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Project Updates

Artists and Community Landowners: Meet the Artists: Richard Bracken

Artists and Community Landowners: Meet the Artists

Artists and Community Landowners; is a collaborative project digging down into the stories of community landownership across Scotland and the impact it has for communities. The Stove is working with Community Land Scotland and 6 collaborating Community Trusts to explore stories of “ownership” and the effect it has had for local people, their identity, decision-making and the economic and social benefits for their community.

Richard is currently working with Abriachan Forest Trust, an environmental artist and creative educator based in Drumnadrochit, with 10 years experience of engaging with communities and collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams in Scotland and abroad.

Can you briefly explain your practice?

My work is a response to an ongoing, personal exploration of the land. I’m influenced by specific places, individual experience and wider themes that relate to how we live with the land.

My attention is usually drawn towards ecology, folklore, natural processes, time and memory.  I typically create sculpture using casting and mould-making processes. Drawing, photography and printmaking methods are also key aspects of my practice.

How are you approaching the commission?

I’ve been keen to understand the story of Abriachan Forest Trust by looking at the past, present and future of the community and it’s relationship to the land. I’m looking at the story as an ongoing journey and to identify places that relate to key stages of this journey the community is taking together.

I’m aiming to create artwork that is accessible – eg objects that can be picked up, held and taken for a walk; I believe that walking around the land plays a key role in understanding the story of AFT, so I’ve felt drawn to creating something that is portable, rather than something that exists in a fixed location.

So far I’ve been:

  • Getting to know how the trust operates and how it has developed
  • Looking through archive material that relates to the development of AFT – photographs, newsletters, forest plans and other maps.
  • Getting to know the young people and volunteers that participate in AFT’s activities – learning about the land from them by going on walks with them.
  • Talking to staff and community members about their relationships to AFT
  • Finding out which places resonate with the community by asking a series of questions.

Learning about materials I can feasibly source from AFT, plus facilities / expertise in the community that may come in useful for fabrication.

What excites you about the project?

The opportunity to contribute creatively to the conversation about land use in Scotland.

Getting to know a community and seeing how they have grasped opportunities to utilise their land in ways that benefit local people and the environment.

Exploring the parallels between young trees and young people – the growth and development of both are crucial to AFT and their long term vision.

On a personal note, having recently moved to within about 6 miles of Abriachan, the project has provided me with an invaluable opportunity to make new connections that I hope will last well beyond the lifespan of this project.

How has the process been so far? Anything unexpected?

Living so close has been a great advantage, giving me time to meet up with staff from AFT, slot into existing sessions and create new ones with relative ease.  This has allowed me to start getting to know people and allowed me to communicate to others about the project.  I feel that my thinking around the commission has benefited from this close contact, as I come to understand AFT better, letting that influence my work.

Being close-by has also meant that I can spend my own time exploring other parts of AFT.

Has covid-19 affected your work with the community?

AFT are not able to work with as many young people as they would normally, so I have had less opportunity to see this side in it’s fullness.

Some uncertainty around changes in guidelines and restrictions has meant having to be flexible in planning, or waiting until the last minute, but generally this has not been a disruption on outdoor working.

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News Project Updates

Speeding Backwards: Kyna Hodges

by Kyna Hodges

As part of the ‘Speeding Backwards’ project there was to be a woman’s build weekend. The weekend was to help plan and construct a bicycle trailer that will house a dark room and equipment for taking photographs using the wet plate collodion process (you can learn more about this here) The build up to the weekend was nerve racking, still the questions of ‘Can we? Can’t we?’ floating aground with the restrictions seeming to change daily.

But the day finally arrived, food planned and workshop laid out! On the first day Emily Tough, Beck Tucker and Myself all got to know each other and then went into the workshop to get to know the tools. One of the most empowering things as a woman learning construction can be understanding the use of tools and what they can do. It gives you an idea of what is possible and how. We applied the tools to the task of creating a box that we designed and began to execute. I took portraits of the interns using the wet plate collodian process that the trailer is destined to house.  

 On the second day our female builder Alice Francis arrived and we set to work looking at how to construct the trailer, it was so inspiring being around all these different creative and problem solving minds. When having meals together it helped to cement us as a group and come at a problem with the same energy. After lunch we set about looking into the interns individual projects that they had been asked to prepare. The weekend ended on a high of everyone getting a start and insight into their own projects and the mass giveaway of tools!  

The next phases of the project are to complete the build and begin to contact primary schools about seeing them in the spring. This is when the other intern Faye McKellar will be joining to deliver educational workshops and create a slow moving wonderment down the coastline of Dumfries and Galloway. 

