When we look back on 2024 from a distance in years to come, there is no doubt that for many, it will be remembered as a tragically difficult year, one marked by events beyond their control. From the heartbreaking loss of life and destruction in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, to the relentless exploitation of populations by autocratic regimes in countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, to the rise of divisive populist leaders spreading hate in the US, Hungary, Scandinavia, and Germany. The question we face now is whether this period will be remembered as a descent into deeper human self-destruction—or whether we can pull back from the brink. These are big and daunting questions—almost overwhelming when viewed from the perspective of our daily lives in a small corner of the world.
At The Stove, we’ve always approached such challenges by ‘digging where we stand’—focusing on making a positive impact within the world we can influence with the hope that multiple local efforts can, over time, connect and grow into something much larger. Our work is about involving people, connecting ideas, and using creativity to empower individuals to have a voice in the world around them, and to make positive change in their lives and communities. I believe this approach is foundational to pushing back against the rise of populism in our country, and perhaps it can serve as an example to others. Populism thrives on feelings of exclusion and disconnection—allowing manipulative leaders to exploit alienation and sow division. But we can resist this by doing the opposite: by including, involving, and creating opportunities for people to engage in positive change in the world around them.
These are big thoughts for the end of a tough year, but hopefully they can serve as a strong base for the new year. This requires collaboration and connection with other groups and individuals striving for a common goal. None of us can do this alone.
Looking back on 2024, I hope we can take pride in the small steps we are making in this big world. This year, we’ve hosted 264 public activities, reaching a total audience of 10,417 and engaging 6,835 active participants. We’ve also awarded 178 contracts to creative freelancers, totalling £187,000—42% of which were to people we had not commissioned before, and 31% to individuals under 25.
As we reflect on these figures and the impact of our work, we are reminded of the vital role that creativity plays in creating change. At our AGM earlier this month, we shared highlights from the past year and our ambitions for the year to come:
Looking ahead to 2025, like many Scottish arts organisations, we are awaiting Creative Scotland’s Multi-Year Funding decision at the end of January with a mix of nervousness and hope. Whatever the outcome, we’ll make the best of it and are excited about the key initiatives we’ve planned for the year ahead.
It just remains to say a huge thank you, from all of us at The Stove, to everyone we’ve had the pleasure of working with this year—whether a participant, a collaborator, a partner (local, national, or international), a Stove member or supporter, or a Trustee. We deeply value every connection and are continually inspired by the commitment and passion of all those we work alongside.
Wishing you all peace and happiness as we welcome the new year, however you choose to celebrate. Here’s to another year of positivity, collaboration, and mutual support.
We got stuck straight into our first Creative Spaces project at the start of August, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we had a ball with it. We wanted our installation to examine the ideas of imposter syndrome in creativity and dissect what it is that makes a person creative. And so, the Inspiration Donation was born. It went through a couple of iterations before reaching its final form, but we were all dead chuffed with the final installation. We started off by going on a wee adventure to the local garden centres to check out clear containers (we did get briefly distracted by the fish on display at Heathhall Garden Centre) and had a roam about the Range to get the rest of our supplies together.
We worked together on four panels of collage to demonstrate how we hoped the final product would look – we experimented with creating stencils for these too, along with the ‘feed me’ stencils that went up on the walls. It was great to start working together on some artwork, it was a fun way of bonding and building each other up as a team. The installation went up with the help of Stovie & artist Katie Anderson, who offered her expertise and guided us through the process. We had some brilliant donations from the Stove team after we had added our own inspirational pieces in (some Blu Tack, a feather and a funky rock), such as a vintage toy car, a post-it note that read ‘Sparkle Baby’, and a map of the town.
Our Conversing Building project was a super fun introduction to our roles at Creative Spaces. It was my first opportunity to work collaboratively on a creative project with other young creatives, something that felt quite daunting at first is now something I’m looking forward to doing more of in the future.
James
The Conversing Building project pushed us straight out the gate to create something that represented us, and in turn our community in Dumfries. It helped us work as a team and realise where some of our strengths lie”
Sonah
Conversing Building was a really interesting jumping off point for our time with Creative Spaces. Working on this project taught us how we fit together as a team, and got the ball rolling with our style and approach.
