This gallery space is accessed through the cafe. It consists of two small rooms connected with a small corridor. It used to be part of the old museum.
This page features exhibitions from 2011 onwards. Due to the constantly changing nature of the gallery space newest exhibitions are listed at the top of the page. Please click on the photographs to view the full image.
Grizedale Residency
Karolin Schwab & Ben Allan – 12th September to 15th December 2019
This new opportunity based at Grizedale Forest is an annual intensive six week long residency that fosters experimentation and innovation in response to the natural environment. Formed from a partnership between Grizedale & The Royal Society of Sculptors, supported by the Brian Mercer Charitable Trust.
A Royal Society of Sculptors member will be paired with an early-career sculptor to explore how creative ideas can evolve and how new ideas and innovative thinking can cross generations of artistic practice. “It has provided the time, space & resources to experiment with new ideas & processes that would otherwise not have been possible.” – Grizedale exhibition Interpretation. The residency ran from 2 August – 13 September 2019.
Every mountain is a cloud moving very slowly – ground slate on Arches paper, Schwab
Karolin Schwab
“A visual artist… using site specific installation & sculpture, she explores different ideas of how we perceive a landscape as well as the space & the relationship between the viewer & their ever changing environment.
Everything is moving, constantly. Trees are growing, trees are falling. Every stream running down a mountain slowly carves a line into the rocks. Every step we make into a forest eventually becomes a path & thus alters it’s shape… We shape our environment just as much as it shapes us.
During the residency Schwab closely examined the very materials & processes that characterise Grizedale Forest. On long walks she gathered rocks & pieces of wood, which she then took apart in order to get a deeper understanding of what holds this place together & how it moves.
Slate grinded (sic) to dust & mixed with rainwater were used for drawings that reflect on just how fragile & vulnerable every mountain is. Wood burned to charcoal & then pulverised to powder forms a circle that suggests just as much the end of a (tree’s) life cycle (as the beginning).” – Quote from Artist Statement
https://www.karolinschwab.com/news
Left to Right: Impervious to all weather conditions – rubberised rock, Allan. Untitled – oak & dyed herdwick wool, Schwab. Zero – charcoal, Schwab. Murmur – concrete mixed with slate & charcoal
Ben Allan
“Ben Allan is currently exploring ideas surrounding the dichotomy of nature and culture. Forestry England here in Grizedale work in a sensitive partnership that suggests a symbiosis with nature rather than a dominance over it… It is from this that Ben has subjected a few specific materials & objects to a hypothetical process of evolutionary mutation.
One such inanimate object: a rock, has an unappreciated vitality that is particularly emphasised in wet conditions of the forest where they simultaneously erode away & facilitate the growth of moss. Impervious to all weather conditions (combats)… the erosion via a new skin of durable rubber.
By speculating on pseudo-biological possibilities of these materials Ben hopes to question how we perceive non-human objects & suggest vitality outside of our own understanding of it.” – Quote from Artist Statement
Further names of work exhibited by Allan: Untitled (work in progress) – photographs. A(biotic) – fibre glass & herdwick wool.
Seeing Through The Ground
Andrea Gregson – 5th July to 31st August 2019
“Grizedale has a long history of industry, everything from iron smelting, tanneries, swill making, charcoal burning, bobbin-making and gunpowder production. For this exhibition, Andrea Gregson considers the landscape as a relic of past production, where natural materials have been transformed through industrial processes.
In the work ‘Spectre’, multiple bracket fungus from different UK forests, usually found on trees weak from damage by man or nature, have been cast in porcelain and grow like ghostly parasites in large formations on the gallery wall.
Using graphite and charcoal, both locally sourced materials that played important roles in Grizedale’s history, in the production of gunpowder and iron, she has made a series of large-scale drawings and frottages from industrial remnants and ruins found in the forest.”
The metal cast sculptures in the show allude in part to the dependence on water in past and present industry, making connections to the glacial past that shaped the landscape and the rivers powering mills and forges. During the 18th century, the overproduction of iron almost depleted the forest. Coppicing was introduced to manage wood stocks and later during WW2 much of the mature timbers were felled and had to be replanted.” – Quote from Grizedale.org exhibition page
Photographs Taken by R. Harvey
Hiding in the Wood
Shona Branigan – 14th November to 17th February 2019
“An exhibition of original Relief prints which are made from printing the wood itself. Trees may be rooted, but there is a way they can show us their own life journey… Burning away the softer wood, the harder wood remains. Wire brushing away the ash and soot so that every small shape is revealed. Linseed oil and pigment mixed into ink.
A very thin layer of ink, cotton paper laid down. Then the magic of relief printing begins, pressing the paper onto and into the shapes of the wood by hand with a bone folder. Their story is made visible.”
It is a pure delight to print wood, and to revel in its natural shapes, patterns and mysteries. The prints especially of the Burr Elm have inspired flights of the imagination quickly and easily. This exhibition includes prints created using this technique with wood collected from Grizedale Forest and from wood collected form forests across Northumberland.” – Quote by the artist
Balance Stack Play
Kayt Hughes – 5th February to 30th April 2018
““Balance, Stack, Play” was a completely interactive exhibition where anybody could be an artist. The audience were invited to balance, build and construct wooden shapes to make their own sculpture, considering shape, pattern, mass and colour. The instructions could be interpreted in many ways to play and assemble sculptural forms.” – From artist’s website
Visitors were encouraged to photograph their creation before uploading it to social media. A winning design was then chosen to be created in an enlarged size as a sculpture in the forest, see middle image above.
Artist’s Other Work In Grizedale –
Balance Stack Play – 2018
Keir Smith an Archival Exhibition
9 April to 31 August 2011
“This exhibition is the first to draw on a collection of archival material held by the Forestry Commission at Grizedale, and explores the incidental encounters Keir Smith experienced during the time he spent in the forest during two residencies and the influence this special place had on his later practice. In a text reflecting on the forest, he wrote: “So you see in this place no man really dies. Death is merely a translation into a different kind of growth.”
Photograph from Grizedale Website
The exhibition will include Running from Eden, a sister work to Last Rays of and English Rose originally developed in 1986/87 and installed at Grizedale on the Silurian Way in 2009. A further 18 never before exhibited wall-mounted pieces, including watercolours in homage to Paul Nash, rust iron filing drawings; a technique developed by Keir, as well design lead ink drawings, made as project drawings to the development of later sculptures will be on show.” – Text from Grizedale Sculpture Official Website
Artist’s other work in Grizedale –
Enclosure. Realm of Taurus & Stag Pit – 1979
Seven Stones Before The Old Man – 1980
Last Rays of an English Rose – 2009
A Flower in Flower – 2014
Running from Eden – 2022
Grizedale Forest Sculpture An Unofficial Archive 