University of South Alabama - Contemporary artists working outside the city: creative retreat

Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City

This book reflects on the motivations of creative practitioners who have moved out of cities from the mid-1960s onwards to establish creative homesteads. The book focuses on desert exile painter Agnes Martin, radical filmmaker and gardener Derek Jarman, and iconoclastic conceptual artist Chris Burden, detailing their connections to the cities they had left behind (New York, London, Los Angeles). Sarah Lowndes also examines how the rise of digital technologies has made it more possible for artists to live and work outside the major art centers, especially given the rising cost of living in London, Berlin, and New York, focusing on three peripheral creative centers: the seaside town of Hastings, England, the midsized metro of Leipzig, Germany, and post-industrial Detroit, USA.

Sarah Lowndes is a writer, curator, and Research Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/art/series/RRAR

Art: Process: Change

Inside a Socially Situated Practice

Loraine Leeson

Visualizing War

Emotions, Technologies, Communities

Edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Kathrin Maurer

Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art

Edited by Cristina Albu and Dawna Schuld

Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture

Iconoclasm, Monument, and Multiples

Laura Gray

Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture

Making and Being Made

Edited by Corey Dzenko and Theresa Avila

The Evolution of the Image

Political Action and the Digital Self

Edited by Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska

Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North

Edited by Gry Hedin and Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud

Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City

Creative Retreat

Sarah Lowndes

Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City

Creative Retreat

Sarah Lowndes

As always, this book is for Richard, Violet and Raymond Wright.

It is also in memory of my brother, Dominic Lowndes (19742016).

Green grow the rushes, O.

Contents

Cover image: Howard Sooley, The Canonisation of Saint Derek of Dungeness of the Order of Celluloid Knights, September 22, 1991 (1991). Howard Sooley. Courtesy of Howard Sooley.

In September 2015, I moved with my husband and our two children from Glasgow, to live and work in rural North Norfolk. We moved 400 miles to the southeast, leaving a city with a population of 605,340 and a local population density of 3,300 people per square kilometer, for a small hamlet with a population of 129, in an area with a local population density of just 22 people per square kilometer. My family moved, somewhat in the spirit of Thoreau, who famously explained his country retreat thus:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We moved, like most families who move from the city to the countryside, in search of more quiet in which to work, less stress, more contact with the natural world and less crowded schools for our children.

Glasgow, where we had moved from, is a city rightly noted for its interlinked DIY art and music scenes. Yet, I soon noticed, the self-initiated and non-commercial approaches embraced by artists and musicians in Glasgow in relationship to their creative practices were embedded in every aspect of peoples lives in the Norfolk countryside. In the self-reliant localized economies of the surrounding small towns and villages, people were growing their own food and flowers, chopping their own firewood, and making their own entertainments like amateur dramatics, pop-up cinemas, maize mazes, folk art museums, music festivals, craft circles, cricket and football matches, clay-pigeon shoots, tug-o-wars, and village fetes. Every village hall, church and shop had a display of secondhand books you could either buy for a few pence or exchange for a book of your own. Such activities were open-access and rooted in amateurism consequently they were truly democratic and attracted a wide range of ages and abilities.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the countryside were the alternative economies that operated independent of wage labor, consumerism, and the capitalist market. For example, the numerous honesty boxes by roadside stalls, where you could leave a few pence in exchange for locally produced eggs, honey, kindling, vegetables, or flowers. There were also numerous farmers markets, car boot sales, and yard sales where bartering and discounts were the order of the day. Facebook, which for city people was a place to post holiday photos and info about upcoming projects and events, was in the country repurposed as a place to advertise for sale items ranging of capitalism. Certainly, I now realized that in the city I had been conditioned to earn my wages and then immediately spend it all. And in the city, it was very much easier to change your mood, with so many shopping opportunities and other amusements readily available to help people avoid thinking dark thoughts concerning their identity or purpose in life.

But in Norfolk, as I walked my dog through muddy woods and along the deserted coastline, I saw and heard lovely and surprising things. Spiders webs hung like tiny hammocks in the dewy grass. Murmurations of starlings. The curious ricocheting sound of a stick thrown across a frozen pond. The constellations appearing sharply in the night sky, in wondrous numbers and dizzying complexity. The tide going out on a beautiful empty beach. A thousand-year-old oak tree that was hollow and you could climb inside. I was getting to understand what Ralph Waldo Emerson had known:

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.