Anna
Creative Spaces is a Dumfries-based collective of young creatives, working with and advocating for our region’s young artists.
Situated in the heart of Dumfries, Creative Spaces collaborates with young creatives from across the region, providing young people with opportunities to engage in the arts. Whether it’s through events, workshops, mentorships, or our annual Associates Programme, we aim to enhance Dumfries and Galloway’s creative scene by offering free access to opportunities and paid commissions.
Keep up to date with the Creative Spaces team on Instagram: @creative.spaces_
An update on the next phase of Stranraer’s waterfront development project by Maya Rose Edwards.
The Stove and Creative Stranraer have been commissioned by Dumfries and Galloway Council to use creative placemaking techniques to involve the local communities of Stranraer in the rethinking of the town’s waterfront spaces as part of a major regeneration effort following the ending of the ferry service to Belfast in 2011.
In November 2023 we commissioned artist Maya Rose Edwards as artist-in-residence for the waterfront – Maya’s brief was to use their creative practice to reach out to diverse communities in the town and seek their thoughts and ideas about the kind of waterfront they’d like to see for the town. This initial phase of the project was very successful – ending in a public festival day called Raising the Sails. We were delighted that DG Council have integrated a creative placemaking approach into the continuation of the One Waterfront project and we were able to bring Maya back to the town for a second stage of work. This is their first blog on returning to Stranraer.
Watch the Raising the Sails film by CT Productions HERE.
In the initial Harbour project we engaged with nearly 900 local individuals and 27 community groups to get people’s thoughts about the kind of waterfront they would like to see for the town. I am now homing in on one aspect of the proposals – a new area of ‘reclaimed’ land between the slipway and the East Pier which will be formed using the material dredged from Loch Ryan to make the harbour area deep enough for larger boats to use the marina.
Location of ‘Harbourland’ marked with X
Site specific research/concept realisation
My hope is that Harbourland will be a new piece of Scottish coastline built from the ground up using community ideas and creative inspirations taken from the locality. I have commenced the initial research process thinking about the nature of the land itself – the dredged Loch Ryan sediment. Sediment is an essential component of natural cycles and ecosystems it it acts as a constantly changing barrier between the ocean and coastal communities. I’ve been considering ways in which that ‘barrier’ can instead increase our access to the coast and our connection to the water itself. Turning the tide towards a future where the communities in Stranraer are more connected to their coastal culture and its ecosystems.
I’ve also been thinking about oysters. The Loch Ryan oyster beds are a rare and unique feature of this coastline, and something of great pride for the communities of Stranraer. Oysters themselves are natural dredgers, with each individual oyster filtering over 50 gallons of water per day. Once an oyster attaches to a bed, it grows and forms around the surface it attaches to. It’s like starting a rubber band ball, the oyster needs an initial surface to attach to, but once they start growing, they can transform an artificial reef into a natural one. The question I am asking myself is – how can we act like the oyster to build an infrastructure that benefits both the toon and the coastal biodiversity? What are the types of ‘surfaces’ that communities in Stranraer can attach to and make their own? How can harbours and sea walls become landmarks of heritage value for communities of the future?
With this site-specific research underway, I’ve began to combine the visual languages of the geologic coastal sediment and the organic processes of the oyster bed to develop sketches of landforms, tributaries and coastlines for the Harbourland proposal.
Co-design and collaboration
With initial sketches starting to take shape, I then began to meet with local folk, organisations and marine researchers who were key partners within Phase 1 of the Harbour project for their input. We have all sat down around a large acetate map and plotted might be needed within this new piece of Stranraer. Some of the feedback included practical requirements for community events, lighting, recycling and growing facilities, etc, all of which have been drawn up and incorporated within the wider design.
As a part of the co-design process, I am putting together a programme of creative engagement activities and events to further inform the proposal for Harbourland and provoke the imaginations of those who have not yet been reached by the project. The commencement of this programme is now underway, with the first interactive installation due to take place at this year’s Oyster Festival.
