Arts & Crafts House, Bowness-on-Windermere (until 4 Sep) and Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (until 25 Jun)

Stuart Walker: Design for Life: Radical Objects for Sustainability, Brantwood, Coniston, until 6 Jun

Alfred Heaton Cooper: From Fells to FjordsHeaton Cooper Studio & Gallery, Grasmere, until 12 Jun

Lakes Ignite ran 30 Apr-22 May 2016

lakesculture.co.uk