Gift wrapped – a hill farm that fell by the wayside
Last updated 05:40, Friday, 26 September 2008
THE farm where Ettie Spencer’s parents worked is up for sale – and so she is gift-wrapping it.
The 57-year-old artist is creating a work entitled All Wrapped Up for the festival.
She plans to wrap Croft Farm and its outbuildings in black plastic and bailing twine – as if the entire property is a parcel ready to be delivered.
Ettie was born and brought up on a small farm in Somerset and after she had left home her parents moved to take over the farm at Scarrowmanwick , near Armathwaite in north Cumbria.
But many small-scale farms such as theirs are facing decline in the face of the large agri-businesses which are taking over food production. Ettie said she wanted to symbolise this decline in her work.
“Farming is in crisis,” she explained. “It is the end of an era for my family.
“This is about the demise of the small hill farms – how they are becoming less viable, and impossible to make a living from.”
The artist is using black plastic and bailer twine to wrap round the buildings, as they are the typical materials used on farms. “I’m hoping to wrap it nice and tight, as you would wrap a silage mound or a haystack,” she said.
Ettie studied at Chelsea School of Art and later worked in community development in London before studying for a master’s degree at Edinburgh College of Art, specialising in sculpture.
She worked in more conventional art media in the past but has also begun to create large-scale, striking installations, many of them carrying a message.
The tension between the natural and built environments interests her and she said: “As a building in the countryside, a farm is in the midst of that.”
This is the first time Ettie has been involved in the Fred Festival but her other large installations have recently been on display elsewhere.
The most recent was a piece she produced for this year’s Edinburgh Festival entitled Tobacco House, in which she used a derelict office building in the centre of Edinburgh, filling the upper storeys with hundreds of tobacco plants growing out of the windows.
It creating a striking image for passers-by, and the connection of the plants with a corporate building also symbolised the tobacco industry’s connections with slavery, the Third World and making profits from addiction.
Croft Farm is near the hamlet of Croglin, a few miles east of Armathwaite. More details are available on the Fred website at www.fredsblog.co.uk
STEPHEN BLEASE
