A one day symposium discussing the unique opportunities and challenges faced by creative enterprises and individual practitioners working outside the metropolis.

Modus Operandi Agrestis: Tullie House, Carlisle - 11th November 2010

10.00 Arrival – registration and coffee

CONTEXT AND THE BIGGER PICTURE

10:15 - Introduction to the day - Hannah Stewart

10.30 - Roger Turner -England’s rural economies – whose working where in rural areas?

11:00 - Rosemary Shirley - The Wirescape and The WI: The networked village in the 1960s

Break - 11.30

11.45 - Ian Hunter - Promoting the Creative Rural Economy;

a Rural Cultural Forum/LITTORAL initiative

12.15 - Grant Pound (USA) - Miles From Nowhere: Nomadic Arts in the American West

12.45 LUNCH

Networking and chance to visit Sedition exhibition .

WAYS OF WORKING – INNOVATIONS, CHALLENGES, SOLUTIONS

1.30 - Jennifer Stoddart - Folly + AND, Leading digital arts organisation

1.50 - Alastair Hudson - Agriculture to Superculture;

Cultural production in the post-industrial rural environment

Break - 2.20

2.35- Dr Eddie Kirbie - Fab Labs

2.55 - Paul Scott - Sustaining an international arts practice from the rural hinterland

CONCLUDING PLENARY

3.30 - Discussion Chaired by Esther Salamon

4.00 Networking

Hannah Stewart is Director of FreerangeArtists Ltd, an artist and entrepreneur. she has administrative and project management ex-perience and qualifications and has worked freelance in the (non-metropolitan) creative sector for 12 years.

FreerangeArtists Ltd are an artists agency and advocate, enabling professionalism and productivity. We provide curation, innova-tion & project management services, researching and creating strategic, sustainable infrastructure for the creative industries.

We believe in sustainability, best practice, innovation and com-munication. We have an approach to product development and growth that is founded on partnership working and not dependant on grant funding, we look for, identify, emulate and reward good practice.

We believe in resourcing artists where they are, in raising the vis-ibility, viability and profitability of the creative industries and in the integrity and independence of rural arts practice.

Hannah Stewart Director FreerangeArtists ltd

Esther Salamon is a consultant with considerable experience in creating, developing and managing arts projects across voluntary, public and private sectors. Areas of expertise – based on an in-depth understanding of collaborative, multi-disciplinary arts practices – include project development, management, fundraising, strategic planning and review. She has undertaken research, evaluations, feasibility studies and consultancies for universities, local authorities, artist-led organisations, cultural organisations, and national and regional arts funding bodies and is an experienced trainer, mentor and facilitator. She currently chairs the Board of a-n The Artists Information Company.

For over fifteen years, and prior to going freelance, she was Co-Director of charity Helix Arts where she created and managed projects that placed practising artists from across disciplines into health, community and criminal justice settings.

Esther SalamonArts Consultant(Chair of the days discussions)

England’s rural economies – whose working where in rural areas?

In this scene-setting presentation I shall profile enterprise in England’s hamlets to market towns, drawing attention to some of its more significant, as well as its more distinct characteristics, and strengths. A particular focus will be placed on communities or groups that are numerous, or growing and innovating, and some indications as to how these are viewed or need to be presented to new policy makers. Finally I shall draw attention to one or two trends and some practical measures that can help these large rural groups, such as those working or running businesses from home.

I lead the Rural Economies policy team, that works to help ensure that government’s economic policies and programmes are equitable for rural businesses, people and communities. Our work encompasses research and analysis of trends and challenges in rural economies; monitoring rural impact of economic and business policies and programmes; advocacy of rural needs and potential; and advice to those making policies and delivering support for employment, business, households and places. I have been employed on similar issues since joining the CRC’s predecessor organisation - the Countryside Agency - in 1999.

My work here also draws on 25 years experience in the practice and policy of rural economies and land use across the UK and internationally. This was gained in management of rural estates in private, charitable and public ownership; with the National Farmers Union from policy and practice of public works, land compensation, woodlands and access issues; at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds on forestry policies and practice; and work for EU and UN organisations.

Roger TurnerProgramme Manager for Rural Economies. Commission for Rural Communities.

Roger Turner(Keynote Speaker)

Grizedale Arts is a research and development agency for artists and creative practitioners, based in the Lake District National Park. Whilst its origins are in the early 1970’s as a forest sculpture park, it has recently acquired a significant reputation for pioneering new approaches to artistic production and exhibition alongside its established residencies. This programme is distinct from others, as it actively engages with the complexities of the rural situation and places process and ideas above the requirement for finished artistic product. Its priority is to generate ideas and pilot schemes which can be taken up by others, having a constructive role in the development of culture and society.

The organisation is now embarking on a new phase in its development, centred on its new headquarters building at Lawson Park, a historic Lakeland hill farm in a dramatic position overlooking the Crake Valley and the Coniston Fells. From this new site, Grizedale Arts is constructing a model for a new kind of art institution; taking the form of a dispersed network of activity and relations, which works beyond the established structures of the art world and aims to rethink the way culture is used.

