ESTATE in New Mills
Hosts: New Mills Festival
https://www.newmillsfestival.com/
Dates: 30th August – 26th September 2021
Fridays to Sundays & extra dates being added, opening hours vary. Check New Mills Festival website for full details.
Location:
New Mills Football Club
Church Lane
New Mills
Derbyshire
SK22 4NP
ESTATE is free to view but booking is essential.
Ticket booking:
https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/newmillsfestival
Opening event 30th August, ESTATE operating 4-9pm
Millers Bar Church Lane @ New Mills FC
Home Game against Stockport Town FC, with food from Bohemian Burger and drinks from Millers Bar.
ESTATE in NEW MILLS Screen-Prints
LUCKY DIP MULTI COLOUR WAY screen-print on 1200 micron recycled grey pulp card.
Bonus PARMA VIOLET colours in honour of the Swizzels Factory in New Mills*.
*Not all prints are Swizzels coloured.
Lucky dip means we relieve you of the burden of choice. All the prints are perfect in their imperfect offsetting and amazing array of colours. We guarantee you will be happy with the one you are sent.
42 x 60 cm
Edition of 113
Signed and numbered by the artist
Available from L-13.org and High Street Books, New Mills
ESTATE: NEW MILLS
A grounding for ESTATE
Pamphlet written by George Lynch, designed by Hannah Webb.
REPORTS FROM NEW MILLS
By Toby Hardwick, Director of New Mills Festival
As part of the MdZ Tour Jimmy Cauty’s ESTATE spent September 2021 at the Miller’s Football Club where it was hosted by New Mills Community Festival. This followed the visit by ADP five years previously.
New Mills is an ex-mill town that lies on the edge of the Peak District with a population of 12,000. The Festival runs for a fortnight every September and is the major event in the town’s calendar. It is also one of only two community arts Festivals in Derbyshire. The Arts Council classifies New Mills as being culturally deprived although they have yet to fund the Festival which is entirely run by volunteers.
ESTATE was included in the Festival Art Trail as well as being given prominent coverage on the Festival website, social media and press coverage. Both it and ADP are the most significant pieces of art that have come to New Mills. There was a lot of community pride that a little town like ours was included on the MdZ Tour and just like ADP, ESTATE attracted viewers who would never enter an art gallery.
As I was closing up one evening, a lad who had been to see ESTATE with school asked if he could go and get his grandfather from the Club bar. This man, a retired builder who had never been inside an art gallery, asked me to convey to Jimmy his respect for all the work he had put in and for his incredible imagination. The lad subsequently brought his grandmother and his Mum, insisting they all needed to see it and to experience the ‘Full English’.
ESTATE was open for ten days to the public for booked viewing slots on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and on the Bank Holiday Monday. We also opened for school and cub visits on another seven weekdays with up to four classes of thirty plus children visiting on each occasion. Based on the number of hours we were open, the length of the slots and the average size of the groups, we estimate the total audience was around 1500.
The audience was made up of people who learnt of ESTATE via the Festival website (the homepage on which it was featured received 6000 visits in the previous month) plus those who came on personal recommendation of friends or family, which grew towards the end of the Festival. These were partly a result of the children brought by the local schools, many of whom were Year 9s who were doing a project on Banksy. Being sited next to the Football Club bar, ESTATE also attracted people intrigued by the noise and smoke who had no direct interest in seeing a piece of art but loved what they found (‘That is mental!’).
We also had a significant number of local people who had seen ADP when it was in New Mills and came on the strength of that experience. Finally we were surprised by the number of Jimmy Cauty fans who travelled from across the north to see ESTATE. They included people from Rochdale, Stoke, Todmorden, the Wirral, Manchester and Leeds – most of whom explored New Mills whilst they were here.
ESTATE attracted the largest audience of any event or exhibit in this year’s Festival and was fully booked for its planned openings. (As a comparison, the normal culmination of the Festival is a lantern procession which regularly attracts 6000). Many other events this year were poorly attended because of fears of covid – during the Festival the highest rate of coronavirus infection in England was in Marple Bridge which is four miles from New Mills. The fact that ESTATE had effective transmission precautions in place reassured people who wanted to see it.
The Football Club holds Foodie Fridays when guest caterers provide takeaway food from their trailer kitchen. Attendance at these increased whilst ESTATE was in their car park – and has remained high, the organiser is directly linking this to more people having found them through coming to see ESTATE. Other people came to ESTATE and then went on to see more of the Art Trail, find a cafe in town or buy merchandise from High Street Books.
ESTATE was also a delight to volunteer for because people were so enthusiastic about seeing it. From the school kids to the fans, people who emerged were involved, amazed, disturbed, talkative and thankful.
