Artist Residency survey

With planning permission in place for a new Artist Residency in Argyll, we need your help with a survey, which will help us in our application for funding, enabling us to ensure that full accessibility remains possible. 

As you can imagine, the costs of making this happen is a real challenge – particularly as these costs have been rising constantly, making everything much more expensive than when we started this process. Conditions imposed by the planning department have raised these costs further – we are still negotiating some of these conditions. Despite this, we are pressing forward, determined and very grateful for the support of Fynewood.

Here is a link to the survey. If you are an artist, and you have ever taken, or would like to take, an artists retreat, then we would love to hear from you. If you have undertaken workshops, would like to start or attend more, we would love to hear from you. If you have run workshops yourself, we would love to hear from you!

Here's a bit more of the story, if you'd like to read it...

For years now, we have been trying to get a project over the line. It has often seemed like it was never going to happen, but now we are finally on the cusp of making it reality. When we moved to our house, we were not looking for lots of land. Our brief was simple – a smaller house, with room for a pottery studio in which we could work and run workshops, and a small vegetable patch to grow as much food as we could. The aim was for a simple lifestyle, as environmentally sustainable and low impact as possible. Things did not quite work out in the way we planned… We ended up buying a house that came with a large area of overgrown woodland. When we moved, it was impossible to explore most of it, choked as it was by invasive rhodedendron and buddleia. We felt the responsibiity to care for this land keenly – to take out the invasive species and let the old oak trees breathe and slowly it has started to transform the woodland back to what it always should have been - a pocket of beautiful oak rainforest, perched above the Clyde estuary…

The other thing that did not go to plan was that we had an unfortunate brush with officialdom. You can read the full story on our own blog, but what it meant was that the building we were using for workshops could no longer be used in that way. Such is life. We adapted and moved on…

Then, Chris's mum died. Her garden was her favourite place in the world. She never got to see our new garden, here in the Clyde, being too ill to travel north. When it came to a share of the small amount of inheritance from the sale of her house that was coming to us, we wanted to make something that might form a lasting memorial. Could we use it to build a new workshop? Something that enhanced the woodland, built from sustainable materials and using low impact construction methods? Even better, could we make a space in the woodland that might become a haven for people – for artists and makers to spent time creating and recharging their passion? Fortunately, we have a friend who runs a company which the skills to make something like this happen. Without Stuart and his company Fynewood, we would have given up long ago as we have tried to navigate the labyrinth of planning. Along with Ronan (who handles design and planning) we came up with something…

We now have planning consent to put up two small buildings – one a micro-lodge with shower and amenities, the other a workshop with disabled access loo. We intend to make the whole site fully accessible to people in wheelchairs by putting in a graded pathway and decking. We will then use the premises in a number of different ways;

• A place for people to make artist retreats. People will be able to book both the accommodation and the workshop for either four, seven or eleven nights.
• We intend to make some slots available at low/no cost to artists who would otherwise not be able to participate.
• Our own workshops. Pottery, retreat days, poetry and writing days.
• Guest workshops. Working with our network of artists and creatives, to host a wide range of arts, crafts and writing.
• Bookings by other artists to run their own events.

Thanks for reading and sharing the story and we hope you can take a few minutes to fill in the survey for us.