 Good afternoon everyone. We're going to continue on with today's lectures, lessons, presentations, discussions of the UNTA. I'm Dr Christopher Payne from the University of Manchester, and I'm here to introduce our two speakers for the first session this afternoon. So to my right we have Diana Yeh from Salon Title, from Lecture in Sociology, Culture and Creative Industries at City University of London. We're obviously like titles and so on, right? So it's nice that she's come up from London to do her work. Of course Diana has done a lot of work on the UNTA already. She had one of the opening essays in the TFAM exhibition catalog, which talks a lot about these, I guess, trans-cultural transnational exposure in this movement from mainland China as a younger child to Taiwan, to Italy, to finally banks in the north of England. And today she's going to be here to talk about translocality and difference and rural conviviality. So I'm very much looking forward to, again, titles, right? So very much looking forward to this presentation. And then following, Diana will have Yacen Holt from Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Northumbria, who has done a lot of work primarily on British art and British artists in the 20th and 21st century. So kind of looking at Lee, I guess, from the perspective of where he fits perhaps within the British canon and so on and so forth. She's done a lot of work with multi-institution research networks and academics and artists, as well as edited numerous volumes published that look at British arts and modernist landscape and so on and so forth. The rest of the bios, of course, are available on the sheets that you all have and I'm online. And I don't know if I've got the title of your paper here. It's here somewhere on one of the other sheets of paper. There we go, Rethinking Place at the Border. So we'll look forward to this one and hopefully we'll have time for me to respond and then open up the floor to questions to explore a little bit more about Lee Renja. All right, thank you and I'll turn it over to you, Diana. Thank you very much, Chris, for the introduction and good afternoon to everybody. As Chris has already mentioned, I've been working on Lee Renja for quite some time now, it's almost 15 years, I can't quite believe it myself. So I just want to thank Hannah, it's so much for inviting me here to speak today because I'm just absolutely thrilled to see all this research now taking place on me because it's been quite a lonely journey up until now and I'm so excited to meet all of you. So I'm particularly pleased as well that this symposium takes up the proposal that we should see the LYC Museum as a culmination or extension of Lee's participatory art practice. This is something I've consistently argued, despite many people in the field, sort of protesting to me that the one disadvantage about the LYC was that it's opening marked the period when Lee stopped making work, which is, you know, so now we're kind of thinking about it as the continuation of his work. So today what I want to do is to really expand on the idea of the LYC as practice. And in particular, I want to talk about Lee's role in catalyzing social change via the LYC in the context of debates over the politics of belonging and the apparent challenge of living with difference. So first, I want to suggest that in creating the LYC, Lee crafted a space of aesthetic and everyday belonging for himself. And second, that in doing so he played, as we've already heard today and I think it's become patently clear, that he made a truly transformative role in the lives of others. Having been asked to speak on the theme of place, I also want to argue that in creating the LYC, and this is the translocality part of my paper, Lee de-territorialized spaces of belonging that were once grounded in his birth place of Chao Dong in the 1930s and his young adulthood in Taipei of the 1950s and re-territorialized them in banks in Cumbria in the 1970s and 80s. And part of what my work suggests is really that it's impossible to kind of only look at one part of Lee's story. We can't just understand him from a perspective of locating him within British art practice, for example. We need to understand this translocal story and how he was circulating amongst many different sites and a way in which his work kind of builds on his movement between these sites. So, rootedness to a specific place and the deep understanding of the local community there have often been characterized as key characteristics of socially engaged art. But I want to highlight the potential significance of both translocality and also difference rather than sameness in social practice and in bringing about effective social change. In doing so, my paper expands current debates on conviviality, not only by looking beyond the urban, but also by bringing to like the transformative role of a racialized migrant in a rural area of England that has been constructed as white. So, my paper draws on several years of multi-sided fieldwork undertaken across London, Manchester, Cumbria, Taipei and Guansi, among Lee's friends, family and colleagues including some of the members of the Tom Fung group. And as you can probably tell, I'm kind of located interdisciplinary in sort of sociology, cultural studies, hence the focus of my paper. Okay, so during my fieldwork I found that Lee's decision to set up a modern art museum in such a remote spot as Banks was a source of amazement and amusement to many. But if we consider the aesthetic dimension of belonging, this decision is perhaps not so surprising. So what I want to suggest is that on arriving in Cumbria after the dirt and noise of London, Lee rediscovered a sense of joy in the beauty of nature of the universe that emerged from his childhood in the Sue Hamlet, where as he wrote he had once arrived on this beautiful earth. This is not only suggested by the scores of poems he wrote at that time, but also became clear during my fieldwork in his home village in Guansi. This province has been described as a land of mythical landscapes, a place like no other, a view reiterated to me by Lee's family as they took me on tours to admire the beauty of their village surrounded by street, sorry here's the local area, surrounded by the street cast mountains. We stood before vast stretches of green, dark green, whole green that Lee had once written about on arriving in Banks. Here a single paddy field that provided food for the family. We clambered up the hillside to pay our respects to these ancestors, their memorial stones built upon turrets overlooking the fields below, where successive family members had worked the land for 22 generations. Yet as Nick Sawyer has perceptively argued, Lee's cosmic sense was as much about the dirt beneath our feet as into planetary space. Both Banks and Lee's hometown share not only otherworldly landscapes for which they've been renowned as centres of tourism, but also harsh living conditions. Indeed the image of Guansi of an untouched