The National Garden Festival, Gateshead Tyne and Wear was the fourth in the sequence of five National Garden Festivals held in different cities throughout the UK.

Following on from forming the visual art programme for the Glasgow Garden Festival 1988, Isabel Vasseur was invited to be the Visual Arts Director for Gateshead. The festival opened in May 1990 and ran until October.

Selection of the 70 visual art components were gathered from the hundreds of proposals received by Isabel and her expanded team: Jane Heath, Timandra Gustafson, Liz Knight, Reuben Kench and Martin Garrett. Expectations had been raised as a result of the successes of the visual art programme for Glasgow.

While there were critical voices raised largely to do with cost of the Glasgow exhibit, visitor feedback from those attending was overwhelmingly positive. Audiences had shown an unexpected ability to engage positively with the art content.

It was testament to the momentum generated during the previous two garden festivals at Liverpool and Stoke-on-Trent that seemingly, visitors had become more discerning and familiar with art in the context of an open air event. As a result certain installations became closely associated with the identity of the Glasgow festival. Without question art had lodged in the public imagination in Glasgow.

Clearly ambitions for the visual art programme for Gateshead were increased. The programme was given a headline title to reflect this change in status: Festival Landmarks ‘90. The claims made for some of the art installations were more ambitious too. The festival site comprised four areas, starting from the River Tyne’s southern shoreline at Riverside, toward Dunston, Eslington and finally Norwood.

Each locale was connected by a form of public transport. The festival’s attenuated layout over 200 acres had inherent logistical idiosyncrasies that had to be overcome by an imaginative use of trams, a monorail, steam locomotive and road train. This meant that there were ample opportunities for the visual art programme to resolve design problems inherent within the temporary infrastructure of stations, platforms, bridges and gateways.

With nearly double the budget of the Glasgow Garden Festival, Isabel raised and committed 1.5 million GBP to be directed towards 50 commissions across 70 installations of different disciplines in art and craft and an extensive education programme. The festival attracted 3 million visitors, provided 1,000 jobs to help run it successfully and saw another 1,000 created in the area to service it.

The festival’s content was one of the first to include art and craft within its remit. The craft objects were displayed within a domestic setting, a Showhouse laid out to accommodate different disciplines like ceramics, textiles and furniture. This dedicated, non-gallery space showed how commissioning craft could give a home a less manufactured, more individually considered presence.

While the selected artists had their motives in creating the work produced for the festival, there was a limit to the amount of interpretive text that could be presented within the open air context of a garden festival. With this in mind the art was selected for its ease of access for a general audience, each installation had to stand up on its own merit without recourse to the language of art appreciation.

With an education and outreach programme that was developed to engage with different community groups locally as well as drawing out interests that would be relevant nationally, it was considered essential to build relationships within the education networks established for the event that would last beyond the dates of the festival’s duration.

The festival featured installations and performances by the following artists, designers, makers, performers and poets:

Sponsors:

The accompanying publication was

Festival Landmarks ’90.

Click here for details

Photography by: Reuben Kench, Damien Wootten and Charles Hall