Vintage works

THE first thing you notice about the Glenfiddich distillery is the warm, malty aroma which percolates around the buildings. If you were in any doubt about what is made here, one sniff would put you straight. But it isn't just whisky that's been distilling here these past three months.

This little corner of Speyside has become a hotbed of artistic creativity. Six artists and a musician, from as far afield as South Africa and Taiwan, have been in residence here since June. With little fine weather to distract them, they've been working, working, working.

For the last six years, the distillery has been home to one of the most innovative artist residency programmes in the country. Artists are selected internationally, then receive travel and accommodation, a generous stipend and a materials budget, and spend three months working at the site.

Launching the programme in 2002, the owners of Glenfiddich, William Grant & Sons, one of the last family-run distillers in Scotland, renovated workers' cottages on the estate to house the artists and turned the former souvenir shop into a gallery. Previous residents have included Alison Watt (it was at Glenfiddich that she painted in red for the first time), Ross Sinclair, Christine Borland, Louise Hopkins and Rosalind Nashashibi.

For the distillery, the programme is about creating a more modern image for the product and building a collection of contemporary art (the owners retain one piece by each artist), but the company knows that most visitors to Speyside are more interested in the distillery tour and a nip of the world's best-selling malt than international contemporary art.

They're taking the long view, using the project as a way to build international connections - it's no coincidence this year's artists come from countries which are key markets for whisky: North America, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan and China.

Arts project manager Andy Fairgrieve says: "Making whisky is a long process which involves many years of maturation, and that's an interesting timescale for understanding an art project. The brand's new slogan is 'Every year counts' - that's as relevant for art as for whisky."

And for the artists, this hands-off approach creates an absence of pressure - and they are not expected to make work directly inspired by whisky-making. One of this year's residents, Canada's Jonathan Kaiser, says: "Often artists are wary of the corporate environment, but I haven't felt anyone pushing me to make a certain type of art. Everything Glenfiddich has said has led me to believe that they want to invest in the artists, there are no parameters."

This year, the distillery reviewed the programme's first five years and introduced a few changes. The artists' stipend has been increased, but all artists are asked to stay for the full three months. This might exclude some more high-profile artists, who have in the past done shorter residencies.

Fairgrieve also plans to extend the programme to include musicians, writers and performers, beginning this summer with musician and composer John Kenny. Fairgrieve says: "Sometimes when you're doing something that seems to be working OK, the greatest pressure is to leave it alone. That to me is the greatest danger, because it can become stale."

Look closely as you walk around Glenfiddich and you start to notice that more is going on than making whisky: a wire fence decorated with strips of coloured plastic is a lasting legacy of Spanish artist Cassandra Constant, who was here last summer. And in the staff car park there is a Ford Escort with a lamppost grafted through its bonnet: when it gets dark the headlamps come on instead of the streetlight.

This is Junction, a new work by one of this year's artists, Barcelona-based Luis Bisbe. "I try to do something extraordinary in a place where we go every day," he says. "If you go to a gallery you're expecting everything. I want to make people think a little, look a bit harder."

And in a corner of a bonded warehouse where Glenfiddich's premium brands are maturing slowly in their oak casks, there is a barrel with a broom tucked behind it. On closer inspection, you realise it's a barrel with a broom grafted through it. This is Intrusion, by Bisbe. It is filled with spirit which will mature in 12 years (tight regulations mean that it can't be called whisky).

"Things get fused together, like Dufftown and whisky," he says. "This kind of attachment that together makes a new thing. I wanted to force that link. This residency has been very positive for me. A lot of my work consists in getting permission to do things. Here the scale is shorter: if I want to do something in the middle of that field, I can know today.

"There is freedom to develop new ideas here. Very few visitors here are interested in contemporary art and that gives you a special freedom to experiment with certain things, you don't feel you are going to be judged. I've enjoyed everything except the weather, but there's nothing Glenfiddich can do about that."

Work for a prolonged period in a remote location has been a chance for serious productivity for many of this year's artists. At home, Yao Jui Chung from Taiwan juggles art-making with work as a curator and critic. At Glenfiddich, he drew constantly, producing 30 large drawings meticulously worked in biro and golf leaf. The style is Eastern, but the humour often Scottish.