landscape inhabited by content farming people on the one hand and a sight of lack and uncivilised vulgarity on the other has also been applied to Cumbria. At some distance from the key scenic spots of Guilin and the Lake District respectively, Chadung and the Banks occupy a marginal position within the wider regions of Guansi and Cumbria. Sorry, isolated from economic benefits of tourism, their infrastructures have developed only slowly. Electricity, for example, only became available through the Banks in the 1950s and the Shoe Village in the late 1980s, where the first roads built to the latter built only in 2001. Both are also subject to extreme weather conditions. And when I met Lee's brothers during fieldwork, they recalled the harshness of their childhood, telling me, we didn't play games, we worked. It was a difficult life. In the growing season, we would help to plant the rice. In the harvesting season, we would help crop the rice. And finally, we would help by grinding the rice. Each child took an apart time job to help the family. So it was this way of life where survival, heavy labour, history and identity were deeply entwined with the land and which Lee would rediscover in Banks, though abruptly ended for Lee in 1937. Moving to one orphanage after another, he spent the next 12 years in a highly institutionalised life with, as he wrote himself, no direct contact with the outside world. In doing so, he left a place where houses were always open, where people dropped by and the children roamed freely even as they worked. So the strong sense of communal life shouldn't be idealised, but nonetheless, for a child of eight to enter a series of military orphanages was to lose what Lee spent the rest of his life searching for, space and freedom. And this, I argue, he was able to rediscover in art, though first through the everyday creativity of childhood games. So as an old schoolmate of Lee's told me, who was at the, his first orphanage with him, he said to me, Lee was very sad at his new home and cried a lot. He always wanted to go home but never did. His two favourite pastimes were carving and playing with marbles, which he made himself by slowly working pebbles into spheres. So the handmade element of Lee's work, his later concepts of the cosmic point and that of toy art and his commitment to introducing art to children had a basis in these early life experiences and they would of course be revived at the LYC. For the time being, however, following the outbreak of the civil war in China, Lee's highly disciplined institutional life continued in Taipei when during a white period of martial law he entered Taipei Normal College. So it was run like a military service at the time and students were under the constant surveillance of military personnel. So bereft of family, Lee and his fellow students, mostly they were refugees and with whom he set up the Tong Feng group, they sought out other spaces of belonging. Several emerged in my participants' memories, the minute level of sensory detail and the emotional delivery of their narratives indicative of the significance of the sites in their lives. Two were associated with Lee Jun Shen, who is the independent teacher of art. Every Sunday, Lee and his friends would gather in tea houses to learn for the first time about develops in modern art in Europe. Just as Lee had spoke warmly of his teacher, Tong Feng member Xiao Qin recalled to me, and I quote, the very, very warm atmosphere in those years. Three times a week they also attended classes at their teacher's humble home, a bleak location down a dirt path permeated with fumes from the Leather Dye Factory opposite. In a small room with an earth ground, the young artists would crowd round past the bust and learn about art as a means of individual self-expression rather than the kind of continuation of tradition that was being taught in other places. As Tong Feng member, another Tong Feng member, Xiao Yan, recalled to me, the whole studio was dimly lit but had the atmosphere of a dowry. Two other special sites in their lives were the disused Air Force Bunker, which was lit up by a stolen street lamp, and the primary schools where two of their members taught, which after school hours became the artist's studio. Lee also taught as a teacher of art to children during his early life in Taipei. Whenever possible, they would gather in these spaces to paint, to talk about art, to show their works, or on special occasions to hold parties. These were sites of communal artistic activity, grounded in material scarcity, and run in contradistinction to the repressive political atmosphere of 1950s Taipei. So parallels between these spaces and LYC seem unmistakable to me. Yet, Lee didn't simply plan on just reviving these spaces wholesale. Rather in making the LYC, he was responding to his new needs and those of others in his new environment. His vague desire to run artist workshops echoes his experiences of finding a sense of group belonging in Taipei through the learning and teaching of art. So as he wrote, and many of my little quotations here come from the catalogs that were shown earlier, bring people all linked together throughout the world, come here to Bankside LYC Museum to learn it, to teach it, to make real good friends, and to feel like home, a real warmthly house, love each other, to try and understand each other, your enemy too. So just as Lee's brothers were building new houses in Chardung when I visited, Lee spent a year renovating the LYC building with his own hands. And as we probably know by now, he opened it to the public in 1972. But consistent with his participatory vision of art, he still refused to define LYC after a year, expressing his wish rather that it would grow day by day according to the desires and needs of his visitors. And as we heard earlier, he was however adamant about two things, one of them we heard earlier, that he would never think of charging for anything, even his catalogs. And also that he wanted to run LYC without an overseeing committee. And as time went on, his vision became firmer. As well as encouraging artists, I want to encourage everyone, not only to become aware of and to begin to appreciate all new forms of art, but also to begin to express themselves, to make art a part of their everyday lives rather than just something in a museum or gallery. This is why I will never charge admission. I want everyone to be able to come and go as they please, to feel free to express themselves in peaceful and uninhibiting surroundings. So in this statement, it's possible to identify LYC's two major concerns, in which his experience of Guansi and Taipei converge. First, there is an emphasis on the importance of creativity, so one that's not limited to artists, but an everyday practice of doing and making, which enables self-expression and self-development for everyone. Second, LYC stresses, and I'm sure he'd approve of the baby's participation in my paper. Second, LYC stresses his aim of creating a space in which everyone