From TimesOnline - September 04, 2004

Where sheep may safely gaze
The cows are gone but the slurry store has become a cool exhibition space. Lucy Pinney finds a farming community diversifying into art

While Chris Howard talks in his farm kitchen a peacock hesitates on the threshold. 'It's the neighbour's,' he smiles. 'It comes in every day to eat cat biscuit.' Last winter there was a lamb with hypothermia warming up in the bottom oven of the Rayburn stove. Afterwards it took up residence there on a stripy blanket, tucking itself neatly inside whenever it felt sleepy.

For 35 years Howard has supported his family by rearing sheep, but a decade ago, in order to survive financially, he diversified into art. And next week his sculptures will be shown at an innovative exhibition in Devon called the Art Farm Project. Next to Howard's lush fields full of fattening lambs is a wide, tree-ringed yard full of concrete mixers, piles of sand and wooden forms where he makes his follies and giant pots. He stains them gold and brown with metallic salts and decorates them with bits of stone set in ancient field-bank patterns. 'Whenever I plough a field,' he says slowly - 'and I plough three acres a year to grow a green crop for my sheep - I walk the furrows with a bucket, picking up the right kind of stone.'

The follies are big enough for human beings to sit inside, and his next project is to create visually satisfying, economic shelters for the sheep, so he can combine animals and art. He would never want to give up his Dorset Down and Polled Dorset sheep. He says they keep him sane, and besides: 'Both sheep and sculpture have problems. It is easier to sell lamb, but the price is poor. Art is more profitable - but only if it sells. But then art is harder than farming. You really have to think deep and you are always on your own. After all, if I'm ill, my neighbours can help me with the sheep - but no one can help you when you are creating art.'

The Art Farm Project was thought up by Peter and Suzanne Redstone, dairy farmers near Newton Abbot. For years they kept an organic Jersey herd, but after diversifying into luxury ice-cream they took the painful decision to sell the animals and buy in the milk they needed. 'I do have a lingering sadness that ours is not a working farm any more,' Peter says. 'But small family farms are under massive pressure. At least 10,000 farmers and farm workers leave the land every year, and it is all the more poignant because it is largely unnoticed.'

They were wondering what to do with the redundant barns and cowsheds when it occurred to Suzanne, a sculptor, that she could use them as an exhibition space for local artists. The first Art Farm Project took place last year and attracted 50 artists and more than 3,000 visitors. This year it will be bigger, with three new, very rural display spaces: a dry-stone wall, a hay-bale building, and a slurry store. (Only recently the slurry store was full of stinking dung. Now it has been emptied, scrubbed out, given a special canvas roof, and become an elegant curved space.)

Exploring the farm on my own, I wandered into the old ice-cream-making shed, now a workshop for an artist called Martin Prothero. He's a tall, intense man in his thirties who is fascinated by animal tracks. 'Years ago,' he said. 'I saw the tracks of a bird which had taken off in the snow. You could see where it had been running, its footprints getting lighter as it began to get airborne, and then the mark of its wingtips in the snow. It was like a whole story unfolding.'

To get the same effect in his art he uses sheets of toughened glass coated in carbon, and lays them out where hours of observation have shown him that wildlife is likely to be present. He showed me the beautifully subtle track that a slug's mouth-parts create - like a woven band - and the fleshy pads of a rat. 'They have fingerprints, just like us. The point is,' he said, as he drew out a sheet with two sets of badger prints on it, one a calm adult, the other a panicky, scrabbly baby, 'that by doing this you notice so much more detail.'

Suzanne gave me a tour of the farm, revealing the big, life-size freehand sketch of a rampant bull that she drew for fun, years ago, in the whitewashed pen where they artificially inseminated their heifers. All around us, artists were working on the different venues, humping wheelbarrows. In a sloping field dominated by four brooding statues of rooks she showed me where a performance artist will be burrowing through the mud, dressed only in goggles and swimming trunks, pretending to be an earthworm. And she explained how, last year, visitors had been taken by surprise by the project, seduced by the charm of art in such a rural setting. They had expected to spend only an hour there, but instead lingered all day, many coming back again with friends and picnics and bottles of wine.

We stopped under some poplar trees, by a little stream. Ahead of us a double spiral of willow turned mournfully in the breeze. Titled The Fragility of Life, it was made by an artist called Maddy Norris, to commemorate two dead children: a baby Suzanne lost aged six days old, and Maddy's 24-year-old son Lucas, who died in a car accident. This year her pieces are about quantum mechanics, a particular interest of Lucas's. 'We used to have such fascinating conversations. Now I have to make sculptures instead.'