Harbourland polling station
Oyster shells were historically used as the first ever ‘ballot cards’ during the early days of democracy in Ancient Greece. Communities would cast their shells to announce/denounce happenings within their towns and villages. At this year’s Oyster Festival, the talented guys at the Rhins Mens Shed and I have created the ‘Harbourland polling station’ to bring this tradition back to modern-day Stranraer.
During the Festival, the shells of millions of oysters consumed over the weekend are collected for re-distribution back into the Loch. These shells then form the basis for new growth and the continuation of the native beds. This year before their redistribution, the empty shells will be collected to form a part of an interactive public consultation for ‘Harbourland.’ This 3-metre polling station will hold large clear box sections, within which people will cast their shells in vote for specific features they’d like to see on the land – much like your little blue tokens at Tesco! This data will be recorded to further inform the design proposal and initiate important conversations about what matters to people most. From interactive play structures to a sheltered place to sit and bide a while – this will be the first and most public opportunity to engage in the co-design process.
Siltcrete trials
I will also be undertaking several material trials. I have been working with the form of the Oyster shell as a sculptural reference point, exaggerating its topographical layers to create tiered island structures. These forms also reference harbour staircases, where ecological growth can be tracked through tidal fluctuations.
I have been experimenting with use of the Loch Ryan seabed aggregate (a mixture of Grey Wacke, shale and Red Sandstone) for use within sustainable building materials, leading me to create ‘Siltcrete’. I have been researching the many ways in which architects, sculptors and engineers have been developing organic material composites towards a sustainable future. Due to the rich mineral content of the dredged seabed, the incorporation of this material into the foundations of Harbourland should greatly improve the biodiversity we’re hoping to achieve.
From hand carved sculptures cast in silicone to form a mould, I have been creating ‘Siltcrete Harbours’ from a mixture of cement, local beach sand and coastal aggregate. I have formed a relationship with marine biologists at the Solway Firth Partnership who have offered to formulate a report at the end of the installation period to track the ecological growth in the harbour, on the siltcrete and within this topographical form. This should form a key piece of research within the wider proposal for Harbourland.
Siltcrete experiments installed on the harbour steps
Until next time
Over the next few months as we move into Autumn, residents of Stranraer should expect more opportunities to engage in the Harbourland proposal programme, beginning with a sandcastle competition on Agnew Park beach on Saturday 28th September. All participants will receive a free ‘Stranraer Oyster Bucket’ inspired by the topographical sculptural trials. Over the course of the afternoon, we will fill the coastline with a community oyster bed of inspired organic structures! Prizes will be available, see poster below for further details.
If you want to find out more about the Harbourland proposal programme or the context of the project, please contact Maya on [email protected]
A Gathering of Young Creative Freelancers at the Creative Spaces Showcase 2023
A Gathering of Young Creative Freelancers at the Creative Spaces Showcase 2023 | Photo by Kirstin McEwan
A Joint Statement by CEO, Matt Baker and Board Chair, Lynsey Smith.
The Stove team and board of trustees were deeply shocked to learn this week of the imminent closure of Creative Scotland’s Open Project Fund for individual creative practitioners. The richness and diversity of the culture created in Scotland ultimately depend on individual practitioners. As a country and a culture, we are profoundly impoverished and damaged by the shutting off of this key source of support for the creation of artistic work and the survival of artists.
We’d like to express our committed solidarity with the freelance creative sector and, in particular, with people who have been developing projects for funding that now will not be able to proceed – this is a heartbreaking and existential situation for everyone who works in the creative sector.
The Stove sees itself as part of the regional support structure for the creative and community sectors in Dumfries & Galloway – if any of our members need help in progressing a project impacted by this decision, or have questions/ideas about what is going on and how to respond, then please do contact us, and we’ll do all we can to help.
We feel that it is important for all of us in the creative sector to stick together during these very difficult times. Moreover, we should stand in solidarity and work collaboratively to support all other sectors—Education, Communities, Local Authorities, Health, etc.—who find themselves in a similar predicament. What we are facing is the potential decimation of every aspect of our society that relies on public funding.
