Somerset Art Weeks: art's democratic free-for-all This informal affair is administered by an artist-led group called Somerset Art Works, founded nearly 20 years ago to provide support services for anyone painting, sculpting, weaving, potting or printing in the county. It's been hugely successful in banging the drum, opening up opportunities and developing networks, as well as commissioning special projects and programmes with schools and the disaffected young. This is precisely the sort of grass-roots organisation that the government's agenda of self-helping localism should be encouraging: yet although local authorities, one-off grants from foundations and membership fees provide some income, it's the tireless efforts and enthusiasm of volunteers and an over-worked, under-paid skeleton staff that provide the bedrock. Somerset Art Weeks isn't formally curated: rather on the model of the Edinburgh Fringe, it's more like a democratic free-for-all, open to the participation of anyone who pays the modest entry dues. Much of what you see in a wide variety of venues and premises in towns and villages from Porlock to Pilton will be humble and, in the best sense, amateur, but the overall impression it leaves is of an area buzzing with pleasurable energy and creativity. One highlight of this year's programme is an exhibition called Make the Most, held at the National Trust property of Barrington Court (near Ilminster), famous for its richly mature gardens and orchards. The rambling Tudor house which overlooks them is now empty of furniture, but in partnership with the National Trust and Craftspace, Somerset Art Works has commissioned five distinguished craftspeople to fill some of its rooms with pieces inspired by local natural materials and processed through Somerset ateliers and suppliers, all of whom work with traditional tools and techniques. Maeve Clancy tells the history of Barrington in paper cut-outs woven from linen and cotton milled in Watchet; Garry Allson carves from oak sourced from the Barrington estate; Laura Youngson Coll weaves fantasies out of leather cut by the legendary glovemakers Burfield's in Martock; while Thomas Appleton sculpts in reclaimed Hamstone masonry. Most striking of all is what Laura Ellen Bacon has woven from sweet-smelling Musgrove Willow, harvested from the Levels at Westonzoyland and patiently knotted together by hand. Bacon's thicket of intricately curlicued tracery fills the whole of Barrington's Old Kitchen, evoking the fairy-tale forest that magically surrounds the Sleeping Beauty or some primitive form of life mushrooming under a microscope like a virus without head or tail.