Introducing Natives Journal, where five artists hang out in the Lake District
What happens when you take five very talented artists and makers, and send them all off together to a a stone barn in the Lake District to draw, make music, write poetry, take photographs and generally spend time exploring together? Beautiful things, that’s what, as Nicolas Burrows (who is one third of brilliant collective Nous Vous) soon found out.
He has just founded Natives, an “ongoing, itinerant residency project,” as he explains to us, for “gathering together practitioners who share a sensitivity towards landscape, wilderness and walking, opening up collaborative possibilities, allowing for a closer connection with the landscape and exploring alternative ways of living and making.”
In its first iteration the group of practitioners consists of Marcus Oakley, Sister Arrow, Supermundane, William Edmonds and Nic himself, and it culminates in the first edition of Natives Journal, the paper rendition of all that they made and did together while in Cumbria.
The name came from something Creative Review editor Patrick Burgoyne said at a talk Nic went to about six years ago, he explains. “He was describing young illustrators/designers/artists etc as ‘native’ to the cultural environment. I liked the implication of being ‘native’ to something, or a native of a discipline, not necessarily a place. Later, when I thought about this residency and what I wanted it to do, I thought it fit quite nicely with that word. It also obviously relates to place as well – and I have a plan that it’ll always involve someone who is familiar with the location we are in.”
“The whole thing was a brief moment of absolute joy,” Nic says of the time they spent. “Such a welcome space from regular life. We all got along so well and it really affected me afterwards. We were in the middle of nowhere, doing whatever we wanted, cooking meals together, talking and playing music in the evenings. And every morning we could go outside and look out at the mountains, fog and lakes all around.”
The first issue of the journal is a beauty to hold. It contains a perfect amalgamation of creative materials by diverse artists which are strung together by a thread of common experience rather than repeated ideas. With a number of postcards, prints and an audio soundtrack contained within its pages, the notion of it having been made by a collective is very strong.
“I’m pleased with the result,” Nic continues. “Elliot at Victory Press who printed it did a great job. We also collated and bound it by hand, so it’s nice that it has that element to it as well. To me it’s a good reminder of the time spent there – for other readers I hope that the bits of sound, the texts and the images all contribute towards building up a picture of the place we were in, through the eyes of five different artists.”
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Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.