To the Hills: Lakes Ignite brings interactive art to the Lake District

For many, the Lake District will conjure images of holidays: bed and breakfasts, hiking, misty mountains and lakes, and quaint pubs selling local produce, all with the guarantee of a spectacular view and changeable micro-climate weather. For others, this is the land of Peter Rabbit and Swallows and Amazons, a strange secret garden of England that is glimpsed only from the train window at Oxenholme.

Of course, the Lake District is much more up-to-date than this rather twee appraisal. Tasting menus from Michelin-starred restaurants sit within a food and drink scene that is regarded as one of the best in the UK, and the county boasts more microbreweries than any other in the country. Art has also been high on the agenda in the Lake District for quite some time, and this stretches far beyond the tiny, locally focused galleries found in towns and villages where your auntie Christine might find something pretty and appropriate for her downstairs hallway.

Lakes Ignite is a new festival that celebrates, commissions and knits together contemporary art practice and culture in the Lake District during April and May. At its helm is Manchester-based artistic curator Aileen McEvoy, formerly of Arts Council North West and also one of the organisers of the Macclesfield Barnaby Festival. McEvoy was also previously chair of Kendal Arts International, so she already had some experience of working in the Lake District. Funded by the Arts Council, Lakes Ignite “brings together the tourism sectors and the arts sector in Cumbria to really make it clear to visitors that there is so much more here than the beautiful landscape, the wonderful food and wonderful environment,” McEvoy tells us. “There is a lot of arts and culture in the Lakes and we need to make more of that.

“Visit England had done some research on locations across England, and the Lake District rated very highly for landscape and environment but didn’t rate so highly for arts and culture – and that’s not so much that there aren't fantastic venues, projects and festivals, but that the arts and tourism sectors had never really worked together to promote them,” she continues. “Lakes Ignite is the beginning, really, of a programme to bring together things like the Lake District National Park, the tourism bodies and all of the arts and cultural bodies so that they get together, discuss and plan their programmes.

“We also thought it would be important to have a specific spotlight, or focus, on arts commissioning in April/May of this year. This is the first time we’ve done something like this and I think the intention is to do it again next year.”

The commissioning has taken the form of four key projects selected from more than 40 artists worldwide, who submitted a proposal for Lakes Ignite based around the theme of ‘Imaginary Journeys’ after a call went out early this year. The work needed to relate “both to the landscape and to notions of the Lakes, and the way that plays out in relation to the rest of the country,” says McEvoy, and the four resulting pieces share the idea of visitors taking their own journey within the landscape of Cumbria, discovering the commissions for themselves along the way.

An example of this is the work Point to Point, which takes the form of an audio walk, blending words and music. The ‘tour,’ which can be downloaded free from lakesculture.co.uk, comprises a nine-mile circular (approx. five-hour) route across Wainwright’s Walla Crag, a fell located near Keswick, with the audio presenting new perspectives on the landscape as the route unfolds. It has been created by a team of artists comprising Louie Ingham, Mark Melville and Lee Mattinson, who have taken inspiration from the famous British fell walker Alfred Wainwright and his Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells.

“The audio is a really different way of experiencing that popular Wainwright walk,” McEvoy says. “It’s a mixture of music, poetry, folklore and stories – so it’s a way of immersing yourself in the landscape as you walk. The same is true of PaperBridge, which is a really extraordinary and wonderfully ambitious project by Steve Messam. That requires you to park near Patterdale, a really beautiful location in the Lakes, and you walk maybe two miles or so to see the bridge itself, which spans a little river in the shadow of Helvellyn – an extraordinary location for a commission! I think it’s the first paper bridge, or bridge constructed of paper, in this country.”

[PaperBridge, concept image - Steve Messam, 2015]

PaperBridge, showing 8-18 May, is one of the most interesting finds in the Lakes Ignite programme and nods to the tradition of artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash, who were creating environmental art in the forests of Grizedale in the 1980s and 90s. “Apparently the bridge will take the weight of a horse, so that’s about three people,” says McEvoy, “so yes, you can indeed walk on it, but obviously at your own risk because it’s paper! It is a real adventure. It raises those questions of disbelief – a paper bridge in the landscape.” She explains that the style of it – the way the paper is cut and constructed – nods to “the old packhorse bridges in Cumbria; it has that kind of reference to bridge construction in the past. But it is a bridge that’s held together without bolts or glue, so it’s a clever construction. Messam has been working on it for about three years.”

The other two projects are a little more conceptual. Harmonica Botanica (until 20 May), from Cumbria's Dan Fox, is another highlight. Electrodes are clipped to the leaves and roots of plants, picking up changes in resistance as the sap rises, with the data triggering music samples depending on atmospheric conditions, temperature and the time of day.

“It just seemed perfect, really,” says McEvoy. “It’s placed in a building called the Fern House at Wray Castle, a National Trust property. It’s a well-known place to visit but Fern House is not usually open to the public, so this is an exploration for visitors into a new place. It’s such a lovely, fun, uplifting, un-interventionist project – musical plants!”

The fourth commission comes from Oliver East, who has recreated the walk of an elephant and its keeper from Waverley Station, Edinburgh, to Manchester that took place in 1872. East, a comic artist, produces and publishes comic books based on landscapes; while his walks are usually self-directed, for Lakes Ignite he has followed in the footsteps of the elephant Maharaja and its keeper, “imagining,” as McEvoy explains, “how Edinburgh, Kendal, Lancaster and Manchester looked at the time of the original journey, and then creating a book based on that.” East's walk took place between 8-17 April – “ending up at Manchester Museum, where the skeleton of Maharaja is a prize exhibit” – and an imaginative film documenting East's walk and the original journey and story of the elephant, Take Me Back to Manchester, by Cumbria-based filmmakers Dom Bush and Simon Sylvester, will show at Brockhole Visitor Centre, Windermere, 8-17 May.

[The Disputed Toll - Heywood Hardy, c1875. Image: Manchester Art Gallery]

All in all, this seems like the perfect time to be planning a visit to the Lake District – especially if you’re interested in contemporary art. Beyond the four commissions for Lakes Ignite, which will end during the third week of May (apart from Point to Point, which can be downloaded online until October), there is so much more to see; part of the point of the commissions is to also highlight what is going on in the region in general. McEvoy points to the programme at “the fantastic Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal, one of the best in the country,” as well as Kendal's Abbot Hall Art Gallery, “which has a great portraiture show from the Arts Council on at the moment [Face Value: Portraiture from the Arts Council collection, until 13 June]. It really brings home what a rooted collection the Arts Council have.”

“We have to think about how we get really good work, whether that’s music, whether that’s theatre, whether that’s art,” McEvoy says, underlining that the Lake District offers a unique environment for programming. “Part of what I was thinking [when planning Lakes Ignite] was to commission work that maybe wouldn’t work so well in an urban environment – so much of the stuff we have, for example PaperBridge, just wouldn’t work in a context like, say, Kew Gardens. It’s a different animal completely.”

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