Art and sport run side by side at the Bupa Great North Run. DAVID WHETSTONE reports on the cultural attractions linked to this year’s event
THE artist Cerith Wyn Evans spent yesterday scouting locations for a major new installation in Sunderland. Meanwhile performance poet Kate Fox is working with children in seven schools in Newcastle, Gateshead and South Shields.
Both are vital contributors to this year’s Bupa Great North Run cultural programme (officially known now as Great North Run Culture), a regional example of what the 2012 Cultural Olympiad aspires to be.
Great North Run Culture (GNRC) was boosted earlier this year by being granted coveted National Portfolio status by the Arts Council, guaranteeing funding until 2015.
It has enabled director Beth Bate to think ahead and with even greater ambition.
“We are enjoying working with the Cultural Olympiad but come 2013 the Olympic Games will be over and the Great North Run will very definitely still be here,” she said yesterday.
“We will remain fully embedded within the region and nationally. The Arts Council’s decision was a huge boost for us and made us feel the work we do was being appreciated by audiences and funders who wanted to see more of it.”
Since it began in 2005 with the keen support of Brendan Foster, GNRC has built up a significant body of work ranging over different art forms.
Artists, film-makers, writers and dancers are among those who have responded to the spectacle of 50,000-plus people running, jogging or wheelchair riding from Newcastle to South Shields.
You might remember Jane and Louise Wilson, Newcastle-born twins and stars of the contemporary art world, and their 2005 film Broken Time, responding to landmarks along the route including Gateshead’s now vanished concrete multi-storey car park.
Also embedded in the memory might be photographer Julian Germain’s The Running Line, a 2007 installation in Gateshead’s Saltwell Park featuring 139,000 photos taken by run spectators and others during the previous year’s race.
