The
views are great from Cove Park, the rural artists’ residency centre based on
Scotland’s west coast. Any of the more than 1,500 artists who have stayed in
the centre since it was founded in 1999 by Peter and Eileen Jacobs will have
been able to gaze out on Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde, with Arran and Bute
within sight. This will probably have been the case too for 2018 Turner Prize
winner Charlotte Prodger when she was awarded a Cove Park Emerging Artist
residency care of the Craignish Trust back in 2010.
Nine
years on, Cove Park and curator Linsey Young have commissioned Prodger to
represent Scotland at this year’s Venice Biennale. With a major new single
channel video work developed over a series of research and production
residencies at the centre.
“When
Charlotte first came in 2010, she was here for a month,” says Cove Park’s
associate director and visual arts programme producer, Alexia Holt. “It was the
end of the summer season, and was a relatively solitary time for her, but it
was just right for that moment for her to be able to take stock and see which
way her work was going at that time. It’s been really nice since then watching
Charlotte’s career snowball.”
This
time out, Prodger has already “got her head down,” according to Holt. “She’s
making new work, and from our part it’s a really lovely moment, and a great
thing to be a part of. Charlotte works really collaboratively in a way that
fits in really well with our ethos at Cove Park.”
It’s
raining the day Holt says this, but the greyness of the drizzle can’t dim her
enthusiasm for Cove Park, where she has worked since 2004. Nor does it take
away from the sense of Cove Park’s very special essence as a place that
provides space for artists to work outwith the hubbub of the city, and which
makes for a less frenetic and more organic working practice.
With
accommodation available for up to fourteen people on-site, Cove Park offers
residencies for artists at all stages in their career across all artforms in a
shared space which offers up opportunities for artists to interact in creative
ways.
“This
is done with a light touch,” says Holt. “We don’t force collaborations on
people, but we hope artists being around each other will help their work. Some
people might come here and just hunker down, and we see very little of them,
but I still think of Cove Park as being somewhere that brings artists together.
We’re very self-contained here. Artists can find their own rhythm here, and opt
in and opt out of things. Other centres keep more regular hours, but we’re more
fluid.”
For
all its idyllic setting, a residency at Cove Park shouldn’t be regarded as some
airy-fairy away-day or summer camp.
“It’s
not a retreat,” says Holt. “It’s more about artists being engaged, so it’s more
of an attack on your work than anything. When people come here they work very
hard. , and can contribute to other people’s work, so they become part of a
community. It’s not a holiday. We don’t expect people to produce finished work,
but hope artists are able to explore whatever it is that they’re doing without
any pressures of deadlines.”
In
some respects, Cove Park’s holistic worldview reflects some of the interests
developed through Glasgow School of Art’s quietly influential Environmental Art
course. Indeed, at various points lecturers from the course have brought their
students to Cove Park to soak up the atmosphere.
“From
their point of view,” says Holt, “they can see lots of different things going
on, and that is an amazing means of getting the students to think about all
that.”
This
works across the generations, as the presence of artistic visionary and elder
statesman Alasdair Gray at Cove Park testifies to.
“There
was such a wonderful mix of brilliant people around when Alasdair was here,”
says Holt. “He was really generous to the younger artists, and he said how much
he learnt from them, and how he never stopped learning.”
Next
year will see Cove Park celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its first set of
artists’ residencies. With Holt having been around for fifteen of them, her
overview of how the centre has developed is more incisive than many.
“Cove
Park is quite an inspiring place to work,” she says. “You get privileged access
to how artists work in a place where people have room to make mistakes as they
explore what they’re doing.
“It’s
about confidence. When you’ve just left art school, and you’re looking around
at what to do next, Cove Park can provide space for professional development in
a really calm environment. I think there’s something here as well, where you’ve
got these big open vistas that you can see, and having that in front of you,
there’s a way it affects you physically.”
Holt
jokes she sounds like an estate agent when she expounds on Cove Park in this
way.
“It’s
beautifully appointed,” she says of a place that has plenty of room for a view.
The List, April 2019
ends
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