We will be holding a number of drop-in pom-pom sheep making workshops in February as part of our Flock public art project.

On 16th February join us in the Devonshire Arcade and help us to create a small flock of 50 sheep which will then be added to the large scale national flock (which will go on display at Rheged Centre in April). Drop in anytime between 10am and 4pm.

On Saturday 25th February we will be holding a sheep making workshop at the Gallery@Rheged from 12-2pm as part of the WOW exhibition workshop programme.

Both workshops are FREE if you donate your sheep to the flock project or £2 if you can’t bear to part with it!

Children must be accompanied by an adult.

For further details about the Flock project visit www.jointheflock.co.uk 

For further details about WOW visit www.rheged.com/wow

We have been working with a number of groups and schools to create a special little Flock installation which is being used to represent the sheep of Cumbria in WOW – an exhibition celebrating the Wonder of Wool and the art of knit and stitch at Rheged Centre near Penrith.

The pom-pom sheep have been made using pure Herdwick and Swaledale wool from local flocks and will be on display in the exhibition until 15th April. The Gallery@Rheged will be acting as a Flock sheep drop-off point through the duration of the exhibition and sheep making kits are available from the gallery shop in exchange for a donation to the project.

Groups involved in making the Cumbrian Flock installation include Rose Lodge Residential Home, Eden Young Parents, Newton Rigg College, Penrith Home Educators, Newbiggin Community Cafe, ACTion for Communities in Cumbria and Temple Sowerby, Langwathy and Stainton C of E Primaries.

visit http://www.rheged.com/wow for further details on WOW

C-Art Open Studios paints exciting picture for 2012

The county wide arts promotion ‘C-Art’ will this year run from 1 September – 16 September and is now open for applications from both artists and galleries across Cumbria.

Building on the 2011 event, C-Art 2012 is set to bring together more of the best Cumbrian creativity in another two week event this September. This year, in addition to individual artists, galleries are also to be included so that C-Art serves as a definitive directory of art, craft and design across the county all year round. Participating artists can also take advantage of selling their work year round in the C-Art gallery shop, situated in Penrith’s Devonshire Arcade.

“The first year of C-Art showed us that collectively marketing Cumbrian artists is really effective, both from the artists point of view and the visitors.  8000 visits to studios and £50k of sales is a great start. We are now looking to improve on that benchmark in 2012 by adding more events, arts sales, and literature and other arts activities and working ever more closely with Cumbria Tourism.  The arts are a key economic driver in these hard times, and with our landscape we can truly claim that C-Art is the most beautiful art trail in England!” explains Eden Arts Director Adrian Lochhead.

C-Art is also looking to develop further its curated programme of events alongside the Open Studios and welcomes collaboration with venues large and small across the county.

C-Art 2012 will run from 1 – 16 September 2012 and is now open for applications from both artists and galleries across Cumbria.

Deadline for applications is Wednesday 29th February 2012. Apply online by visiting the C-Art website here.

Alternatively please call us on 01768 899444 for further information.

C-Art Open Studios 2011 saw 100 artists and craftspeople across 80 venues open their studios for two weeks in September. For the first time, both fine and applied artists from across the whole of the county came together to promote their work collectively creating Cumbria’s biggest Open Studios event.

“The first year was a bit of an experiment” says Adrian Lochhead, Director of Eden Arts who organise C-Art, “and based on all the feedback it seems that there is a great desire from visitors, locals and artists to ensure that Cumbria has a collective event just as many other parts of the country do. The idea of highlighting our fantastic Cumbrian artists in a one stop shop event, website and brochure exceeded our expectations in 2011.  Adding galleries to the 2012 promotion has been requested and obviously makes complete sense”. 

During the 2 week event there were over 8,000 visits made to the studios, generating £57 000 of sales, with one studio based in Allerdale taking over £600 of sales in the first weekend alone.

Emma Wigginton, one of the participating artists from Cockermouth said of C-Art 2011 ‘We found it brilliant, the whole exercise has made us review who we are and what we want to do as artists. Myself and 2 other artists are now running workshops from my studio…it’s been a terrific boost to our confidence so many thanks for all the hard work behind the scenes.’

The website www.c-art.org.uk, generated 50,000 page views and helped promote the event to a wider audience both in Cumbria and across the region.

