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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.

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News Opportunities

Your Invite to Our Foundation Gathering

The Stove Needs Your Help!

The Stove is organising itself properly for the future and needs your help to do this – we’re inviting people interested in the arts in Dumfries and Galloway to join us for an informal evening to share their thoughts on our performance so far and how we can improve in the future. After agreeing on a way forward, everyone will be offered free membership of The Stove.

You might wonder how this relates to you?

We believe The Stove can make a genuine contribution to the future of our region – benefiting both the creative sector and the wider population.

How does this involve you?

The Stove is two things:

A Building

you need to come to this gathering if:

  • You’d like to see a place in the centre of Dumfries where you can meet other creative individuals, get information about what is going on locally and further afield.
  • You’d like to be able to hire affordable space to hold workshops/events.
  • You’d like to present or perform in a space dedicated to multi-disciplinary contemporary arts.
  • You’d like to rent a small serviced space in the centre of Dumfries.
  • You’re interested in joining the artist team to work on a series of commissions that will be integrated into the building.
  • You want to know about the progress with the building (we aim to have completed the necessary building work by the end of 2023).

An Organisation

You should come along if you are interested in:

  • Collaborating with other artists as part of teams to take on large commissions.
  • Bringing forward new ideas for projects/initiatives that require an ‘organisation’ to carry them forward. Note: One of The Stove’s rules is, ‘If you have an idea, you need to be prepared to implement it yourself.’
  • Joining forces if you represent an organisation and are looking to collaborate and share resources/expertise.
  • Learning new skills by participating in Stove projects.
  • Building a creative career in Dumfries and Galloway.
  • Supporting early-career individuals to get started locally.
  • Enhancing the arts scene in Dumfries and Galloway.
  • Collaborating with the creative sector in your work, even if you are not part of it, as we offer valuable assistance.

The aim is to find a creative solution that works for all of us to set up The Stove as the best thing it can be. By attending, you will have the opportunity to integrate yourself into the Stove network from the beginning of this exciting new phase of the venture.

You do not need any expertise of any kind to take part – just enthusiasm and an open mind and heart.

Informal workshop led by Andrew Lyon until 7:30 PM, with refreshments and chat afterwards.

Please RSVP to [email protected] to help us estimate attendance numbers.

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News Project Updates

Inbetween: Dumfries on TV

Here is the item broadcast on Border TV’s LookAround programme on Monday 5th November:

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News Project Updates

Bill Drummond in Dumfries

‘Why Andy Warhol Is Shite’

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 The 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.

Mr Drummond is standing in the Penkiln Burn (near Newton Stewart) with a salmon and bluebells.

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 pm on Thursday, the 8th of November (free).

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News Project Updates

First Foot – the Movie

By some oversight, we managed not to post John Wallace’s fine First Foot film on The Stove blog when it first came out…so here it is (with apologies to all of you who like things in chronological order).

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News Project Updates

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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