Tucked away in the lanes above the Cotswold market town of Nailsworth in Gloucestershire, UK, is the Hide, an artist retreat hosted by Alice Sheppard Fidler and her husband, Piers Leigh.
Sheppard Fidler, herself an artist and founding member of Studio Voltaire in the 1990s, moved out to Gloucestershire a decade ago with young children in tow, renovating a 1960s bungalow with Leigh, a director of photography. It was an idyll, but one she found isolating after the hubbub of working as a set designer for film and TV. It was graduating from an MA in fine art from the University of the West of England, Bristol, during lockdown in 2020 that really prompted her to create an artistic community of her own.
“I realised that, as someone on their second career, as a working mother, holding it all together, I needed friends, allies,” Sheppard Fidler tells The Art Newspaper. “I’d just finished my Masters in Bristol but there was no degree show due to lockdown so it just fizzled out. I needed to find my artist group.”
So, in 2022, when exhibiting inside was still difficult because of Covid-19 precautions, Sheppard Fidler invited a group of artists to exhibit sculptures around her garden. The Hide Installation and Sculpture Showcase (THISS) is now an annual event. This year’s ran over two weekends in June, with ten artists from London and across the south-west responding to the theme of adaptable matter, and the environmental implications of making permanent sculpture today. Artists included Jessica Akerman (a Bristol-based artist who now works on the project), Barbara Beyer, Flora Bradwell, Luke Chin-Joseph, Will Cruickshank, Liz Elton, Chantal Powell, Valentino Vannini, Andrea V. Wright and Sheppard Fidler.
This is the first year that Sheppard Fidler has secured Arts Council funding for THISS, which is part of the Site Festival around the Stroud Valleys. “I need to be able to pay people and pay the artists because I’m so fed up that artists do so much for no money, it feels like we’re propping up the art world,” Sheppard Fidler says. “[The funding] means everyone is getting a fee and it enabled me to deliver [art] workshops in Gloucester with two youth charities.”
Beyond the annual sculpture show, the owners of The Hide open up their home to month-long residencies for visual artists, film-makers, writers, dancers and musicians Courtesy: The Hide
Around 400 visitors attend THISS each year, both locals and those from London, Oxford, Cardiff, Bristol and Birmingham—“a committed audience of pros and amateurs,” Sheppard Fidler says. “They love the fact that, with the London art community often being gatekeepers, artists are using their geographical disadvantages to create their own ecosystems.”
The rest of the year, Sheppard Fidler and Leigh open up their home and the adjoining live-work studio to creatives—whether visual artists, film-makers, writers, dancers or musicians—for month-long residencies. “I’ve made this place my home, my family space, my studio, my networking venue,” says Sheppard Fidler, whose own studio is within the open-plan kitchen and dining room.
The couple now want to expand the model and have been speaking to the local council about finding a building to facilitate more residencies. “We’ve seen what Hauser & Wirth has done for Bruton, and there isn’t anywhere like that here,” Sheppard Fidler says. “It could become commercial but that’s not the initial idea. Around here, it looks wealthy but the local creative scene is not being nurtured. That’s our pitch to the council—they have to look after and nurture the artists they’ve got, that is our future success.”