Alistair HudsonGrizedale Arts

Eddie is a multi-disciplinary engineer who prior to working at The Manufacturing Institute held various roles in the manufacturing industry, primarily in the automotive sector. Eddie has been with The Manufacturing Institute since 2005 and has progressed from New Product Development to managing Operations Support and leading on charitable projects such as the Make It campaign and more recently the Manchester Fab Lab. Eddie has a keen interest in applying modern open methods of innovation to create novel technologies for environmental sustainability.

My presentation will simply be entitled, “Fab Labs”My presentation covers • Fab Lab concept and history• The Fab Lab mission and philosophy• The global Fab Lab network• What a Fab Lab is and what it can produce• Users and uses of Fab Labs• How Fab Labs can be used for the good of the community• The future of Fab Labs in the UK

Dr Eddie Kirkby FAB Labs network and the Manufacturing Institute

Grant Pound is the founder and executive director of Colorado Art Ranch.

Trained as both an artist and a scientist, he interprets his surroundings from three perspectives: subjective, objective and a blend of both. It is at this cross section–of right and left brain thinking, of intuition and data, of fringe and center, of the metaphorical and the literal–that creative problem-solving is emerging.

Grant was trained in the arts at the College of Art and Architecture, University of Idaho. He also has a degree in wildlife biology from the University of Michigan. Grant has worked as a graphic designer for 20+ years and in 2005 founded Colorado Art Ranch, which he directs. Colorado Art Ranch has given residencies to 55 visual and literary artists.

Grant currently works in clay, mono-print, and assemblage.

Grant PoundColorado Art Ranch

This presentation is drawn from my wider research in the non-metropolitan everyday and visual culture. It focuses on a set of visually stunning scrapbooks made by the WI to celebrate the organisation’s jubilee year in 1965. The books reveal something of the complexity in how modernity has been felt in non-metropolitan places, and prompts a re-evaluation of this often parodied rural organisation. It explores the productive connections between the WI as a rural women’s network in parallel to the expansion of the national grid network that was taking place at this time. Thinking about how these developments work towards recasting the rural as a multifaceted site of modernity.

Rosemary ShirleyWriter and Academic

Paul Scott is an artist best known for his research into ceramics and print. He creates individual pieces that are exacting and critical, blurring the boundaries between fine art and design

His practice is diverse, so as well as making individual artworks, installations and artefacts for exhibition, he also works to commission, writes, teaches and curates.

Research has always played a key role in all aspects of his work - from investigating the technical methodologies of print transfers to the synthesis of historical form and contemporary artefact embodied in his Cumbrian Blue(s) artworks. As a result, he has ongoing connections with a number of Universities and Ceramic Research Centres. In 2005 was awarded a Phd Bursary at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University for his project Ceramics Landscape Memory and Confection.

He teaches The Vitrified Print workshop/master-class twice each year at the International Ceramic Research Centre, Skaelskør, Denmark and Kurszentrum Ballenburg, Switzerland.

Paul ScottCumbrian Blue(s)

Ian completed a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1992, and was Curator and Acting Director with the National Art Gallery in New Zealand until 1980. In the early 1980s Ian set up the ANZART Australia/New Zealand artist exchanges, and after moving to London was employed as Arts Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties until 1984. He came to live in the North West in 1986 on a pioneering artist residency with Rossendale Groundwork Trust. In 1989-90 he established Littoral/Projects Environment as an arts trust for social and environmental change.

Ian HunterLITTORALProject Director and lead artist

Jennifer will talk about two recent folly projects in rural Cumbria. FLI residencies is a partnership project with Lanternhouse in Ulverston. Now in its third year, FLI has welcomed artists working with new technologies, from urban centres in the UK and abroad, to develop their ideas and extend their practice, with a particular emphasis on participatory activity and collaboration in a rural context. Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a new Northwest-wide festival, a catalyst for production and experimentation led by FACT in Liverpool, Cornerhouse in Manchester and folly. Throughout March and April 2010 AND abandoned the city and headed for the hills of Lancashire and Cumbria. Jennifer will talk particularly about the experience of delivering a major festival weekend in Grizedale Forest Park. Jennifer will also talk about folly’s future plans, with an emphasis on the power socially-engaged arts activities hold to address the digital divide and make a major contribution to digital inclusion agendas, in the context of rural or geographic isolation.

Jennifer Stoddart Folly + AND

“ To be well-prepared for the economic and social challenges facing the UK we need to approach innovation as a UK-wide activity rather than just the domain of

urban areas.”

Rural Innovation - Nesta (December 2007)Authors: Sami Mahroum, Jane Atterton, Neil Ward, Allan M. Williams, Richard Naylor, Rob Hindle, Frances Rowelink:www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features/rural_innovation