feels free, both from economic concerns and personal ambitions. So next, I want to talk briefly about my participants' multiple perspectives of the LYC to highlight its variegated meanings and the ways in which it became a space of shared value in belonging for diverse groups. So despite Cumbria's iconic status within British aesthetic discourses, in the 1970s, according to my participants, the presence of modern art was scarce. As Mary Burkitt, former director of Albert Hall told me, in this context the LYC became the local Cumbrian art world, modern art world. Northern Arts, the regional funding body, agreed, supporting the LYC for its potential to act as a hub for otherwise isolated artists across the region. And for emerging artists, musicians and poets who couldn't penetrate the exclusive art world in the 1970s Britain, the LYC offered a place to see the work of others and to show or perform their own. So as is well known by now, over those 10 years, Lee held exhibitions, concerts and poetry readings for more than 300 artists, poets and musicians. And while some, for example, Andy Goldworthy, David Nash, Michael Longley and Francis Horowitz have since become well recognised, most were either unknown or beginners at the time. But to encourage not only those pursuing modern art, but everyone to make an art, to make art a part of their everyday lives, Lee displayed a range of, as he wrote, the possibilities of human achievement, from Roman relics and antiquities to different sorts of pictures and sculptures. He also built a communal arts room as Joy Dee, who is here with us today, Lee's one-time assistant has commented, it was always the most popular space and it gave people the rare invitation to reflect and to make whether or not they bore the title of artist or poet. In inviting locals to run workshops in crafts such as doll or puppet making, weaving, poetry and rug making, Lee also legitimised the talents of those, often women, marginalised by dominant aesthetic discourses esteeming fine art over craft. Even those who didn't engage in activities usually considered craft, such as baking or jam making, found their creations gaining new value at the LYC. The impact of the LYC on local youth was immense too, nurturing artistic careers. Artists told me how they wouldn't have gone to art college if it hadn't been for Lee. They recalled how they catered to them as young children by providing a room with especially low tables, free materials and Lee's own work hung at child height. The respect towards children's creations and the importance of teaching and learning that Lee had both experienced in his childhood in Guangxi and developed as a teacher in Taipei was revived at the LYC. Lee not only spent every Saturday working with children but also took their work seriously even inviting them to exhibit alongside their parents in what he developed as family exhibitions. So one artist who was a participant in my research recalled hers remembering not only that did her children sell and I quote tons of work, they sold tons of work but they were also treated as stars and we were treated as stars because everyone who exhibited at the LYC, whoever they were, were always treated as artists and stars. So while Lee wanted people to learn, to teach and to make real good friends, he affected his aims not through didacticism but through space and freedom. As one another participant commented, it was more possibilities and opportunities than showing somebody how to do something, that openness that you can take this in any direction you want. That's what allowed people to do what they needed. This ethos was built into the way the LYC was run. For periods it was open every day of the year even on Christmas day. Not only was the building open but the spaces within it were too. Lee left his kitchen open welcoming visitors to drop by for tea or to make something to eat without charge and created a library of all kinds of books so anyone can come and read them. The LYC became a community space where people could meet to share ideas, attend workshops and events or just drop by. This was a similar kind of hospitality that I experienced from Lee's family when I dropped by completely unannounced to their home during field work and I was probably the first person from Europe to go to that village in probably a long time. In creating the LYC, Lee, a racialized migrant who was sometimes called the Chinaman locally, was able to bridge differences in ethnicity, age, gender and conceptions of art across diverse groups from gallery directors, arts funders and artists as well as those who bore no claim to an artistic identity. As the narratives I've discussed suggest, by valuing the creative talents of everyone, Lee legitimized often marginalized groups of people who suddenly found their practices of art, craft and everyday life and therefore themselves a place to belong. In 1982, a decade after its opening in 82-83, Lee closed the LYC. Some believed that he'd always planned to run it for only 10 years, others suggest that he was exhausted. He was certainly financially constrained and faced with administrative difficulties from the tax men, building regulators and funders. It is also the case, I think, that the small world that he had created ultimately didn't give him the sense of belonging he was seeking for himself. His manuscript poems and miscellaneous writings are replete with expressions of isolation, unrequited love, financial hardship and stasis. So, to conclude, I've argued that in creating the LYC, Lee catalyzed significant social and cultural change in banks, the wider Cumbrian region and indeed, as we heard earlier, sort of nationwide and internationally. I didn't have time to talk about that today. But he certainly created not only a modern art world where none previously existed, but also an art space for everybody as well as a community space where people could just be or belong. My analysis has highlighted the translicality of the LYC by identifying similarities in the spaces of belonging co-created by Lee, in Chà Dung and Guangxi, in Taipei and at the LYC. And if I had had more time, I would have sort of also talked a bit more about Lee's participatory total environment artworks in London. That these sites, those scattered across continents and indeed decades of an individual's life, share similar qualities as habitual spaces of ritual communal creativity crafted from a minimum of resources and characterised by a sense of freedom and belonging. The LYC Museum thus vividly illustrates how culture, aesthetics and ethics as practices travel and the significance of both translicality and difference in social practice. The warmth Lee house, as he called it, that Lee created challenges popular discourses that tend to highlight the help that migrants require to achieve integration. Or that focus on a supposedly unsettling effects of immigration and the threat that so-called multi-culture brings to a so-called white Britain. The LYC shows how racialised immigrants are able to create places and introduce practices, cultural objects and ways of living that are valued and meaningful, not only to their own ethnic communities, but also to those constructed as indigenous. In other words, the LYC provides evidence of the value of difference in social practice and in bringing about effective social change. Despite this, however, the limits of Lee's own belonging at the LYC and in Britain more widely, cautions against any celebratory discourses of conviviality. Someone mentioned earlier the dark side of the moon. This case, I think, returns us once more to the very real and continued challenges faced by racialised migrants in making a home in Diaspora. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure to be here today and to listen to these stories and different perceptions and ways of conceptualising the importance of Lee Wanchi and of the LYC itself. And so there are many overlaps with some of the things that I'd like to talk about today, which is good. So just to say that I have a particular interest in northern cultural landscapes and particularly in what I term in a sense peripheral regions, borderlands and island communities. And so to an extent this interest in a notion of bordering, cross-bordering, if you like, frames this particular paper. But it's been specifically interesting for me too because I grew up here. I went to school in Brampton. I looked around in Lee's art room and I taught at Carlyle Art School for a while too. So I have a very particular interest in this place and it's the place that I want to talk about essentially here. So writing in 1974, the critic and art historian Paul Overy and his pieces reprinted in Guy Brett's text remarked that Hadrian's Wall was an outpost of a far-flung empire, a barrier to prevent the invasion of one culture by another, whereas the LYC is a meeting point of different cultures of time and place. Well Hadrian's Wall was actually a meeting point too for exchange between the peoples of different cultures, an intermingling of races and a permeable border rather than a solid barrier. However this is to think about time and place and space here in northeast Cumbria, close to the borders with both Scotland and Northumberland. Hadrian's Wall and as filled over on the right in 1933 for Pathé's film Walls which had comparative aerial footage of the Great Wall of China, always a very particular place of social and cultural encounter. So place here is marginal as in at edge, a place often but not always of solitary topographies, that's Peter Davidson's phrase to encapsulate northern landscapes, a place with a long ago violent history associated with the border reavers or the moss troopers who ultimately intermingled and intermarried across and along the borders. A place then of long-standing interactions, shared identities, traditions, heritage and common material resources. So a hard, not a hard but a soft, a permeable border or a borderland, a hybrid space and certainly not remote, not in any static or timeless sense at least, rather this is a fluid and lived and a relational place, a place in a state of becoming and with this relational understanding as opposed to a settled notion of place, place or landscape is understood here not as a space or a terrain to be perceived but as an evolving site of habitation. So this is to think of landscape for example as seen with rather than looked at as lived with not lived off and this particular conception frames to me the importance of the LYC Museum and Art Gallery, place then as mutually constituted, overlaired with human and non-human interactions with resources, wood, soil, stone, wall and its objects and commodities. So this is a place as overwritten through time, a site with a legacy of meanings and accumulated values like LYC Museum and Art Gallery perhaps with its accumulated objects and artifacts, its Roman remains, drawings, locally woven rugs, found or repurposed objects, books, pottery and contemporary artworks from near and far. The LYC then full of traces of connections and interactions and like the wall and I'm really really interested if someone could tell me about this particular photograph, this particular work, come back to that perhaps, like the wall and its surroundings with evidence both of deep rootedness and of mobility and transience, a particular form of curated place, the LYC itself maybe, a performance of place. And to think of this place as practiced as it were we can look back to the crucially important interwar period and the appeal of bank's head banks and its surrounding landscapes for the artists Winifred and Ben Nicholson and for those who visited there Christopher Wood, Ivan Hitchens amongst them. Ben Nicholson on the left, Winifred Nicholson on the right. And to think of this place as sorry that interwar moment was more broadly characterized on the heels of the great war by a back to the land simple life spirit and an elemental aesthetic. The cultural critic Raymond Williams once spoke of a tendency at moments of national crisis for what he termed a sustaining flight to the edges of the island, to distant places, coastal communities, borders and so on. And something of this perhaps underlay the importance of bank's head for these artists, the renovated farmhouse, a place to draw others together. The Czech art critic JP Hoda saw Ben Nicholson as uniting geometry and the primitive and the interior of bank's head at the time similarly presents a mixture of vernacular furniture stone flags with Mondrian on the walls, simple unpretentious, harmonious, local and international. And there's something of a revivified arts and crafts aesthetic here with pertinent historical connections of course in this area and with a wider context in that interwar crafts revival, a modernizing of past traditions, weaving, studio pottery and so on. And in terms of my focus here on engagements with material resources as producing material communities and attitudes to regional craft displays, the complex knots and loops typical of the period. In this context Winifred Nicholson's interest in the local tradition of hooking in progymats made from saved up home-died scraps of blankets and old clothes, or bought from the nearby mill at Otterburn in Northumberland, a craft born out of necessity and limited means, a concern allied to the interest in interwar craftsmanship at the heart of British modernism, some of which more broadly underpinned bodies such as the 1920s rural industries bureau that was aiming to boost struggling local economies while at the same time maintaining craft traditions that were passed down through generations and in danger of decline. So there's an idealism and a practical spirit at play here, a linking of past and present for a sustainable future for this place. And we register something of this sensibility transformed to in many ways forward into the 1970s and to the values of the LYC represented. The 70s of course a period of increased environmental and ecological