Two weeks ago, the Scottish Government announced that it could only guarantee to honour funding commitments that were legally binding; all others must be considered under question. This stance was prompted by the financial settlement imposed by the UK Government, which is announcing a similar stance regarding its own financial position. A narrative of resource scarcity persists across all levels of government, affecting us all—whether it be in healthcare, our children’s education, transport, or our cultural lives.
We must continue to fight for the value of culture and creativity at every opportunity—it is, we believe, the lifeblood of communities and an essential, uplifting force for good in individuals’ lives. However, we must also endeavour to form alliances and support networks with our workers across all sectors affected by this public funding crisis. If we all stand together it will be harder to pick us off group by group.
The Stove has worked tirelessly over the years to advocate for increased public investment in culture and creativity. We have pioneered new visions and approaches, contributed to numerous consultations, lobbied politicians, and spoken at Holyrood. At every opportunity, we emphasise the significance of culture within communities, particularly in a rural setting, and propose ideas for developing new revenue streams to bolster the prosperity of freelancers in Dumfries & Galloway—the foundation of our cultural life here.
We have championed the D&G Cultural Strategy and invested considerable time and resources into fostering the development of new mechanisms. These mechanisms, derived from this strategy, aim to inject additional income into the local creative economy. In 2023-24, we offered 180 individual commissions to local freelancers, collectively valued at over £200,000. Like many other organisations, we await news of our core funding from Creative Scotland. This week’s announcements underscore the complexity of these decisions and the importance of collaborating with our freelance community to devise a better system for everyone. Everything is interconnected, and our actions are inextricably linked.
We stand in solidarity with creatives everywhere and with public and third sector workers. Together, we must forge a better way to ensure that each individual is valued and supported within our society.
Well, this blog has changed already. I started some scribblings a couple of weeks ago and at that time I was still a member of the Board of Trustees at The Stove Network (TSN). Now I’m not. For me, that’s quite a big change!
At the AGM in February this year I bade farewell as Chair of TSN, a role I’d been in for almost nine years. As part of reporting what the board had been doing and how it had been changing over the year, I said I’d be stepping down, firstly as chair, then as a board member once we had a new chair in place. We were ready for change but wanted managed change, a transition. Sensible.
In a subsequent email to Lynsey Smith (now our wonderful new chair) I wrote that my experience on the board had been probably one of the most “fabulous, enticing, disruptive and creative experiences of my life,” In short, it had changed me. What I’d also seen was that The Stove too was changing and enriching the lived experience of even more people in and now beyond Dumfries.
I knew when I signed up for the board that it would be about organisational change and professional development and that the board had to stay alert, keep up, be water-tight in governance terms but also, importantly, not get in the way of the dynamics coming from our creative community and the people of the town.
I had a clear sense that what was happening in and from The Stove building was different. There was a palpable sense of energy and some urgency that I didn’t quite understand but soon realised it was being driven by the desire and need for change. It was coming from the people of the town, those involved in the many fresh and new projects and businesses in the town centre. It was also coming from a growing band of creative and energetic young people, many of whom were coming to or returning to the area after periods of work, study and travel elsewhere.
In industry they have ‘accelerator projects’ to nurture and bring to life innovative practices and ideas. I saw The Stove as Dumfries’s accelerator project for the creative industries and indeed for the town. I also saw The Stove equally as a creatively driven community development project which was increasingly supporting wider economic development aims in a very tangible way. There were risks too and that was a great thing.
In my previous life, I had been involved in some amazing creatively driven change programmes and projects, but they were often scattered in the towns and villages across the region and not happening to any lasting extent in Dumfries. There were of course a growing number of exceptions like Big Burns Supper, The Usual Place, the revamped Theatre Royal, the Dumfries end of Spring Fling and the D&G Arts Festival. But there was clearly much more creative potential to be unlocked in our regional capital.
I don’t intend to list the programmes, events and happenings that have come from TSN over those years, but for anyone who has spent any curious time in The Stove Cafe, you’ll have spotted that there’s more than great coffee and food happening.
