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Conversing Building in partnership with Fife College & HMP Dumfries

October 23 @ 9:00 am November 18 @ 3:00 pm

Postponed from October 16th | Closed Sunday’s

As part of this year’s Wild Goose Festival, the Stove’s Conversing Building project has been engaging with Fife College learners based at HMP Dumfries. Sharing inspirations and prompts from the festivals theme of Keep Looking Up, the learners have worked through a variety of creative mediums to respond through both creative writing and visual mediums including painting and drawing.

The works on display began during a creative workshop day exploring the background of the festival and it’s wider themes of migration, nature and of course, a celebration of our seasonal visitors – the geese!

Stop by the Stove Café during visitor hours to have a closer look at the work created.

All artworks are submitted anonymously.

Keep Looking Up

The migration of the barnacle goose has been a rich source for writers and artists for centuries. Before we were able to monitor their movements, there were many myths on the origins of the barnacle goose. Like the name suggests some used to believe that during the winter, barnacle geese turned into barnacles in the sea, as they disappeared after every summer leading many to question their whereabouts.

Their arrival is most noticeably heard by their calls in flight as they pass over the towns and villages of Scotland. As onlookers crane their necks skyward, the faint but distinctive ‘V’ formation affords us an opportunity to pause, to observe and to connect, for a small moment, with our natural environment.

That’s why our theme for this year is ‘Keep Looking Up’. We’re asking everyone to take a moment to pause, to look up and ponder their place in the natural world.

About Conversing Building

Conversing Building is an in-house Stove project that explores how communities and artists can interact with the Stove building and wider environments through visual means. Conversing Building considers all of the spaces in and around the Stove as potential locations for dialogue, activity and gathering.

The Stove Cafe hosts regular displays and exhibitions, both as part of the Stove’s activity and featuring ‘guest’ projects and artists with visiting works, conversational installations and displays – that seek to gather, share and create discussion in the town centre. 

About Fife College

The vision of Fife College is to transform the lives of our students through inspirations learning and teaching. Our mission is to deliver excellent opportunities for our students and work with them to develop their full potential with life enhancing skills, knowledge, experience and resilience that will shape their future success.

free

100 High Street
Dumfries, DG1 2BJ United Kingdom
01387 252435
View Venue Website

DGRC – Evening of Empowerment

November 30 @ 5:30 pm 8:00 pm

Dumfries and Galloway Rape Crisis hold an exhibition open evening around the theme of empowerment to celebrate and raise awareness of the 16 days to tackle violence against women.

This exhibition forms part of a global campaign to end gender-based violence, presented in collaboration with Dumfries & Galloway Rape Crisis & Sexual Abuse Support Centre.

The 16 Days of Activism will run from 25th November to 10th December.

Dumfries & Galloway Rape Crisis launched a competition asking local creatives to submit work inspired by the word EMPOWER to reflect their support model and to send a strong message of strength and survival out to our communities.

The work on display is a selection of entries comprising of individual interpretations of empowerment.

Free
100 High Street
Dumfries, DG1 2BJ United Kingdom
01387 252435
View Venue Website

Access Information: Level Access in rear of building through adjacent close to left-hand side of the Cafe (facing the front of the building). To ensure your experience with us is as best as it can be, please do let us know if you have any specific access requirements and we’d be happy to help. Please email Kevin or Sal on: [email protected] or phone 01387 252435 and speak with one of our team. We are able to provide walk-throughs of the building before attending our events as well as assign seating before your arrival.

Conversing Building x DGRC – Empower Exhibition

November 21 @ 9:00 am December 9 @ 3:00 pm

This exhibition forms part of a global campaign to end gender-based violence, presented in collaboration with Dumfries & Galloway Rape Crisis & Sexual Abuse Support Centre.

The 16 Days of Activism will run from 25th November to 10th December.

Dumfries & Galloway Rape Crisis launched a competition asking local creatives to submit work inspired by the word EMPOWER to reflect their support model and to send a strong message of strength and survival out to our communities.

The work on display is a selection of entries comprising of individual interpretations of empowerment.

Free
100 High Street
Dumfries, DG1 2BJ United Kingdom
01387 252435
View Venue Website

Access Information: Level Access in rear of building through adjacent close to left-hand side of the Cafe (facing the front of the building). To ensure your experience with us is as best as it can be, please do let us know if you have any specific access requirements and we’d be happy to help. Please email Kevin or Sal on: [email protected] or phone 01387 252435 and speak with one of our team. We are able to provide walk-throughs of the building before attending our events as well as assign seating before your arrival.