To learn more about Kyna Hodges’ practice, you can email her at [email protected] or visit her website https://kyna-hodges.com

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News Project Updates

Messages: Elsewhere Installation

Messages. Helen Walsh 2020.

Messages is a new artwork installation created by artist Helen Walsh, and sited in the windows of 113-115 High Street, Dumfries.
The installation will be on view from Monday 21st September to Monday, 19th October.

Messages

“We use envelopes to send mesages, to communicate, to share our ideas, our secrets, our hopes and dreams. Envelope also means to wrap and protect and in my installation I want to look at both these ideas. These envelopes represent some of my hopes, dreams and fears for us post Covid-19.

I’ve made the envelopes from transparent paper so you can see some of the contents, a sharing of my hopes, dreams and fears. I hope you’ll share some of yours with me by taking an envelope from the box provided, working on it and then returning it to us at The Stove Network so we can add it to the installation.”

Get Involved

To get involved collect an envelope from either 113-115 High Street, or The Stove cafe and share your hopes and ideas of what life should be like after the Covid-19 pandemic. You can share these ideas however you like, drawings, words or another way – and return it to the Stove cafe addressed to ELSEWHERE. Alternatively, if you are based outwith the town centre, post us your ideas to ELSEWHERE, The Stove, 100 High Street, Dumfries. Envelopes should not be larger than C5.

Elsewhere

“The High Street is somewhere we thought we knew, and now it’s different, it’s elsewhere.”

Elsewhere is a research project by The Stove Network that looks to locate creative activity in the High Street of Dumfries as a means of exploring public space during a time when we as a community are responding to, and recovering from, the effects of COVID on our sense of place.

Helen Walsh is an artist and creative practitioner living on the Solway Coast. Helen specialises in drawing and textiles, particularly embroidery. Helen is continually fascinated by the natural world and our connection to it. Find out more about Helen and her work online here

Helen’s work is located in 113-115 High Street, a property recently purchased by Midsteeple Quarter. Find out more about the project here

Elsewhere is part of Atlas Pandemica. Find out more here

Elsewhere has been supported by Dumfries and Galloway Council’s Regional Arts Fund.

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News Project Updates

Lowland: Re-Imagined

In the good old days, if you recall, before the big bad virus swept across the world. You know, that flu that awakened our most primal of fears, leaving us high and dry, bleaching banana skins from the supermarket shelf and losing all concept of social cues and humility. The ‘good times’, before bumping into an old colleague in the supermarket left you equal parts scattered like some unassembled jigsaw and petrified, marooned and struggling in vain to stitch together some semblance of a normal, pleasant English sentence from the ruined, anxiety ridden attic of your mind whilst gripping a bottle of disinfectant (anti-viral of course) just in case they dared step foot within your 2 meter sanctuary of social isolation.

Pause for air.

Well, before all that, we had such things called ‘plays’. ‘Plays’, or ‘live TV’ (not really, but bear with me) were these real-life moving pictures where people called ‘actors’ would perform words written by writers, too strange and socially awkward for most other professions.

These ‘plays’ would be performed in ‘theatres’. Theatres were buildings that came in all shapes and sizes. From majestic stone coliseums in Greece, to tiny wee almost-shed-like structures near Whithorn on the Galloway coast. Yes, they were quite the hit for some time. People would travel in their millions to a tiny, expensive over-crowded city in Scotland to watch some semi-sane people dance and prance their way on stages in dive bars and portaloos. The legends of the Internet are rife with memories and photographs of these most magical, dumb and dangerous shenanigans.

Then the Big Bad came and ‘plays’ weren’t able to take place in theatres, with people, sitting right next to you, loudly chewing Werthers Originals, letting their mobile phones ring loudly occasionally interspersed with quiet farts now being considered a health risk. So much of them went online, in Instagram stories and glitchy Zoom sessions where you got to sit and stare at yourself, striking the odd socially-conscious facial cue to let them know you were in fact listening and not just scrolling through cat videos on YouTube. The same too happened here, at the Stove with the ‘Lowland’ play, ready to be performed in Lochside, Moniaive and Langholm, Lowland sank back into the dusty shadows of the rehearsal room and sat, patiently waiting for the time to return. Realising after three to four months that maybe wasn’t looking all that likely, it was time for a re-imagining!

Originally conceived and developed with the help and guidance of local young writers, poets and dramatists, Lowland initially explored what it meant to ‘belong’, using postcards filled out by Doonhamers, featuring drawings, poetry, stories and the occasional dirty joke. Over 500 of these postcards were filled out during poet Stuart A Paterson’s residency with the project over a year ago.

As time went on, the play started to take a bit of shape. Several adaptions, rewrites and voyages into dead-end dark tunnels later, the play was ready to be rehearsed with a talented community cast of local actors, writers and performers. Just as it was coming to the scripts-down, lights up, camera action…the big bad burst on through the stage door and it all went quiet.

