A hand-drawn map leading to half a dozen artists’ studios was the tiny start of a festival that has become a huge institution in the Cambridge art scene.
When two artists, Julia Ball and Christine Fox, decided in 1974 to throw open the doors of their workshops to help demystify the creative process and make art more accessible to ordinary people, they could not foresee the movement that would still be going half a century later.
But Cambridge Open Studios is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and it is still going strong - now with more than 500 members and more than 350 artists who are taking part in the weekend openings in July. It is one of the oldest artist-run open studio initiatives in the country.
From the mid 1970s onwards they were joined by ceramicist Elspeth Owen, who has shared some of her memories with the Cambridge Independent, which is officially supporting Cambridge Open Studios in its anniversary year.
Elspeth recalls: “We had heard that some women in other parts of the country had started to open studios on a very small scale, I think maybe in Oxford was one of the first ones. And this was the mid 70s - it was the very early days of feminism and there was a lot of political activity about equal pay, recognition and visibility for women - and also for women artists. I think they had a strong sense of what to do to counteract the ivory tower aspects of the artists, that sort of isolation and maybe privilege and formality that surrounded the art world at that time, even more so than now.
“It did seem to be mostly women to begin with, and there was this energy around. ‘We're doing it as women’ - I think that was part of the ethos of the time.
“So Julia and Christine and about three or four other people just made a map of where they were. There was, of course, no digital communication at all. Everything was on paper. So they made a copy of the Ordnance Survey map of Cambridge and just wrote by hand where the studios were going to be open.
“It was taking place as part of something called the Cambridge Festival, which happened at that time and had happened for several years, every summer. That was largely a music festival and we kind of tagged onto the coattails of it.
“This is the small event that we started and with completely different technology to what promotes us now. Back then, things were hand written and we sent invitations through the post. It was only publicised locally.”
The movement was born from friendships established at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (CCAT), where Julia taught art and Elspeth was studying in a ceramics evening class. As a young woman, Elspeth studied history at Oxford University and worked as an academic, a social worker and a teacher before starting pottery evening classes there in the mid seventies.
This college later became part of Anglia Ruskin University. Christina and Julia also belonged to an art group called the Cambridge Society of Painters, and, according to Elspeth “all their friends came to visit the open studios”.
Elspeth says: “I think the spirit of Open Studios is that there is a curiosity about it. Maybe it still has a sort of reputation of being hidden away or happening in some private place. And I think people gain a huge amount by being able to see the context of the work, of the paint brushes and talking to the makers. That was inspiration at the beginning from the beginning.”
Elspeth’s own studio is the former village cricket pavilion in Grantchester. Her pottery has been shown in exhibitions across the world and can be seen in many public collections, including those at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, University of Wales at Aberystwyth, the Kunstmuseum in Hamburg, Germany, and at Leeds City Art Gallery. She became well known after her work was championed by Henry Rothschild at the Primavera gallery in Cambridge.
She explained that the atmosphere of those early events has remained the same at Open Studios down the years.
“Some people who are coming for the first time are very shy at the door. It's a personal space that they're coming into and they hesitate. I think one of the better skills for the artists is to be able to welcome the visitor over the threshold. I was nervous at the beginning myself, because I was unsure about my work and I'm sure that still applies to people who are doing it for the first time,” says Elspeth.
“I love the feeling of the discovery, I suppose. The discovery that the visitors are making and that that I'm making by doing the work - there's a feeling of a meeting. Also, unlike in a gallery people are more able to touch the artwork or pick it up. For me, it's invaluable and we have such amazing conversations. People ask sort of shy questions like ‘How do you get this blue?’ They don't quite know what to say. But then they look around and they have more time. There's not a feeling of rush. We get into all sorts of conversations about the ideas that the work comes from and the politics and the wider things about making things as a woman in a competitive world.”
One of Elspeth’s personal highlights from Cambridge Open Studios during the past 50 years was holding an event during the pandemic, when people were only meeting outside.
“I've got quite a lot of outside space around my workshop and so I opened in 2020 and 21,” she says.
“It was very moving, actually, people coming and being so delighted to be able to come to things. You remember what it was like, how we got out of the habit of going to things. And then it was marvellous to do this - very, very rewarding and moving, actually, and touching.”
Other artists took part in an ‘Open Windows’ trail during the pandemic in which they put artwork in their windows so that the public could still come and see them during Covid restrictions.
The first recorded meeting of Cambridge Open Studios took place in 1987 and the minutes were written in a yellow notebook. That inspired the colour of the logo. In 1988, the organisers decided artists must be within a 25-mile radius of Cambridge to take part and there were 44 artists who opened their studios that year.
There have been several famous names writing the foreword to the guidebook each year, including Anthony Gormley, who said: “The studio is the pressure chamber, incubation box, tabernacle and funeral pyre of aspiration.
Roger Law, of Spitting Image, wrote the introduction to the guidebook in 2010, saying: “Artists’ studios always give clues to the makers’ passions and obsessions and sometimes it is possible to be drawn into the artist’s vision enough to literally buy into it and start collecting.”
In Elspeth’s introduction to the guidebook this year, she says: “It’s a long time since Julia Ball and Christine Fox put up the first hand-written posters, as part of the Cambridge Festival in 1974. It was a good idea then and it is still a good idea now. In a city where the Academy and the Museum dominate our visual culture, a pioneering handful of us opened up, hoping to find an audience who trusted their own judgments as they came to see work in the environment in which it was being brought to life.”
She adds that the festival “still holds to its original principles, those of accessibility, self selection and neighbourhood belonging. And still the invitation is: above and beyond being a consumer, Be an Explorer.”
Elspeth will be holding her own open studio again this year during July and Julia Hill’s studio will also be opened.
Alison Hullyer, who is exhibiting in her garden studio in Milton this year, is a printmaker whose work is sold by the National Trust among others.
She says: “Open Studios is the highlight of my year, to be honest, because I work in isolation. And it's just really nice to open your doors to the public and get actual feedback. Because when you put your work out into galleries or shops and you don't actually see who's buying it, or how people react to things.
“With Open Studios, you've got people coming directly to you and you can see what people are drawn to and they're really interested in the technique, especially the printmaking side of things because a lot of people don't understand printmaking as a process.”
Gabriella Del Valle, a jeweller, who is this year’s chair of COS, said: “When I first visited an open studio I just thought, goodness I've never seen anything like this before. I was fascinated to see the different types of jewellery that were being made to see how people did it. I had. I thought it was exciting and I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
She adds that the art is not the only attraction: “It's about seeing studios seeing art that people wouldn't necessarily have seen. And to be honest, a lot of them like nosing around people's houses as well. People will come and say: what a lovely garden, what a lovely house! Oh, look at your ponds, that’s part of the fun. So it is very informal and they get to chat to the artists and find out how it's all done.
“Now people come in and I say: do you want to see my studio? Oh, yes, they reply, especially the men, who can stand around looking bored sometimes. And they come and they look at the tools and I show them how I make things and how I take a black bit of silver and then turn it into something lovely. So they're really fascinated by that.”
Now Open Studios is coming full circle, with members joining together in small groups to put on village art trails with maps of half a dozen nearby studios for the public to visit.
Gabriella says; “People can use our website and guidebook to find the artists they want to visit but some artists have put together local trail leaflets,which have been really successful.”
Cambridge Open Studios will run during the first four weeks in July.
