Pavement invasion was last week’s Back 2 Back Dumfries project for Guid Nychburris Day 2013. Music by the Luke Barlow Band – Tetherdown.
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Back 2 Back Dumfries
Join Us for Back 2 Back Dumfries: A Day of Street Art and Community Celebration!

The Stove Network is taking to the streets for Guid Nychburris Day – Saturday, 15th June – with a DIY street art event on Dumfries High Street.
The large-scale pavement drawing will map out a contemporary identity for the town, with imagery and stencil designs being developed in partnership with the local youth group YES (the Youth Enquiry Service), which is celebrating its 20th year.
The work is temporary and will be made on-site, building up over the course of the day. With stencils and spray chalk on hand, The Stove invites aspiring artists of all ages to participate and contribute by making their mark on our map.
Back 2 Back Dumfries will take place between 12pm and 4pm on Saturday, 15th June, alongside the rest of the annual festivities taking place this year.
The weekend saw The Stove Building come to life with the University of West of Scotland’s (UWS) Annual Student Showcase – running from 9am to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday.

The Showcase is an integral part of the BA Applied Enterprise (Creative Industries) students’ experience and provides an opportunity to come together and celebrate the fruits of the academic year.
It was pleasing to see the Stove Building being used by a group of very talented young adults who injected life and vibrancy into the building’s blank canvas.

Local folks, visitors to Dumfries, and those with a keen eye for emerging talent were given the opportunity to view the work and get to know a little bit more about what the UWS’s Dumfries campus has to offer.
As The Stove Network continues to formalise, grow, and develop, we look forward to welcoming the UWS back to the building in the future and hope to see similar initiatives taking inspiration from the weekend’s showcase.
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Ring Out, Wild Bells
Creetown Plays with Fire
Exciting things are happening in Creetown…
We have teamed up with Roddie Mathieson, who runs The Mobile Foundry, to create a bronze bell, which will form the centrepiece of the new sculpture. This is taking place next Saturday and will be open for everyone to come and witness.
‘This is an opportunity to see the casting process in action,’ says Roddie. ‘We will make moulds of the bell and clapper and pour them as part of a public demonstration. It is quite a spectacle and really exciting to watch.’


We will also be holding an all-day casting session at Creetown Primary School for pupils to get a chance to try their hand at the casting process. They will use moulds to make sculptures and will then use a charcoal furnace with bellows to cast them.
Exciting events are unfolding next week; we look forward to seeing everyone there!
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The Stove Presents: Art Shorts

Saturday, 4 May at 6.00 pm
The Stove Arts Collective presents a programme of short films by and about local (or local-ish) art and artists.
InBetween: Dumfries – As part of a national project exploring the role of the arts in shaping the future of market towns led by The Stove in collaboration with the University of Newcastle, five artists worked in and around Dumfries during 2012 to create works that examined place, identity, and belonging. This 15-minute film details the works created by Mike Inglis, Hannah Brackston, Suzanne Parry-John, Marion Preez, and Lisa Gallacher, with commentary by the artists.
Stonypath Days – Shot on 8mm film in 1973, this film by Professor Stephen Bann of Bristol University gives a rare insight into the early period of Little Sparta, the artist’s garden created by Ian Hamilton Finlay and his wife Sue at Stonypath in the Pentland Hills. Accompanied by a four-minute interview with their son Alec Finlay and contemporary views of the garden commissioned in 2012 by TATE Media.
The Eskdalemuir Harmonium – A US-built harmonium is disintegrating in a farmhouse near Lockerbie. An intimate visual exploration of a much-loved but decaying instrument, accompanied by an interview with its current owner, this short film by sound artist and filmmaker Chris Dooks is the result of his repeated ‘pilgrimages’ to visit the dying device.
Booking info: Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre, Mill Road, Dumfries DG2 7BE – Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Ticket prices are £6.30 (£4.70 conc), available from the Box Office (01387 264808) or at the door.
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Our Foundation Gathering
The ‘Foundation Gathering’ always sounded more like a cheesy Sci-Fi convention than an art event… The Stove’s ‘Foundation Gathering’ has now landed on Earth, complete with dry ice (or was that just folks breathing in the ‘bracing’ conditions?) and wobbly flying saucers.

More than 60 folks turned out on Wednesday – drawn by an invitation to come and be part of the future of the arts in the region by shaping the idea of a membership that will be at the heart of the organisation’s operation and decision-making.
Phil Jones (Business Development Manager) gave a welcome and defined The Stove as a project with the potential to be at the vanguard of a new genre of arts provision in Scotland – a social enterprise that aims to provide means for residents of Dumfries to play an active part in the future of their town.
Phil describes The Stove as ‘two things: 1) A Building – a fully accessible arts resource for the general public and creative practitioners… and 2) An Organisation – delivering participative public arts projects and undertaking commissions in the region and nationally

One of The Stove’s founding members, Colin Tennant, then gave a brief illustrated presentation of the work completed by the group to date and their plans for the future. To date, The Stove has delivered a highly successful programme of public arts events including ‘First Foot’ (part of Big Burns Supper 2012), ‘Punkin’ the Jubilee’ (Guid Nychburris 2012), and the Dumfries Music Conference – which brought industry professionals to the town to explain the contemporary digital music scene to the region’s young music entrepreneurs.
In 2013/14, The Stove will refurbish and open premises at 100 High Street as a public arts centre, complete a sculpture commission in Creetown, and work as one of three local partners delivering the inaugural Environmental Art Festival Scotland.

For the main part of the evening, Andrew Lyon of the International Futures Forum led a workshop that got people started working in small groups to make sculptures from a pile of recycled materials. Andrew’s organisation works to find creative ways of thinking about the future, and he asked groups to build a sculpture that illustrated the ideas and hopes they had for what The Stove could do for themselves and the wider community.

An amazing outpouring of creativity ensued, and groups then explained to others what their sculptures represented. Andrew Lyon then skilfully gathered all these ideas together into a creative discussion about how The Stove could operate as a democratic organisation with a membership, a board, and a ‘curatorial committee’. A general discussion followed, and 43 people signed up as the initial members of The Stove.
Membership is open to everyone and is free – if you would like to be a part of this innovative experiment in building a collaborative creative organisation for Dumfries and Galloway, then please send an email to [email protected], and you will be sent a membership form.
The first Stove AGM is set for mid-May 2013, where the members will be invited to elect a board to run the organisation on their behalf.