Tracing, placing, plotting;

Holton Lee

http://www.holtonlee.co.uk/arts/

Holton Lee contains a gallery, and a suite of studios, in the middle of a 350acre country estate near Poole. Access to Holton Lee via public transport is limited. Almost all of the art here is disability art. There are constant exhibitions, and residencies.

I spoke to Trish Wheatley, curator at Holton Lee, while I helped her hang the Holton Lee Disability Arts Open 2009, the 3rd year for this exhibition. Trish has worked at Holton Lee for a little over 3 years.

Gus. Is Holton Lee in any sense artist led?

Trish. We’re very consultative in the way that we work. The way that HL works is that we have 4 different aspects, one of those is the arts aspect. For that we have an arts aspect group which meets quarterly, and is comprised of artists that work here, local arts professionals, disabled artists, and staff and trustees. So artists tend to have a lot of input to the agenda.

Gus. OK. And is the arts aspects of HL purely Disability Arts or art for disabled artists?

Trish. Yes, but we work with non-disabled artists as well.

Gus. So is it mainly for disabled artists?

Trish. I’d say that 90% of the exhibition programme is DA, or work by disabled artists, and use of the studios is probably 60 or 70% disabled artists.

Gus. Can you give me an idea of the history of HL?

Trish. Yes, the charity was set up in 1992, and it originally started to address the needs of local disabled people who wanted to go somewhere on holiday. The landowner, Sir Thomas Lees, was approached by a local school called Victoria School, they had a group of young disabled people come and camp here. Sir Tom and Lady Faith Lees realized that an accessible short stay accommodation was not being given anywhere, and developed the vision for Holton Lee. The first stage of this was the Barn. Then this all evolved with the Post Green community; Post Green is a house in the nearby village Lytchett Minster. It’s a big old house where there was a Christian community. Tom and Faith owned the house and were part of the community, so the Christian ethos came over into HL with that.

The organization developed and started doing arts workshops and other events, mainly working for disabled people. Tony Heaton was employed as the director in 1997, and from Tom and Faith’s original vision he developed the 4 aspects of HL, which are:

the arts
environment
disability and carers
personal growth and spirituality

So it was to encompass all of those things in all the work that we do here. Further capital projects were developed including Faith House as a gallery and meeting place, the Stables artists studios, which are 4 artists studios converted from an old stable block, and then the new Barn accommodation – which you stayed in!

We run a conservation program in the environment, and there are regular meetings connected with personal growth and spirituality, although we have no permanent member of staff working on that side of things at the moment, and we have our art program.

Gus. Your arts program specifically, what does it offer to disabled artists?

Trish. We have artist’s studio space which can hired out, we run regular workshops in partnership with local artists in ceramics, printmaking, photography, stone carving, and we are planning to offer painting and life drawing as well.

We’re open to ideas. If an artist approaches us – especially something to do with the landscape, because we’ve got this wonderful 350-acre site, it’s whatever people want to do really. We’ve had groups camping here and using the environment, doing various sculptural works in the landscape, and also using the studio space. We take part in the local art weeks, we run a full exhibition program all year, which consists of 6 main exhibitions a year. Alongside that we’ve got our collection of permanent artwork here, which is being collected to make up the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive, and we’re fundraising for a building to house that archive on site here. We’ve raised 360K so far, and it’s about a million pound project.

Gus. What’s your point of view on Disability Art’s politics?

Trish. We work to support Disability Arts and artists, but we’re not JUST interested in Disability Arts, we’re also interested in supporting disabled artists that want to work in the environment, and relate to all the other aspects of HL as well.

In the past there has been a lot of debate about whether we should be integrating Disability Arts into the mainstream, and I fully support that, but I think its got to have its own voice as well. Disability Arts is a cultural thing, and needs to be recognized as a movement.

Gus. When you say ‘integrate it into the mainstream’, do you mean for DA to disappear and dissolve into the mainstream?

Trish. No, not at all. That’s what I mean when I say ‘a voice for the movement’, it needs to be recognized by the mainstream rather than integrated; maybe that’s a better way of putting it. And recognized as the valid and high quality and vibrant art movement that it is.

Gus. Are there any other Disability Arts organizations in the South West that you work with?

Trish. Yes, on site there’s

15 Days in Clay http://www.15daysinclay.co.uk

Studio Two Printmakers

and further away there’s

Kaleido http://www.kaleidoarts.org/

Art & Power http://www.artandpower.com/

Artshape http://www.artshape.co.uk

Salsibury Link Up Arts http://www.salisburyartscentre.co.uk/resident-companies/link-up-arts.aspx

Dorset County Council used to have a Disability Arts officer who has gone now, and is not being replaced. They’re having an Arts Officer who is supposed to cover everything, just as all the Arts Officers are responsible for Disability Arts. I think that’s quite indicative of where DA is in relation to the mainstream…

LATER...

Trish. Because DA has not been in mainstream art, art historians haven’t recorded it, so the need for a National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA) was identified and developed at Holton Lee.

Gus. How can I access NDACA?

Trish. Good question! A lot of it is hung on the walls at Holton Lee, and there’s also a notion of a dispersed archive, so other collections and organizations are going to be linked with it.

Gus. Is it going to be online?

Trish. Yes. It’s in its early stages. We’re just auditing everything now, which is a huge job. Everything will be online, the Holton Lee collection and the dispersed archive.

Gus. I was talking to Ju Gosling (http://www.ju90.co.uk/) earlier, and she was saying that funding is getting cut to many DA organizations…

Trish. That’s going to have an effect; things happen in cycles – and I think that DA may well come back round to campaigning. We’re not going to have money and artists are going to be doing… well, the funding system has got to this point where artists won’t make work unless they have got the money to make it, whereas I thought artists just made work because they had to make work.

Gus. Well…

Trish. I know you have to have money to live, but there’s something about the funding system that means a lot of passion has got left behind.

Gus. I’ve only recently discovered Arts Council Funding, and it’s a real bonus! But a lot of people you talk to, it seems to be the main topic.

Trish. Exactly! If you go to meetings with other arts organizations, sometimes you feel like stuff is being programmed to fit in with funding, instead of thinking about the artistic value of the work first.

Gus. Should art be more self funding, and is DA disadvantaged in that respect?

Trish. I think there is a lot of confusion between access and Disability Art, and sometimes people will program things so that they fulfill their requirements as a Regularly Funded Organisation, rather than based on artistic merit.

Or they think they are catering for disabled people by putting ramps in places, and means of interpretation and communication in places, and think that’s all they need to do rather than programming disabled artists because that’s what a lot of disabled people are interested in. Disability Arts and disabled artists are rarely the main feature of a large exhibition or event programme, we would like to see that changed and the work of Holton Lee and NDACA aims to promote their work to the widest possible audience.

Return to intro http://www.aliasarts.org/editorial1/DisabledLedArts.htm