In the Lake District, standing on the foundations of Isaac Wilkinson’s Iron Forge, there once stood a gallery. The Clocktower.
I knew the South Lakes because of my work with the Kirkstone Quarry; Hardknott, Tilberthwaite, Brathay, Stock Ghyll Force, Ullswater, Ambleside, Rydal. All familiar haunts.
And then there was Low Wood. Originally part of the Backbarrow community of iron workers that had helped forge the Industrial reveloution. The village had been owned by the same family for generations, a wonderful, sleepy, time capsule. Complete with phone box and well stocked allotments. And there, magnificently, was the Clocktower.
The building was in a fairly sorry state, having progressed from iron forge, to gunpowder works, to storage for ultramarine blue. In a brief moment between dilapidation and repair there was just enough time, and space, for a temporary art gallery/workshop.
The gallery was never meant to be a grand institution. It began as a kind of dream, a place where the precision of craft could meet the abstraction of art. An impulsive, ragged idea that chased the elegance of impossible forms. I liked the absurdity of it. The gallery was always more aspiration than strategy.
Of course, on the day I signed the lease, my father died.
Grief arrived not like a wave, but like a silence. While others gathered to mark the first exhibition—polished stone beneath their feet, soft light on the walls—I was somewhere else entirely. My father had no direct hand in the building. He had never visited, never seen the print on the wall. And yet, in the days that followed, I began to realise I had made it for him.
There was something in the steadiness of the place that echoed his presence—his regard for integrity, for patience, for things done properly and without fuss. He was a lawyer (a very good one) but also an artist, but he understood the value of things, abstract things. That the gallery happened to be conjured into existence on the same day he left the world felt, in time, less like coincidence and more like completion. A circle drawn in slate.
The aspirations I had for the gallery—grand plans of residencies, talks, the hand made prints, the joint shows—faded in the years that followed. Life pulled in other directions. The building, of course remains, (now excellent new business units), but still carrying the echo of its intent. But its idealised future never quite took shape.
And yet I don’t see that as failure.
Because the gallery was built. And more than that—it became a space of understanding. It let me see, not at once but slowly, that in pursuing a dream I hadn’t fully named, I had built something for someone I loved.
Perhaps that is what hopes and dreams are for: not to succeed in the ways we first imagine, but to bring us somewhere we couldn’t have gone otherwise.
with thanks to: John Blakemore, Paul Gallagher, Paul Hill, Kerik Kouklis, Carl Radford and Andrew Sanderson, Robert Norbury
