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An Update and an Invitation

The Stove committee has been pushing forward on all fronts over the past year, and we would like to invite you to a catch-up meeting on Wednesday, the 5th of September at 7 pm at The Stove building.

At this meeting, we will report back on progress with the building and projects and discuss the future structure of The Stove as an arts organisation. The Stove began as an open invitation and opportunity for D+G practitioners; we’d like to discuss ideas we have for sustaining this ethos into the future and are eager to involve as many of you as possible in these discussions.

Some of you may also be aware that we have been commissioning artworks to accompany a two-week-long programme of public arts activity in and around Dumfries at the start of November. Artist Mike Inglis was awarded one of The Stove’s Inbetween commissions; Mike is one of Scotland’s leading street artists and will present a short illustrated talk on the 5th of September about his practice and what he has planned for the November events.

Utopian Junk Dreams

Kirsty Whiten: Centaur
Fraser Grey: Explosion
Martin McGuinness: Landscape
Mike Inglis: Spaceboy and the No. 9 Junk Dream
Rab Choudhry: Coins

We will also be introducing a two-day symposium we are presenting in November, where invited speakers will address issues surrounding the identity of contemporary market towns in the UK: ‘Place, Sustainability, and Future Culture’ in Dumfries on 8th and 9th November.

We hope you can join us. If so, please RSVP via [email protected] with the text ‘Stove Meeting Wed 5 Sep’ in the subject line.

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News Project Updates

TRDM: Dumfries

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News Project Updates

Punkin’ the Jubilee: The Movie

Punkin’ the Jubilee saw 100 High St transformed into a DIY T-Shirt printing factory for a day. This event was part of Guid Nychburris Saturday and was particularly popular with families and young children.

Here is a video documenting the day by John Wallace of Pile-On Productions:

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News Project Updates

The Stove Comes Alive

The first images from our First Foot event are in! Find out more about the Stove’s first public live art event in 2012 over on our project page here

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News Project Updates

Gin a Body Meet a Body

The keen eyed burghers of Dumfries may have noticed a lot of activity around the Stove this past week as men in bunnets and leopard skin toting ladies bustled around in ever increasing spirals of agitation, armed only with Stanley knives, paint brushes and reams of tracing paper. It’s been all hands to the deck as the Stove juggles projectors, aliens, keys, broken windaes all to get ready in time for the Big Burns Supper

Yes, after months of deliberation; eureka moments, several shoogly nailed marriages, shortfalls in monies, no monies, no ideas, awful ideas and finally super, nay super dooper ideas and enough monies to cover our costs, the First Foot show is finally about to kick off.

First out of the traps is ‘Windows for Burns Night’, a project that transcends time and place and asks contemporary poets to emulate the hard Bard Burns and speak of their own time via the medium of melinex and a permanent marker.

The results of this project, created by venerable Stovies Hugh Bryden and Dave Borthwick, have been a great success with established poets grabbing permanent markers and making free with the odes. Hugh, working with the primary school pupils in and around Dumfries has produced some sublime poems which are displayed throughout Dumfries. The collected works can be seen in the windows of the Robert Burns House museum, the Globe Inn, the Coach & Horses and on mass in the windows of The Stove.  

Poetry is often a respite from the hubbub of daily life, so it was nice to notice in Dumfries today, not hordes of Doonhamers clamoring to read the poems, but a few people pausing to take a few moments out of their shopping experience and the dreich weather, for a contemplative moment or two. 

Poetry is often a respite from the hubbub of daily life

Here are some of the treats that await you all between now and the 31st of January*

and finally from one our younger poets, Joanne Hiddleston.

* The poems on the Stove windows will be taken down on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings for the First Foot projections.

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News Project Updates

Windows For Robert Burns

From a press release by Jean Atkin of Word Sparks:

“Hundreds of poems will be on display in venues across Dumfries from this week as part of the Burns Windows Project. Inspired by Robert Burns’s occasional predilection for writing verses on window panes with a diamond ring or stylus, local artist Hugh Bryden and David Borthwick, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow in Dumfries, have come up with the idea of inviting contemporary poets to submit their own work for display as window poems. Poets were sent a sheet of clear plastic and a pen and asked to write a poem that spoke of their own time ‘in a transparent way’.”

“But David and Hugh had no idea how the project would take off, with the Burns Windows Project attracting almost 200 poems submitted from as far afield as the USA, Belgium, and Switzerland, as well as submissions from some of Britain’s top poets, including Jen Hadfield, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Jean Sprackland, Andrew Greig, and many others.”

“Hugh and David are members of The Stove, a collective of artists and creative individuals involved in regenerating the former Happit store on High Street as an arts venue. The poems are part of The Stove’s inaugural events weekend on 27–28 January, which is part of the Big Burns Supper. Thirty of the best poems will be projected from the building during the Burns Supper extravaganza, with almost a hundred others on display in the windows.”

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