The practice of using the arts as a social tool is not new. John Ruskin tried it more than a century ago on a farm he owned in the Lake District, where he tried to inculcate the communities with new ideas springing from the artistic mind.

He used Lawson Park Farm, on unforgiving Cumbrian soil near Coniston, where little can easily be grown, to try out, among other things, alternative power sources and terracing and growing alternative crops which demanded less of the terrain, such as cranberries — not obviously artistic projects today, but seen as such by Ruskin.

His enthusiasm was for interaction with ordinary people whom he would lecture, often unasked, on aspects of art, science and life. He would dress up as a crow, for instance, to give expositions on theories of flight to local schoolchildren.

“What his middle-class guests thought about being put to working in a bog planting cranberry plants we’ll never know, but he claimed a success,” says Adam Sutherland, director of Grizedale Arts , which has acquired the farm and is updating the Ruskin experiment.

As Ruskin grew madder towards the end of his life the experiments got wilder and less coherent until they fizzled out altogether. The farm reverted to agricultural use, and for 50 years was effectively abandoned. It came into the ownership of the Lake District National Park, and Lawson Park is now an “ideas farm”, the base for Grizedale Arts’s new experiments, which use both Ruskin’s ideas of involving the neighbourhood and the new world of the internet.

The 15-acre holding was acquired in a swap with the Lake District National Park, which has taken over the programming of Grizedale Sculpture Park, Ambleside.

Work starts in September to build accommodation for artists and adapt existing farm buildings which will be occupied and in operation in the autumn, the whole thing costing £1.2 million. Far from being a reclusive artists’ community, though, their purpose will be, like Ruskin’s, to mingle with the varied communities of the Lake District — visitors and residents.

“We don’t want to be Ruskinians,” says Sutherland, “but we are interested in these notions of utopias. Ruskin is one of the local cultures here in the Lake District, and his great driving force was that art had to be morally driven, had to have a valuable purpose to it, and in a way we’re taking up that torch and rethinking it — though the word ‘moral’ is perhaps not as funky as it once was.”

Instead, artists — the current residents include the painter Jonathan Meese and the multimedia artist Erik van Lieshout — are living and working there, while the farm itself is being converted into studio accommodation for projects that that will cross artistic boundaries but be specifically devised to encourage communities to work with them.

Grizedale is eager to make the Lawson Park mission international, and as well as revisiting Ruskin’s cranberry experiment — “we’ll probably have enough for the sauce at Christmas” — they have had more success than their forerunner did with terracing, by bringing in experts. Last year a team travelled to a Japan to help a rural community, Toge. “They were uncomfortable with the number of tourists coming to the village and photographing them and going away without any interaction,” Sutherland says. “Money was not the important thing. We saw it relatively naively, putting a team of artists in to help the village with change, a concept artists work with more and more.”

It was a success, and this year seven Toge villagers made a return visit, building three terraces — effectively paddy fields — at Lawson Park on which cranberries are being grown. They also ran a café which served the roots of bracken harvested from the Cumbrian moors. A similar connection with a Chinese village in Guangdong province is being forged his year.

The £1.2 million development will see Lawson Park Farm itself converted into studios, the exterior preserved intact. Inside, artists will experiment with different styles of decor and installation, under the constant eye of a webfeed camera, will be watchable from all over the world. And they will even have a uniform, designed by the fashion designer Giles Deacon.

It’s all part of giving the familiar an unfamiliar aspect which can be connected with by ordinary people. “We’re not the stand-offish artists of communes, we’re saying it’s time to move on from that. Let’s stop ‘asking questions’, as artists are supposed to do, and start answering them,” says Sutherland. “We don’t want to deconstruct, we want to reconstruct.”

http://www.grizedale.org/