consciousness as represented by degree in the forms of land art and revived interests in nature, natural materials and landscape. And a key touring exhibition of this period organized by the Arts Council and curated by art historian Andrew Causie was Nature as Material of 1980 which spoke to many of these cultural, social and environmental concerns. Causie had visited banks where of course Paul Nash a key interest of his also visited in the 1920s. Indeed Causie wrote an article in Studio International in 1977 that drew parallels between Paul Nash and British land art. For him this land art had a pragmatic non-hierarchic attitude to materials and a quote pre-delection for the wastelands of the penines and the Celtic fringe. And unlike the work of many American land artists something about this is still Causie, a pastoral society's respect for nature, a cooperation rather than competition with nature so it's the seeing with. Included in Nature as material and at the LYC of course as window was sculptor David Nash based in Wales whose practice working with natural materials and living trees produced or assembled minimalist structures that actually bear some relation to Paul Nash if we think of some of those tree form of photographs like Monsterfield etc. Although David Nash of course was also quite new related to American minimalism his works were process and time based and connected to a particular vision relating art and life. In his own words David Nash sought a simple approach to living and doing a life and work that reflects the balance and continuity of nature his ambition to be woven into nature as he put it as with those famous planted works like Ashton or here this is Running Table. His was a spirit it seems fundamentally attuned to Lee's own and his was a practice that was also attuned to the local and participatory ethos of Grisdale from 1977 which was a residency based public sculpture park in the forest and I'm going to come back to Grisdale at the end because I'm interested in the legacy of these moments for various initiatives later on and so to Andy Goldsworthy it's his hazel stick throw a form of drawing in space if you like. His works also included in nature as material and he made work at Grisdale of course and as we know he had his first solo show at LYC in 1979 including this and again I think two or three years later and Goldsworthy's focus too was with process materials the temporal the ephemeral and in common with much contemporary practice beyond simply land or environmental art at this period stating that when I'm working with materials it's not just the leaf or the stone it's the processes that are behind them that are important sorry now this is a terrible image but I just wanted to see them in sequence so there's a sense of embodied space of bodily presence and engagement in the world embodied space then as the location where human experience and consciousness take on material and spatial form as it's been termed I think this is Miles Richardson it is embodied space is being in the world and suggests the existential and phenomenological reality of place its smell its feel its color and so on and this sense of being in the world seems to speak of Lee's own sense of and relation to his museum his artwork his environment his idea of an artist his presence in the landscape and I'll come back to this too both Nash and Goldsworthy were also shown in the 1982 exhibition at Carlisle Art Gallery Tully House titled Presences of Nature Words and Images of the Lake District although the diverse works by artists writers photographers and crafts people were made of and in response to the county well beyond the lakes to the lush farmland of the Eden Valley the British rolling fell sides Hadrian's wall and so on Lee visited the show and liked it although thought it had too many photographs in it the catalogue contains poetry by Francis Horowitz including a dream dedicated to Winifred Nicholson Roger Garfit and Rodney Piper so it all previously contributed to the L Y C publication wall and we saw the image from that catalogue before lunch and before this exhibition of course the L Y C regularly showed the work of crafts people weavers woodworkers ceramicists and we could say that Lee's programming was effectively always cross bordering between diverse forms of cultural production writing craft different types of art practice from innovative and experimental forms like his own to the more popular and more populist it was inclusive and boundary defying in nature it was non-hierarchic in its attitudes and in the broader context of the 70s craft revival the writer and artist Andy Christian who lived locally for a period and was very connected to L Y C recalls to me the drift to the area in the 70s and early 80s of artists and crafts people of an anti-urban impulse in despair at the gradual defeat of socialism they're renting or buying and restoring inexpensive stone houses as of course did Lee with several picking up teaching in surrounding art colleges Carlisle as did Andy Andy Newcastle Funderland degree courses in ceramics and textiles and fine art and Andy remembered a real sense of what he turned idealism of rural hope and political will in the countryside this is the artist Charles Bray stack an artist in glass and ceramics and he was one of those drawn to the area showed L Y C exhibited in presences of nature influenced at one point by Ben Nicholson later inspired by the natural forms of the Cumbrian landscape here it's rock strata and here Jenny Cowan Sky felt for showed L Y C taught at Carlisle and Newcastle moved to Cumbria initially a painter was introduced to felt making and produced a series of these large sky felts working outdoors with nature under the wide Cumbrian skies in dialogue with medium and that influx of talent became ever more entangled with a local culture of making as witnessed in L Y C workshops and in the surrounding area and in this context Audrey Barker came to Cumbria following encounters with Joseph Cornell in New York and an exhibition of her assemblages at the Listen Gallery in 67 to in the 1970s setting up with her husband Dennis who was a local art teacher the barkers of Lannacoste a consortium at Abbey Mill a few miles from banks reproducing Roman artifacts screen prints soft toys hooked rugs with tweed from that Otterburn Mill in Cumbrian designs and using the skills of local people and in an essay in the 70s in this this this catalogue here Dennis Barker spoke of an untapped source of rural energy needing a domestic industry under the local community with a will to create something of that 1920s rural industry spirit but replaced in the 1970s also by an increasingly significant crafts council so we see here that continual evolution of material communities in the sense of communities formed through dynamic interactions with natural resources wool wood stone and so on through cultural traditions skills tacit knowledge assembling and reassembling through time an emphasis on the natural and cultural