There’s a real vibe and sense of creative energy in the place. I can always spot a ‘newie’ in The Cafe. Their coffee often gets cool as they chat, look around curiously, wonder what those people are doing going up and down those stairs, take in the latest exhibits or eavesdrop at that wee buzz of a meeting going on in the corner.
An hour in The Cafe is like a wee bit of performance art in itself. But there’s a warmth to it all. A welcoming. And a kind of urban-cool. It also feels different. As that 70’s anthem went “…something’s happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear…”
All of this is the very stuff of change. Any given hour in the daily life of that Cafe and building generates and emits change. Look into what happens in the evenings, in those upstairs rooms and in the creative productions that come out of the place, and you begin to understand what The Stove is, what it does and how it changes things.
The team have had now thousands of young people, businesses, creative and community practitioners, academics and folk from and beyond the town and region and country through those doors. Any trail through the published programmes of the last decade will be testimony to that. I urge you to have a look at the incredible and growing archives on the TSN website. If you caught Heather Taylor’s blog piece last month, you would have some feel for the next network driver: the “What We Do Now” creative placemaking network. An initiative that has all the makings of a paradigm shift.
So, what happens when an organisation that is driven by creative change and innovation faces a very real existential threat? Well, every such organisation, community and individual faced just such a challenge that lasted almost two years. That pandemic thing.
Almost overnight we all experienced enforced change. The personal, community and organisational turmoil and fear was very real. Some coped better than others. At our AGM this year and last, I found myself repeating that I still don’t think we have truly understood the implications of ‘what just happened’. I’m sure we all still are seeing ways in which social, personal and organisational norms and behaviours have changed, even through those pressures to ‘get back to normal’. But strike up any random discussion about COVID and you’ll find things are far from forgotten or back to normal.
I was truly in awe of what the team and membership of TSN achieved during and following those lost years. Rather than lock-down and close the curtains, The Stove adapted, accelerated its innovative capacity, went online, on to social media, big-time, and into print and set up a small but very significant virtual community experience that proved a real lifeline, not just for the creative sector, but for many in the community in general. Have a look at the Atlas Pandemica pages on the Stove website. As relevant now as ‘back then’!
As this piece goes out, we find ourselves again in one of those periods when political leaders predictably thrust upon us the word “change” as a wedge issue. “What we need now is change” vs “The last thing we need now is that kind of change”. Corny though it was, I rather liked Barack Obama’s take on the change thing:
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for: we are the change that we seek
Barack Obama
It’s something like that which drew me to The Stove Network. Now that I’ve gone, wrench that it was, I’m now a small part of that change. That’s what it’s all about! See?
A note from Lynsey Smith – Chair
‘Tony has played an instrumental part in the development of The Stove over the past eight years and has passed on a very steady ship to me. He has been of great support to me as I transitioned into the role of Chair and will remain a close friend to us all. He has taught us many things on his journey, most significantly his ability to make everyone feel part of something, his flat hierarchical approach and gentle nature. Thank you, Tony, from the bottom of our hearts.’
The Stove’s CEO, Matt Baker, recently participated in a summit between Scottish Government and COSLA (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities) called ‘Connections and Partnerships: The Value of Culture in Communities’.
The aim of the event was to encourage partnership working in culture, at local and national level, to support cultural activity at community level.
Exploring challenges, opportunities, and potential actions for change, the event was also attended by some cultural leaders to inform discussions.
Angus Robertson MSP Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture introducing the event.
We caught up with Matt to find out what he was chatting about and how the idea of shining a spotlight on ‘Cultural Value’ can positively impact those working in the creative, social, environmental, and economic sectors at local level.
Matt’s talk followed a presentation by Inverclyde Council about their Culture Collective project 2021-23.
(Culture Collective is rightly celebrated in Scotland, and beyond, as an innovative new approach to connecting national and local cultural opportunity for communities).
‘Like Inverclyde, Dumfries and Galloway had a Culture Collective project which built capacity in community groups to work with creative practitioners to support their work in communities, particularly people and places that had been hard to reach previously.