Since then, the play has been re-adapted as a podcast in 2 chapters (originally it was meant to be a radio play but there was just too much swearing). Following on from the cast’s first digital get-together and read-through of the adapted script, we are embarking on a journey into the world of audio plays!

We can’t say it’s been easy. Four months of mourning for live theatre and foggy lockdown head doesn’t do a playwright any good. And the pubs were closed. Yet now, ladies, gentlemen and everyone in-between we are delighted to be returning to the rehearsal room (albeit in cyber space) and are almost ready to buckle down and get recording! Lowland: The Play is on its way. And we can’t wait for you to hear it…

So, what’s it all about?

‘Let me get this straight. You’re telling me I have to present some new fangled resources centre, right in the middle of the scheme, with little to no idea what it will actually be used for. On top of all this, they’re all here, Barnside, for a consultation. Only, there is no such thing. I’m nothing more than a salesman. And if I don’t do this. I destroy three years of clawing my way back out of the gutter…for a job.’

Barnside is sinking and the residents are on the edge of revolution. The local council, in its bleary wisdom, have been drafted in to ease the tensions. Only, not everything is as it seems and sooner or later, something’s got to give.

A play in two acts, inspired by over 500 postcards reflecting on life in Dumfries written by Doonhamers. Lowland: The Play features a community cast, devised through collaboration with local writers’ groups, communities and members of the local council, Lowland is the tale of a consultation gone wrong.

As Angela, a council officer, prepares for a consultation, one year in the making, her boss throws a curve ball, eradicating all her best intentions, leaving her and her assistants in disarray and woefully unprepared. As a storm rages on outside, a community prepares a coup d’état…

Lowland is a tragi-comedy, offering a satirical and emotional look at the nature of community, power, local democracy and belonging.

Next Up: Meet The Cast

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Musings Project Updates

Trying to keep to ‘creativity as usual’ during lockdown

Guest Post by community artist & Blueprint100 Member, Kirsty Turpie

I was invited by the Blueprint100 team at the beginning of the year to run the Tuesday night Open Studio sessions. Blueprint has always been supportive of new ideas and giving young artists opportunities to try things out so they were happy for me to bring something new to the table. This was a series of talks about ‘Buildings that housed vibrant artist communities’. Of course The Stove is a building that houses a vibrant artist community but I wanted to explore with the Blueprint100 members, similar vibrant communities from history and from around the world, to see what we could learn from them and be inspired by. So we did just that.

Open Studio Model Making Workshop with Thomas Logan

However in March just as I was about to hold the third talk and Open Studio, dun dun dun…we all know what happened next, Scotland went into lockdown and it was no longer possible to continue the sessions. So being creative and innovative folk, we decided to continue online (after all it was the new craze to go online!). Along with Katharine Wheeler of The Stove Curatorial Team and Stove IT and website whiz, Robbie Henderson, we created Online Rooms on the Blueprint100 website to offer members a place to go to stay involved, inspired and entertained.

I came up with four different rooms: talks, opportunities, creative pastimes and a members’ gallery. It felt really exciting to be able to continue what I’d started for Open Studio, but in a new format. It also provided an opportunity to add new sections to the website that would be really beneficial to members on top of doing the talks. I contacted the Blueprint members and asked them if they would like to exhibit their work in the members’ gallery and had a great response. It has always excited me how much young creative talent there is in Dumfries and Galloway, so to be able to help them to promote their work and show others a taste of the wonderful folk that come along to Blueprint felt great.

Online Rooms Promotional Graphic
A Promotional Graphic for Online Rooms which illustrates the layout of the main page

At the start of lockdown when I was setting up Online Rooms, I also found a lot of great resources on the creative websites that I follow on how to survive as an artist during lockdown. These resources included lists of remote job opportunities, funding options and general ways of keeping inspired and entertained. This was something that I thought would be really helpful for Blueprint Members so included it on Online Rooms.

For the talks on Online Rooms I shied away from doing live videos and went for pre-recorded. This not only took off the pressure for myself but gave everyone at home the option to pop on to the website and watch it whenever they liked. The talks that I did were about the Chelsea Hotel in New York, Outsider Artists, Artist Collectives and a Viewers Choice talk. So they were similarly about vibrant artist communities. I’m a big fan of watching documentaries so I tend to delve in to art interests in that way in my spare time, but doing these talks made me watch more of them, more often and do more reading too which was really enjoyable. I get so inspired and motivated by hearing about other artists and creative communities and I hope Blueprint100 members do too.

