The Stove NetworkMike Inglis pasted up his Devotional Shrines around the medieval centre of Dumfries today – these are based on real people Mike has met in the area, all of whom are concerned with protecting the spirit of Dumfries for future generations.
While others have been busy wading in the river, stitching wedding dresses, or drawing ghost hunters, Inbetween artist Marion Preez has quietly been painting everything blue. Marion is working towards a participatory art event called ‘Frame’ – Doonhamers might notice some nice wee blue picture frames around their fair town next week…
Environmental Artist Hannah Brackston has spent three months exploring the different relationships that people have with the River Nith in Dumfries. Throughout the week of ‘Inbetween: Dumfries’, the artist will be inviting people to peer into the depths of the river using specially created ‘Nith Scoping’ equipment. Also, look out for Hannah’s limited edition newspaper all about the Nith – available at venues around town.
Here are the details of how ‘Nith Scoping’ works… For detailed times and locations, download the full ‘Inbetween’ programme or look in The Stove windows (100 High Street, DG1 2BJ).
“Nithscoping is a new activity I have invented to provide people in Dumfries with an exciting experience of their river from a perspective from which it is seldom seen. It addresses the challenge and struggle we can have in trying to understand and engage with natural forces, such as rivers, which we no longer have an industrial use for or much control over. In the case of the River Nith in Dumfries, the riverbed is one of the most talked-about topics in the town, not because most people have actually seen it, but because it lies at the heart of a strongly held dredging debate. It is trapped invisibly between those who want it removed to solve the town’s enduring flooding problems and environmental groups and geologists who work to protect its essential biodiversity. In my attempt to understand this debate further, I was troubled by a question: surely, it is more meaningful to debate something we can actually look at? Several adapted pieces of piping, a magnifying lens, some recycled bicycle inner tubes, duct tape, truck tarpaulin, and empty water bottles later, this has become possible…”
Hannah Brackston | Environmental Artist
Those who follow the work of Mike Inglis will be very intrigued and excited to see the image below. Mike’s work is all about layers of exposure, and his relationship with public space is often a troubled one. There is an aspect of his work that involves the 3D assembly of very private shrine works. Mike has often talked about ways that he could bring this side of his work into the public domain alongside his paste-ups and graphic work. Maybe Dumfries is about to see something very significant in Scottish art history…
One of Scotland’s leading public/street artists, Mike has been researching ‘outsiders’ and ‘custodians’ in Dumfries since May 2012. He has worked with community groups and historical information ranging from the execution of nine women accused of witchcraft in 1659 to the groundbreaking therapeutic community at the former Crichton Hospital.
Mike’s work around Dumfries will include two ‘window shrines’ and six ‘paste-up street shrines’ – these will begin to appear in the town centre on 4th November and will be visible for as long as the good folk of Dumfropolis choose to leave them unmolested.
Find out more about Mike Inglis’ work here.
My childhood was spent in Galloway. Its hills, rivers, and tidal flats formed my understanding and love of the natural world. The biblical stories I learned before I could read mixed freely with the tales and legends I learned about the land around me to the point that Galilee and Galloway were one and the same. Was it the boy David who confronted Goliath at Loch Trool, or was it Robert the Bruce who faced the Philistines on the banks of the Jordan? When I learned about Saint Ninian landing at the Isle of Whithorn, bringing Christianity to our heathen forefathers, I assumed he was one of the Apostles and that he had just sailed across that Sea of Galilee. As for Tam o’ Shanter, was he Old or New Testament?
At the age of 11, my family moved away. But that heady brew of wild landscape, biblical stories, poetry, a sense that one was put on earth to do the right thing, and the temptations of the flesh—which were always at hand—has infiltrated and informed everything that I have done or attempted to do since. And then, of course, there was the work ethic.
And on the subject of work, everything I have done since the late 1990s has been framed within the context of The Penkiln Burn. This, in one sense, is an old-fashioned publishing house and, in another, an online brand as an artwork. The Penkiln Burn is also a small river that rises in the Galloway Hills and flows down into the River Cree at Minnigaff. It was on the banks of the Penkiln Burn that many of my boyhood adventures took place, a place that still fires my imagination to this day.
I am aware that if I had spent my teenage years in Galloway, my sense of it would be totally different, and that I would probably have viewed it as a cultural backwater that I could not wait to escape. But that was not the case.
As for Dumfries, that was another country altogether.
By Bill Drummond, 3 October 2012.
In 1973, Bill Drummond was coming to the end of his first academic year at Liverpool School of Art. He was studying painting. He loved painting. He wanted to spend the rest of his life painting. But something was troubling him. He thought that even if he became a successful painter, or even a great painter, all it would mean was that his paintings would hang on the walls of a rich man’s apartment in New York.
The young and idealistic Drummond instinctively felt that this was not what art should be about. He put down his paintbrush, walked away from the easel and out into the streets of Liverpool in the hope that he could discover a way of making art that… The rest of his professional life to date has been about trying to work out what the ‘that’ might be.
Some months before he laid down his paintbrush, he had visited the first Andy Warhol retrospective in the UK. It was at Tate Britain. The exhibition had blown him away. But over the next twelve months, what had initially done the blowing began to trouble him. The troubling progressed to the point where he thought what Andy Warhol represented was everything that was wrong with art in the world at that time.
All the first-year fine art students were expected to write a 4,000-word history of art essay on a topic of their choice. This essay was to be handed in by the end of the first academic year. Although he had a title for the essay, he was unable to put more than a few unconnected words on the page.
Most of the several hundred thousand words that Drummond has written and published since the summer of ’73 have been a continuation of this uncompleted essay. What he hopes to present in Dumfries will be a 45-minute performance lecture based on where he is at with the essay at the moment. The working title is, as it was then, the now rather naïve: “Why Andy Warhol is Shite.”
You can be part of the audience for Bill’s lecture “Why Andy Warhol Is Shite” by coming to Greyfriars Church at 6 p.m. on Thursday, 8 November (free).