WWDN Culture Collective Project for Dumfries and Galloway
The legacy of this project for Dumfries and Galloway is the WWDN network which was formally launched earlier this year. This is a vision of our region working together to share resources, capacity and knowledge, using culture to benefit communities.
The principle is that community anchor groups are supported to build experience in working with creative practitioners.
Different communities work together on joint initiatives and all this activity will support a population of local creative freelancers and small cultural organisations.
Community groups and creative practitioners are members of WWDN and use the network to develop new projects and share best practice etc.’
Matt then turned to the practice of Creative Placemaking as an example of one working methodology which can support partnership working across different sectors at local level and draw new support for culture into communities.
‘This approach builds on 12 years of work by The Stove implementing creative placemaking practice in Dumfries town centre.
Our work centres on a simple idea; to use creativity as a tool to support community-led change. Change for individuals, for groups, for social enterprises and for places in their entirety through place planning and the like.
At The Stove we call this ‘Grow Your Own Culture’, a belief in the intrinsic value of participation in creativity, that people making their own culture is equally as important as consuming culture made by other people. This approach often leads to unexpected outcomes right across the spread of social, economic and environmental impact.
In Dumfries, creative projects with communities shaped a conversation across the town about its future, and critically how local people could be involved in making that future. To cut a very long story short, this led to a campaign to ‘buy back our high street’, which became the Midsteeple Quarter project.
Now, five high street buildings are in community ownership and are being developed by the community with over £10M inward investment to date.
What has also become clear through this work is that forming partnerships and bringing culture into collaboration, with other placemaking agencies, helps the creative sector to thrive. In the last year The Stove has cascaded partnership projects to local creative freelancers with 180 individual commissions worth over £200,000 in total.
This year, with South of Scotland Enterprise, The Stove released ‘A Creative Placemaking Approach’ which is published on a creative commons licence and free for anyone to use.
The document aims to lay out a methodology for creative placemaking so that the opportunities and impacts for partnership working across different sectors are clear, and local authorities, for example, feel confident to approach cultural partners about potential collaborations on placemaking projects in health, education, community development, innovation, regeneration and place planning’
Highlighting recent developments in Dumfries and Galloway with the Local Authority taking a creative placemaking approach to connecting larger strategies for economic development with communities on the ground through a place-based approach, Matt went on to talk about practical examples of this work in practice.
This diagram from the publication gives an idea of the spread of impacts from partnership working with the creative sector in the context of place.
Creative Placemaking Impact Diagram – From ‘A Creative Placemaking Approach 2024’
‘We believe this area of work has huge potential for connecting culture with other sectors through the shared agenda of placemaking for the benefit of both.
By way of example – the Economic Development department at Dumfries and Galloway Council is seeing the cultural sector as a vital bridge between strategic infrastructure planning and local communities.
With the advent of Levelling Up and Community Empowerment it is now critical to national funding that communities are directly involved in the design of capital projects – yet in D+G there is a wide gulf between economic development and the grassroots of communities.
In Stranraer, cultural organisations have been commissioned by the council to conduct creative community engagement which is giving less-heard communities a voice in the shaping and delivery of the capital development of the former harbour area and a former hotel on the High Street.
Discussions are also underway about using creative activities as catalyst to bring communities together to develop new ideas which feed into the economic development pipeline.
This work has proved so successful that six weeks ago, Dumfries and Galloway Council advertised, what we believe is, the UK’s first ‘Creative Placemaking Framework’ to enable the council to more easily procure the services of local arts organisations to undertake creative placemaking work.
Of course, there are challenges but it was very encouraging to see this area of work highlighted in the recent National Culture Strategy Action Plan (see S7) and I hope a greater understanding between COSLA and Scottish Government will play a significant part in delivering parts of that action plan.
Matt Baker is CEO and one of the founders of The Stove (est. 2011). The Stove was a progression of his practice as a public artist. Through his career Matt became increasingly concerned with the potential for creative process to empower communities. He sees The Stove as a long-term experiment in embedding a creative resource within a community – the work is a co-directed journey with local people and Matt remains completely absorbed and fascinated by where that journey is leading.
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