The Artist Behind SSW
summer, when four artists travelled to the centre for a month to live and make work. Each of the artists worked with children from Lumsden Primary School on a project that will also form part of the weekend’s celebrations.
“It feels like an important point in the year to galvanise and bring people together,” says Sam Trotman, director of SSW. “There’ll be a bonfire, cooking and food and music as well. We already have a Mary Fair, which marks the start of spring here, but we were thinking – what happens when we go into our really dark and long winter? How do we mark that, and how do we think about sharing some of those things that happen here over the summer as we move into the winter period?”
The Lumsden Residency artists – Dorian Braun and Anna Wolfe-pauly, George Ridgway and India Harvey – were selected on the basis of proposals about how they would work with children at the local school. They were
THE Scottish Sculpture Workshop was the idea of Fred Bushe, an artist who saw the potential in the building in Lumsden as a place to bring a community of artists together to share their ideas and skills with each other.
Fred was known for his warmth, kindness and larger than life enthusiasm, and acted as a mentor to the many artists who came to work at SSW, along with his artist and teacher wife, Fiona.
He later built a metal foundry at the centre, and built up a reputation for SSW in Scotland and internationally that continues today. He is regarded as one of Scotland’s best sculptors of the late 20th century, and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in the 1980s. Fred died in 2009 aged 78.
“The artists were selected on the basis of pupils” how they proposed to work with
selected by staff at SSW as well as the young people they would be working with, as a way of tying in the residencies with local needs in the area.
“Our local school has cut down from a two-class school to one class, and specialist teachers are being cut as well, so there’s less provision, particularly within the arts,” Sam explains. “We set up the Lumsden Residency as a way of connecting what we’re doing here with the rest of the village, but also more widely thinking about our own social practice and how that comes into play in a small, rural village.”
One of the main aims of the Lumsden Weekender is to show to the public what went on during the residencies, when each artist was part-funded to live at SSW and use its facilities – including the wood and metal workshops, foundry, ceramics studio and forge – and to collaborate and make work with the support of the