The Big Question: Is there really a Cornish culture, and does it deserve promotion?

Why are we asking this now?

Because Cornwall, the home of surfing, pasties and Rick Stein, has been awarded £350,000 of European Union money to help finance its bid to put itself on the cultural map. Britain's most southerly county has campaigned for almost five years for a Europe-wide scheme to celebrate culture in the continent's often neglected rural areas.

"Rural regions account for about 80 per cent of Europe's landmass and 25 per cent of its population," says Miranda Bird, director of European Regions of Culture Campaign Organisation (EROCCO), which hopes Cornwall will become one of the first Regions of Culture, "yet when you talk to people outside Cornwall, they only think of beaches, pasties and ice cream."

What is the case for regarding Cornwall as a region of culture? ...more>

All fired-up in St Ives

'It has been a sign-writing workshop, a knitting factory, all sorts of things. And now it’s going to be a working pottery once more.” Jack Doherty leans over the wet, mushroom-pale pot he has been working on, holding a razor blade in one clay-covered hand, and with a deft movement makes an incision, like the barb on a strand of wire. The mild-mannered pot suddenly looks disquietingly edgy.
Doherty is the lead potter at the newly-restored Leach Pottery in St Ives, set on a sliver of land between the rushing Stennack River and the road down into town. It was set up in 1920 by Bernard Leach, one of the great potters of the 20th century, with the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada (who stayed for three years). Their ideas came as a shock to a Britain used to porcelain from Stoke-on-Trent: Leach pottery was sturdy and sensuous, using powerful, sombre glazes. The new museum shows a dark dish with a mysterious figure walking towards peaks of dripping glaze; a blue-and-grey quartered bottle decorated with red characters; a simple bowl with a single line around the inner rim... more>

How Mark Rothko became an Anglophile

Even as he won over his fellow New Yorkers, Mark Rothko remained the angry outsider. Yet he fell for the people and town of St Ives – and the feeling was mutual. As a new Tate show opens, our critic profiles a tormented genius... more>

Roger Hilton at Kettle's Yard

"Who is this Roger Hilton?" asked NY Arts magazine in 1953. Today you could be forgiven for asking the same question. If Roger Hilton (1911-1975) had been born on the other side of the Atlantic and been active there during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, he would enjoy the same renown as Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko and co. But in post-war Britain, when US artists were influencing most of his peers, the non-conformist Hilton looked no further than the European tradition.

This he was able to convert into what he termed "a new sort of figuration; one which is more true". Lesser known than other members of the St Ives clan, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron, Hilton is the unsung hero of the abstract art to emerge from Cornwall in the 1950s and 1960s...more>

Bernard Leach Pottery to become international centre of excellence

The internationally renowned Bernard Leach Pottery in St Ives, which reopened its doors to the public on March 6 following a £1.7 million transformation, is set to become an international centre of excellence celebrating the life and influence of its creator Bernard Leach... more>