Categories
News Opportunities

Cafe – Community – Creativity: Exhibition Call Out

The Stove Cafe x Conversing Building

We’ve spent more time at home than we ever thought we would. What sorts of things did you get up to during the past 14 months? Maybe you started painting again, or learned how to knit, or made collages to send to your friends or started taking photographs on your phone. We’d love to celebrate the little acts of creativity we have all made at home, and share them in our café.

The Stove Café and the Conversing Building project would like you to submit or loan your artworks to us for a Community Café Exhibition in June 2021. Works can be 2D or 3D, measuring no more than 60cm in any direction please. All artworks will be displayed in our public café so please make sure that the work you submit is suitable for all ages.

How to Submit

Artworks can be dropped off to The Stove Café during regular opening hours Wed-Sat, 10-3pm, but please make sure you have included your contact details so that we can return your work to you. If we receive a large number of submissions we may not be able to display all works. Please do not submit more than two artworks per person.

If you have any queries about whether your creative work will be suitable, please drop us an email to [email protected], or pop into the Stove café and ask one of our team.

All artworks must be submitted by Monday 31st May 2021.

The exhibition will run from the 2nd to the 30th June 2021.

Categories
Musings News

2021: The Stove at 10 Years

‘For me, the question of democracy also opens up the question of what does it mean to be truly human. And it seems to me that we need to recognize that to develop the best humanity, the best spirit, the best community, there needs to be discipline, practices of exploring. How do you do that? How do we work together? How do we talk together in ways that will open up our best capacities and our best gifts?’

Vincent Harding

Looking back, looking forward

Our first foot into the New Year might seem like little has changed. With a new spike rolling in with the first snowfall of January, a third lockdown begins. And as we huddle further into our little worlds the news cycle spins and bounces off the walls with the discovery of a vaccine. And for now, we carry on.

2021 marks ten years of the Stove’s work. And we’re immensely proud of what’s been achieved in that time; from festivals and events to community buy-outs and river races. Together with our community, we’ve shaped a new vision not only for the arts but also for the vital role that communities and creativity play in the shaping of our town.

This year, we’re focused on sharing and learning together again so that we can build and support new and ambitious ideas from the voices hitherto unheard across the region.

As of December, the Stove has been focused on building a programme of new projects that will allow us to delve deeper into connecting communities, ideas and creativity together. We want to build new connections, routes and opportunities for learning across our membership and wider region.

This year we want to discover new voices, train and support new ideas as well as deepen our relationship to the places beyond the town center.

We will do this by:

  • Creating new spaces for people to learn, share and take part in conversations to map the future of our region.
  • Continuing to explore and promote bold and innovative projects that connect people in a time of social isolation.
  • Finding the new stories and storytellers to help us navigate a world spinning further out of reach.
  • Focusing on localism and power by providing the tools necessary for communities to realise and shape their identities and futures.

Our programme will stretch across sharing skills in digital communication to help communities and artists reach further and more meaningfully to people, regional projects to support bold ideas concerned with community ownership and place-making and a responsive series of events and conversations open to all.

We are committed to exploring, developing and sharing how we work with other places and people and to continue the conversation online through our new podcast channel and other outlets.

Throughout January the Stove will be planning and organizing for the year ahead, so we encourage you to keep an eye on our website and social media for announcements, job opportunities and activity.

We’d like to once again thank our membership and community who have helped to shape our ideas for the year ahead by taking part in our projects, events, consultations and conversations throughout 2020.

And to celebrate ten years of the Stove we’ll be sharing the stories of those who have come through our doors, sharing their favourite memories as well as finding out what lies next for us over the next 10 years.

Whilst the road ahead looks rough, we’re hopeful our work will cement a new vision of community and creativity that seeks to support a fairer society for all. We can’t wait to see what comes of it.

Categories
News

Elsewhere: First Images

Thank you to everyone who took some time to visit Elsewhere last weekend, it filled us with hope to see the town again from fresh perspectives and in new lights.

The first of our images from the weekend are now available, thanks to photographer Kirstin McEwan.

If you weren’t able to attend in person, much of the wonderful work we included as part of Elsewhere is available to view online, see a selection of links below.

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

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