A hidden Kendal art gallery is spicing up the Lake District.
Cross Lane Projects is tucked away just off the town’s main street, and is based in the old mint cake factory, has been quietly bringing contemporary art exhibitions to the town since 2018.
Its latest exhibition, Formula + Fetish, which will run until June 28, is a striking display of objects that mesh together jewellery, fine art, fetish objects and items from cabinets of curiosities.
The gallery is owned by professional artists Rebecca Scott and her husband Mark Woods, who is the creative mind behind their latest exhibition.
Formula + Fetish is the culmination of three decades of Mark’s work that aims to push viewers to explore comfort zones and question human desires.
Mark said: “There’s quite a strong erotic aspect to it. But also, the fetish-istic aspect is more about the idea of what fetish actually is, it’s almost as much a cultural phenomenon as anything else.
“A lot of people kind of have the association of it just being purely a sexual thing, but it actually has a spiritual aspect and connects back to West African animist religions in its word origins.
“In a way, what I’m doing is I’m making a connection with the absence of spirituality in consumerism.
“The title is the same title as an upcoming monograph book I’m making, but we’re launching the book in London now separately after some delays.
“So it’s almost like a completely new body of work. There’s plenty of it that is in the book, but it’s kind of gone somewhere else. In between the year and a half spent putting the book to bed and having it ready to print I’ve created a lot of new works, so it has a lot of new work in it.”
Alongside the objects Mark creates, the exhibition also features his jewellery, photographs and self-portraits.
He added: “I’ve been creating them for so long that people ask why do you do this and I say, well, I’ve forgotten! It has become part of a pattern of the way I go about things.
“I’ve been known in the past as a super craftsman, I do still craft, but it’s not that important to me anymore. I used to make all the metalwork but now I use a lot of found objects and bolt them into my work.
“I’ve used a lot of chrome plated door knobs and they kind of look like jewellery. I think there’s also a deeper reference to the oftenest that I’m employing, it’s a domestic reference and kind of has a facetious aspect to it, it’s something really serious, but it’s also door knobs.”
The exhibition also sparked some interest online due to its taboo title and imagery standing out on a small sign on Kendal’s main street.
But both Rebecca and Mark said that contrast is something they enjoy.
Rebecca added: “It is a great contrast and I think it’s also an unexpected surprise. I also think Cross Lane Projects is a little bit of a surprise when people find us, so Mark’s work is a double surprise, it isn’t something you’d expect to see.”
Hidden from plain sight, Cross Lane Projects is open from noon until 5pm from Wednesday to Saturday and is free to visit.
It hosts multiple exhibitions each year between March and November and features international artists from across the globe, including Cumbria.
During the winter months, Rebecca and Mark use the project space in the building to work on their own art.
As the building is large, the pair have a studio space, workshop and storage space as well as the white cube gallery on site.
But the husband and wife duo first unintentionally launched the gallery in 2018, after looking around for storage spaces.
Rebecca said: “As the story goes we weren’t really looking for a gallery space, we were looking for storage for my paintings and studio spaces.
“We were looking around Kendal and we found this building which had been empty for at least eight years, so it was very unloved and neglected.
“We’re very close to the high street, so the location was amazing to find and we realised there was so much space that we could and would run a gallery.”
Rebecca, who was originally born in Windermere, is a professional artist who works primarily with paint.
She has work in private and public collections nationally and internationally, and has exhibited in London, Cumbria, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway.
She met her self-taught artist husband Mark Woods, 30 years ago, at the time, he made a living as a jeweller and in his spare time he’d create elaborate fine art objects. Mark has since gone on to exhibit across the world.
After living in both London and Spain, the pair made the move back to Windermere following the birth of their son in the early 2000s, who they wanted to live close to his cousins.
Rebecca said setting up the gallery felt like a way to connect with London, a place where the pair had previously built their careers and lives.
Rebecca said: “One of my main reason’s for doing the gallery was to bring up artists from London and international artists that I got to work with while I was a London artist, so we didn’t feel quite so in the North on a limb, in the mist and clouds.
“It’s a little bit of Hoxton, because it’s a white cube space, I like that contrast of the white cube London space in Kendal. But we haven’t really advertised or publicised ourselves, we like people to find us or hear about us through word of mouth.
“But I deliberately wanted to not show Lake District landscapes in that kind of traditional sense, and if I do show local artists, which I do, I put them alongside London artists and people from a range of backgrounds.”
Rebecca and Mark also have a small sister gallery in London, on Vestry Street and in both galleries, they feature artists from across the world.
On top of their own work and curating exhibitions for the galleries they also host the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award – widely considered the most significant award for emerging artists working in the field of sculpture in the UK.
The award was set up by Rebecca’s philanthropist mother Prudence, in memory of Mark who was a British sculptor and friend of Rebecca’s that died in 1998.
He suffered with haemophilia and died after battling a long illness from contaminated blood.
The award officially launched in 2001 to keep Mark’s passion and enthusiasm for art alive, with full sponsorship from a private charitable trust set up by Rebecca’s mother.
Rebecca now represents the trust and supports the award after her mother died in 2019 and the Kendal gallery has formed part of the award’s touring programme since 2018.
Both Rebecca and Mark said they felt bringing contemporary art to Kendal and making it accessible was important to them.
Mark added: “I think it’s quite interesting to bring contemporary art up here, some people love it and some people don’t and that’s the way of it.”
Formula + Fetish will remain open to visitors until June 28 before it will change into Confluences on July 18.
Confluences will feature the work of 14 other artists who have inspired Mark and his creative process.
Both exhibitions are free to attend.
