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Highland Print Studio North Lands Creative
Karen Phillips, director of NLC, based in the Caithness village of Lybster, has seen the impact a strong artistic presence can have for a community: ‘[NLC] is seen very much as a social and cultural hub for the area,’ she explains. The centre plays an important symbolic role, upholding the local glass-making skills in the area after the closure of Caithness Glass, which was set up to counteract the area’s unemployment crisis following the decline of the farming and herring industries, and now the ongoing decommissioning of the Dounreay nuclear power plant. Ex-Dounreay scientific glass-blowers currently teach lamp and flame working at NLC, alongside visiting artists from across the world, including the likes of Eric Goldschmidt and William Gudenrath from the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. ‘A decline in the traditional industries,
high levels of unemployment (especially
among the young) and an older and ageing population have all
contributed to [Caithness] being identified high on indices of social economic and the multiple
deprivation,’ explains Phillips: ‘NLC plays a part in the regeneration of the village through employment, by bringing people to the area, using local accommodation and services and the renovation and use of old buildings in the village.’ Highland Print Studio is a similar ‘creative hub’ and a key part of the visual arts infrastructure of the north of Scotland. Though it is based in Inverness, it attracts makers from across the Highlands and Islands, Moray and Aberdeenshire. ‘We enable access to professional-grade equipment that could only otherwise be accessed by travelling to the central belt or east coast,’ says director Alison McMenemy. ‘Some of the people who use us have hours of travel just to get to Inverness so having an additional three hour journey would simply make access to this type of facility impossible for many. Highland Print Studios offer s c r e e n p r i n t , i n t a g l i o , r e l i e f p r i n t a n d
lithography facilities, plus a digital suite with resources including high-spec digital imaging, large-format photographic printing and high- resolution scanning. ‘We are conscious that our area includes remote rural communities, so have invested time and resources into adapting techniques to be taught on an outreach basis and this is something that we continue to work on.’ McMenemy describes Scotland’s generous provision of public-access facilities as ‘cultural socialism’. ‘[These facilities] make access to professional-grade facilities available to most and not dependant on personal wealth, which is the case in other countries,’ she says. Artists also benefit from the close proximity and interaction with the small communities these spaces support and work closely alongside. ‘As a key part of the community, we are integrated into all aspects of the community life,’ adds SSW’s Sam Trotman: ‘These facilities provide a strong foundation not just for making artwork but for more expansively nurturing our material knowledge, exploring new pedagogies, bringing people together and, in the case of us, rural organisation spaces where we can act upon these things with a close relationship to our rural landscapes.’
Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Lumsden, ssw.org.uk; North Lands Creative, Caithness, northlandscreative.co.uk; Highland Print Studio, Inverness, highlandprintstudio.co.uk
1 Apr–31 May 2019 THE LIST 121