Why Furness history is in the genes when it comes to award-winning art

I’m on the sand dunes at North Walney National Nature Reserve with artists Maddi Nicholson and Stuart Bastik, co-founders and directors of Art Gene – the winner of the Community Arts Award in Cumbria Life ’s 2017 Culture Awards.

Planes take off from time to time from the nearby BAE Systems airfield but the only other sounds are the song of skylarks and the surf breaking gently. It couldn’t be more peaceful and it’s hard to imagine that this part of the coast played and continues to play a pivotal role in the UK’s military history.

Soldiers and cadets trained in practice trenches on Walney Island in both World Wars and Art Gene’s long-running project - Fort Walney, Uncovered - has brought together artists, archaeologists and local people to survey, excavate and record the trenches and other remains from the coastal batteries.

We’re at the reserve to see One for Sorrow , an artwork inspired by the mechanism from the Fort Walney gun range. Produced by Maddi, Stuart and architect Charlie MacKeith, One for Sorrow is a non-civic war memorial reflecting the fragility of people and nature. One of the artwork’s two elements is a large cast iron gate leading onto the reserve with models of seven types of bird, each painted in camouflage colours and bolted to the bars.

“The gate is an estate gate with cross bars, relevant to the Edwardian period,” says Maddi.

Birds also perch on the numbers one to seven, which form the other element of One for Sorrow . Made of weathering steel, the numbers are set out on the gun range and each carries a line from the One for Sorrow nursery rhyme.

Fort Walney is featured in another Art Gene project, Seldom Seen , which draws on local people’s histories and memories. It charts seldom seen assets of the Morecambe Bay area through exhibitions, events, five maps - researched and designed by Stuart - and walking tour apps.

Revealing and tapping into hidden assets is key to Art Gene’s philosophy, whether the assets are natural, industrial, historical or related to an individual’s potential.

Founded in 2002, Art Gene is an independent research facility and a registered charity. It has developed an international reputation for creating acclaimed artworks and projects across the social, natural and built environment in partnership with deprived parts of Cumbria and Lancashire.

Partnership and sustainability underpin Art Gene and it works with national and international artists, local people and organisations such as Natural England, Cumbria Wildlife Trust and – for Tracks of the Ironmasters - Sustrans.

Cumbrian artist Conrad Atkinson says Art Gene’s “unique contribution at the cutting edge of socially concerned art practices makes a compelling and ambitious spectacle”.

Art Gene occupies some very large and amazing spaces in Barrow’s Grade II-listed Nan Tait Centre, which once housed the town’s technical school.

The area where so many Barrow residents trained in mechanical engineering is now Art Gene’s fabricating workshop and there are eight large studios, one each for Maddi and Stuart, two for artists’ residencies, a big production space, and three rented to local artists including glassmaker Heather Gillespie.

Artist-in-residence Hannah Brackston is working on the Razzle-Dazzle Hides , which Art Gene has been designing and creating for South Walney Nature Reserve and which are speckled like birds’ eggs.

A 19.5m x 12.2m gallery, with 10 skylights and a floor made from ash wood, is used for Art Gene’s own shows, such as its Stuff exhibition last year, and is also for hire along with other Art Gene rooms.

Maddi, 52, lives on Walney with her partner, Charlie MacKeith. She was brought up in a one-parent family on a land settlement smallholding just outside Dalston, a few miles from Carlisle.

She spent her early childhood “making stuff’ – soft toys and clothes – which were sold and which she would also enter into the industrial section in the Cumberland Show.

Following an art foundation course in Carlisle, Maddi gained a degree in textiles embroidery at Loughborough College of Art.

After working as an artist in London and on residencies, Maddi returned to Cumbria for a residency from 1989 to 1990 at radical artists collective Welfare State International in Ulverston.

“I thought ‘Oh my God’ and stayed. I hadn’t wanted to come back to Cumbria but I swiftly realised it was in my bones.”

