Hospitalfield

Hospitalfield, on the east coast of Scotland, just outside the town of Arbroath, is a residence for artists. Set in an agricultural landscape, within view of the North Sea, it has a remarkable history that goes back at least eight centuries, a place where landscape, art and history are closely bound together.
It started life in the 13th century as a hospital, built by monks to provide for pilgrims on their way to the nearby Arbroath Abbey. In the intervening centuries, Scotland has undergone profound social and cultural changes and Hospitalfield too continues to reinvent its vocation.
The radical alteration of form and function in the 19th century was led by the artist Patrick Allan-Fraser and his wife Elizabeth Fraser. The couple transformed their home into a house dedicated to art, designing and revitalising it as a space that encouraged creativeness, sharing and dialogue between artists.
Having passed from private home to international artists’ residence, Hospitalfield conserves traces of the generations who have lived there, nurturing an idea of art as a living thing that can also be expressed through daily practice and community participation.
With its elaborate Arts and Crafts style architecture and small studios, old and new, within sight of the sea, walled gardens and richly decorated interiors, Hospitalfield is a cultural crucible which is unique in the panorama of British institutions: a lived-in house where global communities of artists and thinkers meet to work, interrelate and share a sheltered and creative period of time.
Through the personal accounts of people who live at Hospitalfield and look after it, the film sets out to tell the story of the place as a living organism: a space in which not even the past is static, but continues to interact with the present through the viewpoint of artists, landscape designers, architects, volunteers and visitors who come and stay or are just passing through.