Participant Kevin Carr said ‘I would like to congratulate and thank you for all of your hard work involved in the organization of C-Art…I have met some lovely and delightful people who stayed on average an hour. My visitor’s book looks impressive with people from Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin, County Tipperary, Armargh and San Francisco.’

You can read the evaluative report from the 2011 event by visiting the C-Art website here.

Eden Arts wishes to thank Cumbria Tourism for their assistance in developing the project, with special thanks to Derwent Pencils, Booths and the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald for their kind support of the 2011 event.

Developed specially for SHOWCASE, ‘Flesh and Blood’ is a topical installation by nationally renowned artist Jac Scott that highlights issues surrounding food production and eating habits. Featuring work from her EAT series, strange cutlery glints under a pink, flashing neon light filling the space, questioning our eating habits through a sequence of cryptic messages.

“Today more people than ever before are considering where their food comes from and how it is produced. Will this consciousness lead to animpact on the obesity crisis facing the west?” Jac Scott

Jac, whose work is often multi sensory, triggering contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion, uses humour and wit to connect subject matter and the audience. Jac Scott is a nationally renowned artist and designer with a focus on researching and delivering issue based work that addresses environmental, social and political issues. This perspective is manifested in multi-disciplinary projects and mixed media sculpture.

SHOWCASE is an exciting programme of exhibitions from established and emerging artists from Cumbria and the rest of the UK, situated in a contemporary art space in the Devonshire Arcade, Penrith.The project has been organised in collaboration with Eden Arts and Devonshire Arcade owners Penrith Retail Ltd. Eden Arts Project Coordinator Donna Marris was invited to programme a series of exhibitions in the space as part of an ongoing regeneration of shop units in the heart of Penrith.

Adjacent to the exhibition space is the soup shop – a modern ‘canteen style’ café with FREE WIFI ACCESS offering a daily changing menu of fresh homemade soups, juices, coffee, tea and cakes.For the duration of the exhibition the café will be running an ‘exhibition themed’ daily special on their soup menu.

‘Flesh and Blood’ runs from 10 December 2011 to 31 January 2012 and is free of charge, open daily Monday – Saturday 10am – 4pm.

We are going Mark Watson crazy in the Eden Arts office this week. The next 10 people to purchase tickets to his Penrith show on Sat 19 Nov through See Tickets will receive one of these limited edition Mark Watson masks!

Get yours now! Visit the See Tickets website here

The cut to Eden Arts’ funding by Eden District Council – from £49k in April 2010 to £13.5k in 2014 will all but cease the local authority’s support for arts and culture in England’s biggest and most rural district – Eden in Cumbria – rural people love culture too!

SIGN OUR PETITION: We have started a petition to ask Eden District Council to rethink their decision.

We bring big stars like Bill Bailey, Billy Bragg, Mark Watson, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Northern Sinfonia to Eden on a regular basis. We create community projects like a new rural touring cinema for villages. We create locally embedded projects like FLOCK (www.jointheflock.co.uk) that allow people to participate in a fun and creative scheme that celebrates our local sheep farming. We support writers through creating www.newwritingcumbria.org.uk.

We support Cumbrian artists through our www.c-art.org.uk. We contribute to the vibrancy of the local area and its economy by running installation projects and a pop-up cinema in empty shops.

There is no publicly funded theatre, arts centre or gallery in Eden and no local authority arts officer. Eden Arts is all that the district has – a cross arts organisation with a 20 year history of work for and in Eden. Eden Arts does way more than can be listed here, it punches way above its weight in order to give to the people of Eden.

Eden Arts turns the core funding it receives from Eden District Council (EDC) into a five fold (+) benefit . Eden Arts’ budget forecast for 2012-13 is that against the originally intended £43k from EDC, Eden Arts will undertake £220k of spending on projects. We are only able to do this because we receive core funding paying for a small staff who fund-raise and create projects and promotions for the benefit of local residents and tourists alike.

The arts are a major employer, and they generate far more revenue than they cost to fund. In addition they are a major attraction for tourism in the UK. While cutting arts funding may save money in the short term, in the long run it risks undermining what has been one of the country’s most vibrant areas of growth over the past fifteen years, and destroying one of the national achievements that we should be most proud of.

Adrian Lochhead, Director of Eden Arts