Maddi works with people and place, making inflated structures, plastic installations, and artworks in photography, painting and video. Her commissions have included Shall I Draw You A Bath Dear - a 6m high, pink inflated bathtub balanced on the balcony of Bishop Auckland Town Hall - and she has clad castles, London tower blocks, town halls, art galleries and vehicles ranging from a Norwegian passenger ferry to double decker buses.

Her celebrated work Real Estate (2009), a two-thirds life-size inflatable replica of a condemned Barrow house, was part of her 2009 solo exhibition Going Home From Here at Tullie House, Carlisle, in 2009 and Maddi was invited to display the house during the Cumbrian Artist of the Year exhibition at Rheged last year. Rheged’s show, New Quilting (until Sunday April 23) includes an artwork Maddi created with Levens Quilters of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestlers.

Maddi is currently heading the Islands and Bays of Barrow Coastal Communities Team made up of community representatives, local businesses and industry, environmental and ecological statutory bodies and charities. The team will channel funds from the nation-wide Coastal Communities Fund to meet the geographic, social and environmental needs of the area.

Stuart, 51, describes himself as an artist, thinker and occasional poet – “a passionate generalist who advocates knowing a little about a lot”. He lives in a former fisherman’s cabin on the National Trust’s Sandscale Haws National Nature Reserve on the Duddon Estuary. “It’s off-grid and feeds into the work we do on remote sites and sustainability,” he says.

Stuart was brought up in Beverley, East Yorkshire and went to art college in Birmingham, where he studied fine art sculpture. He says a piece of work commissioned for Hull docks and a series of public art works began a process which led him to where he is now.

Among his more recent works are A Machine for Watching Time Passing Pointlessly (2007) - an oil painting of a computer-screen ‘wait’ cursor which revolves on a cement mixer - and the witty Adam and God Creating , part of a series of photographic and video works. Stuart has re-worked Michelangelo’s God Creating Adam in a photograph in which a driver’s arm rests on a car window, cigarette in hand, and is reflected in the wing mirror.

Stuart came to Cumbria in 1992 for a residency with Barrow Borough Council and Furness College. He and Maddi began collaborating in 1996, creating artworks on the sides of articulated lorries in a commission inaugurated at Tate Britain, London before touring the country as part of the Year of the Visual Arts.

The old technical school had been empty for 15 years and Stuart and Maddi joined forces with Cumbria County Council, the county arts officer, the county architect and Julie Hammerton, of the Barracudas Carnival Band, to develop it for arts use. With Julie, they co-founded Art Gene in 2002 and the Barracudas were based there till their closure in 2012.

One of the first international artists working with Art Gene was Tamotsu Murakami who came for a three-month residency.

We chat in the mezzanine Maddi and Stuart use as an office and for smaller events. Light pours in through windows where Maddi’s collection of cacti flourishes. Photography on the walls recalls projects such as The Roker Pods Maddi and Stuart designed for Sunderland. Commissioned by the city council for Roker Beach, they were inspired by the Sunderland coast’s cannonball rock formations and can be used for functions as varied as performance and taking a shower.

“Our whole environment could be a work of art but the true value lies beyond the aesthetic,” says Stuart. “The world out there is our sandbox, not the studio.”

Most organisations are single-interest, says Stuart, but it’s the multi-faceted aspects of life in Barrow, including its unsung natural assets, which appeal to him and Maddi.

“The [ Seldom Seen ] maps are a representation of what a place is without a particular bent – the complexities and contradictions which are really important for sustainability.”

Maddi says she and Stuart invariably work with people who are not from the art world: “It’s easy for an artist not to fit into any camp. We have a fantastic opportunity to fit into all camps and be mediators.

“We have a skill, like plumbing, and we work with the community to create something – we might not know what at first. We can help empower people in small ways which have a big effect on lives.

“We are using our skills to reflect back to the community and it’s important we do something really good. The joy for us is when people say ‘that’s what we wanted to see’,” says Maddi.