assets of the place just to say that that dawn the top right is by Audrey Barker so there is an entanglement of resources at play here and following anthropologist Tim Ingold who exchanges Bruno Latour's concept of a network of objects ideas processes of a matter all equally as important in creating social situations as our humans for a mesh work so for Ingold it's the entanglement of lines not the connection of points the mesh is constituted every relation every relation is one line in a mesh work of interwoven trails and in this particular community context these textile based metaphors are very apt I think for understanding the density and texture of social connections the fabric and web of social life the inter weaving the interlocking patterns of relationships the close or loose ties through which social actions are organized that shuttling back and forth in a loosely framed space engenders an endlessly shifting set of interrelations between people objects and nature and takes us back to the entangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands and the lyc I think is at the heart of this a material community then actively constituted through an ongoing layering and weaving together I'm overdoing a weaving thing here of resources and heritage so it's a culture of making as John Dewey noted art makes communities communities make us and a conceptualization of artists as artisan and a sense of this struck a chord with the local press in 1975 with an article why Lee is looking for friends the heading Lee the deserving artist and you can't read it I don't think but it says the plucky Chinese artist who has labored long and hard over the years to transform what was a tumbled down old property into a modern museum and art gallery where he maintains a high standard of exhibit I think that sheer graft kind of really appeals to to a local population Lee it goes on is looking for people to become friends of his museum to back up their membership with a modest sum of cash they'll receive discount on items that's interesting free access to catalogs use of the arts theater and the lyc library the ultimate ambition to have an art school running at the banks where people could come and express themselves on canvas that's all in there so Lee was looking for friends so the museum might survive but this was also underpinned by a strong desire to be useful to the local community to be relevant always border crossing between people and place forms and practice and so just across the geographical border to Scotland for a while Richard DeMarco's fascinating British library interview describes Lee's museum as a placemaker worryingly though he thinks it's in the Lake District as Lee himself as a successor to Kirch fitters and DeMarco also records that he introduced Lee to Joseph Boyce at the Edinburgh Festival in 1970 which was Boyce's first significant stay in Scotland and I think Boyce's practice in the 1970s particularly his social sculpture actions are important for this discussion all based on that belief that art can make a difference to society through the creation of situations enabling participation and interaction for Boyce everything is art every aspect of life could be approached creatively and as a result everyone has the potential to be an artist and that thinking and something of that Boyceian model of the free university underscored DeMarco's program of experimental summer schools between 1972 and 1980 Edinburgh Arts which is initiated with the University of Edinburgh and the North American Students Association as part of a transatlantic cultural dialogue and many of the students who participated were from universities in the USA but they involved students and artists and writers, performers and teachers and many others from Britain and Europe it was a liberal experimental approach to arts education part partly in response to examples such as Black Mountain College in the North Carolina in the US I'm drawing on the Richard DeMarco archive here and his ambition was to open participants in Edinburgh Arts to new pathways for self-determined creative action based on encounters and exchanges with diverse people artifacts and events and Edinburgh Arts summer schools evolved into a series of journeys the journey itself central to the learning experiences that DeMarco evolved and he spoke of weaving together sorry geography and cultures the past and the present prompting self-discovery and creative growth visits were made and included Ian Hamilton Finley's Garden Little Sparta in the borders and at least I think on two occasions to the LYC where the travelers were made welcome by Lee and you can see their very engaged conversation the online letter archive also contains this letter from Lee to DeMarco thanking him for his visit and reflecting on a recent program that he on that DeMarco had made you can read it but you know what arts are to me the arts are life plus beauty the arts always have a good relationship with our daily lives if we exist the arts exist if we no longer exist the arts cease to exist so we know the arts and we know our lives we will know that our life is all about yesterday today and where we will go tomorrow well I must go now as I'm busy and we'll let you go free great line financial support for the LYC's existence however was an increasing problem as we know witness another local press article in 1982 a threat to Lee's seven days a week art gallery the popular gallery on the fringes of Hadrian's wall with visitor numbers of 30,000 a year was likely to close if the northern arts grant of 12,000 per annum wasn't doubled so the museum's survival like those other non-commercial galleries and art centers that were listed actually by over in the times from as he put it the mouth of the time to the soul way first across the neck of Britain like the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendall the bead gallery in Jarrow Sunderland Arts for example was largely very due to the support of Northern Arts Association and Joy was talking about the importance of the Northern Arts Association at that point you know one of the first and liveliest of the regional arts associations which as Aubrey pointed out so often acted more humanly and intelligently than the central bureaucracy of the Arts Council so Northern Arts began in 1961 and it was indeed incredibly enterprising at this point in throughout the 70s with dedicated arts crafts theater literature officers who were deeply invested in the region and lobbied on behalf of the most significant developments and practices particularly Peter Davis who was especially dynamic in that in that context was the arts officer and is referenced to in this article here but changes to a model of support and declining funds in general accounted for Lee's experience his ventures sadly not sufficient like the by a brick scheme leading alongside difficult personal circumstances to event eventual closure and a series of remarkable disquieting self images such as this one so the extraordinary