I’d definitely recommend making time every so often to look for some YouTube videos about your favourite creative interests, as it can lead you down new paths and find out new things about the art world that you never knew. I always felt motivated and inspired after doing the research, so I would suggest it as a great remedy to fixing creative blocks!

Overall I hope that the talks and resources on Online Rooms have helped Blueprint100 members to stay motivated, inspired and enthusiastic about creativity during lockdown.

This post was written by Community Artist & Blueprint100 Member, Kirsty Turpie

Categories
Musings Project Updates

homegrown – a conclusion and a new beginning


Homegrown was an immediate response to the Coronavirus outbreak and subsequent lockdown that saw the world close it’s doors and retreat into our homes. The Stove’s doors too were closed and months of programming, preparations for upcoming events and projects were put on hold.
In the final few days before the government enforced the lockdown, we looked for four themes to guide our direction and settled on solidarity, open heartedness, insight and perseverance1. The title for the project looked to create a platform to share the creativity grown from homes across the region, and further afield – and to help create a space to allow these creative reflections to flourish.

We re-grouped, via the now all-too-familiar ZOOM for our first meeting online, and started to investigate how The Stove could respond. The Stove has always been a future-facing and responsive organisation, but we made the decision to be watchful and listen to those around us, supporting the efforts of the council and other agencies, who took the lead on the immediate challenges facing many of our communities.
As the rug was pulled from under our feet, it quickly showed that the rug was all that was holding some of us up; the floor’s foundations were not equally distributed. Of our 600+ members at the Stove, we estimated that as many as half will be self-employed or freelancers, and the COVID-19 shutdown in March saw many people’s incomes wiped out overnight as events and regular contracts were cancelled. The homegrown project initially looked to draw on our resources to share a series of micro-commissions to support Stove members facing financial difficulties. This theme further developed into Atlas Pandemica – for (more detail about this project visit here).

Hope for Food Origin Awareness. For Helen Walsh’s Feathers of Hope series as part of her micro commission

Each week, we invited a creative response from one of our members (growing to two per week as interest developed) to one of our four key themes, and over the weeks we were able to share the work of 14 different artists from a variety of backgrounds and creative approaches. The aim of these micro-commissions was light touch; the proposals were focused on sharing perspectives and experiences of the sudden changes to our world, and giving each artist the time and support to develop something creative where many were finding the daily routine too overwhelming to allow for any reflection or creative focus. Each commission also gave us the opportunity to meet and find out more about our membership, some of whom were new to our team, or familiar faces that we were able to build new relationships with, and to share this with our audiences and wider network digitally.
Homegrown also developed a series of ‘creative challenges’ that were open to anyone to take part in, and responses were received from a wide collection of participants. We set out not to provide distraction, or to add to the noise as organisations scrabbled to move their content online, but to create a space for reflective creative process – opening up space for ideas sharing, playful interaction and exchange. Some of our challenges were focused around key questions – What memories come in times of silence? Where are the secret spaces in your life now? Others invited an exploration of a particular technique or process – photography, writing or printmaking. All of the responses were then added to our online gallery and shared digitally as part of our homegrown conversation.

Memory Jar created by Andy Brooke

Homegrown was conceived of as a starting point, not to provide answers but to open the door to include as many voices in our conversations – towards a new folklore that documented the response from Dumfries and our wider Stove membership in a time of social isolation. Each conversation, collaboration that we hosted opened for us new ways of understanding and interpreting the world around us. As we were each confined to our personal spaces we were able to reach out and make the connections with other people, who helped to drive and direct the project’s course.
Everything is significant, and we have learned a lot over the past three months. As the lockdown moves into a new phase and the town gradually begins to re-open it’s doors, homegrown comes to a close – but we hope to take forward many of the conversations, ideas and approaches that we have learned during this time through listening and being open to the directions of others. As we look forward, we bring the influences of homegrown with us: our new project Atlas Pandemica looks to draw together a team of artists in response to the changes we’ve been facing in Dumfries and Galloway, and Elsewhere a town centre project will look to draw on and further develop some of the responses shared during the homegrown micro commissions. We hope to bring much of the homegrown content from the realm of the digital, back into the public sphere, the physical and the personal, and will be looking at ways to safely do this as restrictions continue to ease.

Doorways. A collective artwork by The Lockdown Collective, JoAnne, John and Luke McKay

The homegrown webpages will continue to live on the Stove website as a record of all of the work that we have shared and grown in our homes, together. To help you navigate the content, you can find:

  • Creative Challenges and responses
  • Artist Talks given by each of the homegrown micro-commissions

Special thanks to everyone that contributed to homegrown.
1Three of these themes, Insight, Open heartedness and perseverance, were originally part of Matt Baker’s three virtues artwork for Inverness.

Poetry by Daniel Gillespie as part of his micro commission
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