Godfrey Majadibodu from Johannesburg became a well-known face around Dufftown, drawing on the fabric of the town and distillery life for his work, as he has on the colourful markets of the townships back home.

New York-based Romeo Alaeff, who combines his art with a day job in animation for children's television, says Glenfiddich was a rare chance to devote all his time to art. "This is the first time I've had since graduate school where I've had so much time to focus on art. I can't explain how happy that makes me as an artist," he says.

Recommended to Glenfiddich by the associate curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, he is currently working on a print series called War on the Brain, which fuses layers of images together into semi-abstract shapes which resemble Rorschach ink-blot tests. Before coming to Glenfiddich he had made two. Now he has completed another five.

"The work has developed quite a bit," he says. "It's when you have consistent, continuous days when you can work with something day and night that things really start to develop. It's much harder to do piecemeal. Three months seems like a long time but I wish it were longer. In three months you're just getting your feet wet."

And Jonathan Kaiser says that back home in Edmonton, Alberta, he works in a restaurant "to pay for my art habit". "The last project I did cost about 6,000 Canadian dollars [2,980], the artist's fee was about 500 dollars [250], most projects are like that. This has been overwhelmingly positive for me."

Not sure at first what work he would make, his imagination was captured by a story he found in the distillery's archives. On New Year's Eve 1887, just a week after the first drops of whisky were drawn at Glenfiddich, the son of the founder, William Grant, dropped the switcher (the broom he was using to stir the foam back into the whisky) into the vat, and sent his sisters, Ella and Meta, running through the snow at midnight to fetch their father.

"There were these fairytale elements in the story. I used that as a point of departure to talk about fairytales and tall tales." The result was a series of elaborate "pop-up book" pages, using folded paper to create night-time woodland scenes populated by origami rabbits.

"Some of the other artists have seen deer on the estate but all I've seen is tonnes of rabbits, so I picked them for my muses. It took a while to get them right," he says, nodding to a pile of discarded paper behind his chair. "That's the rabbit graveyard."

Approaching John Kenny's cottage, in the shadow of Balvenie Castle, I hear the sound of two trombones: Kenny is at one end of the house, his son Patrick at the other. The Edinburgh-based musician and composer was delighted to be invited for a residency.

"It's been a lovely summer. This is my 50th year and this has been a very nice way to take stock, combining my functions as a performer, composer and teacher through the medium of this residency," he says. "I'm very proud to have done it, very grateful for the opportunity. I've been very busy but in between this intense busyness it's been marvellous to have the tranquillity of this cottage to write and produce.

"I think all arts programmes and creative spaces need to develop by drawing on other art forms. I would love to be here with a poet or a playwright, it would make the richness of the interactions even greater."

But, he says, the programme needs to be more flexible for musicians, though Glenfiddich allowed him to bring in other musicians to work with (leading to performances in Dufftown by the European Trombone Ensemble and Carnyx Youth Brass) and to perform elsewhere, spreading his residency over a longer period. A piece he composed at Glenfiddich, Balvenie Castle, premiered at Glasgow's Proms in the Park last month.

His current project is a "gentle" collaboration with Chinese artist Ding Jie, who comes to the door of her cottage smiling and asking me to call her "Ding-Ding". "To me this is a difference place, a different culture, a difference language, different people. It is an opportunity to know more things," she says.

As well as drawing, taking photographs and working on installations using found objects, she was inspired by Balvenie Castle and its melancholy atmosphere, and will bring it alive again in an "evening of enchantment" using fabric, shadows and John Kenny's music on carnyx and trombone. "I want to make some work like somebody still lives in the castle," she explains.

Kenny says: "I and the instruments that I play will be spirits, ghosts in the castle. The sound world we create will be transient, something you catch out of the corner of your ear. The castle is a shell, but a shell with a tremendous atmosphere and a beautiful acoustic."

The performance, at dusk on 29 September, will round off a prolific summer, and herald the start of the quiet winter months. But Fairgrieve isn't worried. Here, things operate on whisky time. His verdict on the residency project? "It's maturing nicely."