and exhilarating atmosphere of the museum that Aubrey had reported upon in 1974 was sadly gone and an exceptional episode in what I see as this process of cross or de-bordering both conceptually and practically came to a close but there are though current and surviving examples other models within parts of rural Cumbria and Northumbria with perhaps a similar ethos if very different of course in other ways and so I think there's something to be celebrated about Lee's legacy that is apparent so I mentioned Griesdale before I'm sorry Griesdale of course much transformed from its 1970s status as a residency towards a based public sculpture park in the forest that parallels perhaps in terms of an attitude towards the use value of the arts and the artist so current Griesdale director Adam Sutherland stated in an interview that you know rural exile has run its course rural culture needs to validate itself express ideas and values through creative activity demonstrate new ways of living creatively consciously and he spoke of a new model for artists create and creative people where there is a connection to place and taking part in a community being part of a local community this doesn't mean you have to be on good terms but it does mean you have the same rights as everyone else and that you belong for artists being part of a local community means serving a local a useful purpose I think you can see strong resonance here as John Byrne noted this attitude comes into the sphere of critique of the writer Claire Bishop with her sense of the ethically driven but precariously supported socially engaged artist of today as prey to if not complicit with the model of the ideal worker in a neoliberal economy but as he notes to and via Alistair Hudson the focus of Griesdale and I would also say so Griesdale left Allen heads community arts in the North Pennines currently is to connect rural places to current global conditions to see rural places as part of a contemporary complex that is shaping the way we all live and work and similarly for Helen Ratcliffe and Alan Smith at Allen heads contemporary arts which is established in 1995 as a quote integration of life work and contemporary art in a rural location begun like leads by a renovation of derelict buildings in our head in Allen heads which was deemed England's dying village in 1985 similarly ACA is not an idyllic bubble it wasn't a place to operate it was a place to operate through dialogue in an area this is Helen Ratcliffe shaped by successive human generations and their manipulation of matter as well as by natural forces it's not a community arts venue it is part of the community it facilitates a crossing of cultures and participates in networks that are about a mutual relevance meaningful contact and a synergy between people so finally this all seems especially significant in this northern region in a rural post-Brexit context underlining a need for working collaboratively in shared landscapes and environmental resources and all of this connects to those relational concepts and the reframing of place in part by learning from the practices of artists and models such as the lyc there's a sense in which the rural peripheries might function as a deliberative space for new ecologies of living and so this is the view this is to view rural spaces as sites of innovation and to forge positive notions of rural rurality and a new rural narrative I'm conscious of time I guess the one the word that's come to me in listening to these two presentations and now I'm reflecting back on the morning as well is the word nostalgia I don't know why it's kind of come to me but I feel that in all of these things we are in a sense nostalgizing failures um if you think of Hadrian's wall it was a failure the Great Wall of China is a failure Lee's proposal for his museum ended up being a failure and you see some of that I think in his photography after the closure of the museum with this kind of blighted landscape and so on and so forth so that's something that's come to me and it's just I don't know if I'm reading this differently or not but it's something that I wanted to put out there um to kind of take that that side of the argument instead of kind of playing it up and how great this place was and it does sound as though it was a wonderful place but but it failed and and that's the legacy of it in a sense and and Lee's the rest of Lee's life was really sad he never got home to see his family he discovers his birth mother still alive but he can't leave because of the failures of the British tax system that wouldn't allow him to to leave and the squatter that was in the place and so on so I'm just trying to take a less positive tone because this is I think it's important to also ask these questions about art and how it works if we are thinking about it as a participatory exercise well then what happens when that participatory exercise fails it doesn't get across what people are hoping to get across I'm just curious right but I'm well I'm just it's not I'm not saying it did fail I'm just this is something that's just kind of come to me listening to these papers today that there's this overwhelming nostalgia I think the last thing so I'm just curious I'm not I'm playing devil's advocate absolutely and I think that's why I ended my paper with this cautionary note about Lee's life and how because it's very very easy to say oh it was just wonderful as a model of conviviality for staff and it was just one of everybody and Lee got everything else with it but the fact is I mean you know by the end of his life he he actually sort of wrote poems about you know how he for the first time felt being an immigrant so he's only felt these barriers to belonging however what I would say is I agree with Helen that there wasn't a failure otherwise he was not a failure I would agree that probably was a huge success in that moment in time I guess it's what I'm trying to get towards at that moment in time it was a success but I definitely think we should we should we should be cautious in not romanticizing it and I think Lee Lee I think that was you know that his sort of taking his past with him came out of a very very specific and violent history so there's also we need to acknowledge the violence in that history and not just a paper of all this cosmos you know there's a reason why he needed the cosmos right yes you know so so I I would kind of leave you posh well I'd say I'm I'm simply trying to play devil's advocate in this because there's also today I mean the the romanticization of of nature and rural communities that we want to get back to these but I mean that's from a middle class perspective that has the the financial strength to do these things so everything I think so I kind of completely dismiss all of this idea about nostalgia and about romanticizing and I think you know that was as you said it was a particular you know project as it were an experimental period of time and it came to an end and there were you know there was partly to it was to do with decisions and plans but it was also the kind of political and the economic circumstances in the arts in general of that particular period so it came to a close it ended I don't think we have to feel nostalgic about it because I think what is really significant about that is the way that it operates actually a kind of a legacy a way of thinking about the future and thinking about how you know we might organ think about ourselves and not thinking about you know rural spaces and kind of middle class idylls but actually thinking about people who live and you know inhabit communities you know and like for example the community around Alan heads up in the north pennines you know where there is where this is not middle-class people buying second homes this is people who live their daily lives and in particular types of circumstances and so I think you know thinking about how an arts context can be of relevance and meaningful in dealing not just with you know rural issues but also thinking about you know the global as well as the local which is you what we're doing you know in a rural place it doesn't mean I'm disconnected from what's going on you know elsewhere in the world so yeah but it's yeah it's good I just wanted to get a discussion started I think just to add to that you know the sense of the land was very much as you know his family were very very poor family using even land I mean we're talking about poverty but we couldn't even imagine you know in the 1930s when he grew up so he had a very you know they were labourers that they worked with him intentionally I mean and he had that particular relationship to him again it wasn't a kind of a romanticised notion it was about money hard work but that was part of his identity you know he used to write I work for 10 years I've been working yeah he says it films the making of the LYC this incredibly back breaking work and which and which really kind of established him within that local community that local rural community as well he recognised that labour I say yeah he him doing the work instead of getting someone else to come in to do it for him great though but I mean I'll open it up to it seems like everybody wants to jump on me and the whole point of these things is for us to talk I'm not going to jump on you but when I sort of quits the idea of the definition of success and failure I think we shouldn't mix institutional survival and success otherwise you would say Theresa May's government has been a terrific success we'll find for that one and then we can think of you know you can pick any institutional whichever political view so I think that that idea of immortality yeah uh with actually doing something of channeling the spirit and then fading away I think that's something you see very often in artistic institutions in magazines in journals that's about a spirit at the time at a place yeah which is then fed and then nurtured in in different ways so the legacy that follows it's I'm so very persuaded by Sans sort of challenge for us to think about legacy in non-linear ways in an abusive way rather than wanting that okay it's the L.Y.C. museum welcome some other heritage ground and it now lives there yeah some sort of some modified creature yeah yeah I also wanted to mention that after the million closed relief he wanted also to be free yeah so he wanted to travel and so he came to visit me and Elsa in the Netherlands for the first time in 86 and he really wanted to be also away yeah from you know so if you have the museum when you work you know all the time as it did right be there so this idea that he was able to go other places I think he felt he was meant to work and also to be free in another way I don't love we've got a few more minutes maybe yeah go ahead um you use the term translocal um in both areas I think or no no not there um I'm curious about you know um you know you've both talked a lot about how he built a community in place but were there um did L.Y.C. museum participate in a network of other museums or groups or communities? Well I think me himself did uh-huh so I'm not sure when he begins in the L.Y.C. sure he did participate I mean you know he was doing international curating at that time he was still in touch with the groups from Tonfa from Italy um that he was um sort of had been working with so he was certainly still um working with these other groups but I wouldn't say it was a kind of a concerted effort of oh multiple sort of groups coming together to work at the same time. So if you want to talk a little bit more about such a thing that's what I know I got in front of maybe people or you might have something to remember from your involvement. There wasn't any interaction with other arts activities in the Commonwealth of England he just sort of probably asked me. Well I mean he was well I know that was about Bollywood yeah I mean for example yeah there were connections and people coming from different arts contexts to spend time there I think that the people who'd answer would be Mark and maybe Nick and people who remember the time. Well I do know that Cumbia is a particularly and the other ones who would impact my commission at some point the review of how the different arts centres in Cumbia, a huge county was separated by mountains and could come here and it was quite a long report of what the person who was doing the report was doing. There was no chance of ever appearing in terms of the different arts centres and there are still several different fantastic arts centres in Cumbia but the conclusion was that at that time anyway it wasn't reasonable to bring the world together and work together. But I think the remarkable thing was that Lee was that her. So they were working from the Son of Lance Centre and she offered them the print workshops at the time and they were to gathering there you know from the northeast and from elsewhere in Cumbia and Lee actually provided the help rather than necessarily networking particularly out to those and since there was a community in the centre of it. And if you look at one page of the OIC Foundation there's a big page of all the artists who showed there. I mean if you look at that the number of the people who are there often had a very particular role in arts in the region, stayed there, worked in the arts schools and still around still making work you know and that kind of there's a sort of tradition I think that has continued as a result of that. So was she the director of Albert Ford? At that time, yes. So did he ever do this with Albert Ford? Well he had to do it with Mary Burger I would say. He had to do it with Mary Burger and she was a great supporter of his work. She would go and take people to see, to the OIC, to see his work, to buy his works. But I guess that's what I'm trying to say. It wasn't at an institutional level of oh okay let's do it together. I'm not funding applications. It was a much more uniform thing. Well on that note I guess we'll rush off to have a bit of tea and coffee.