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Off The Margin: Imprints in Time

March 22 @ 6:30 pm 9:00 pm

Off the Margin Imprints in Time graphic. Red background with white square centred with text

Join us for the launch of ‘Off The Margin’, a micro-fest of print, illustration, journalism and publishing.

Artist John Wallace presents a re-staging of his documentary and site-specific video installation, “Imprints In Time,” delving into the rich history of printing in Dumfries Town Centre, with a focus on the former Dinwiddies retail shop and Printworks. The event includes a screening followed by a discussion featuring invited speakers from grassroots journalism and print in Scotland, along with prominent figures from the printing industry in Dumfries.

Imprints in Time was an exhibition, site specific video installation and series of public engagement events exploring the history of printing in Dumfries Town Centre, centred on the former Dinwiddies retail shop and Printworks. Three installation films capture the experiences of Master Compositor Mac Creedon and Master Pressman John Ronnie, both of whom served their apprenticeships at Dinwiddies, and of Dr. Robert Dinwiddie, grandson of founder Robert Dinwiddie, who himself worked regularly within the business when he was a student. The three films are here re-presented in standalone form.

After the screening, we welcome you to join us for an insightful discussion delving into Dumfries’ print heritage, while also examining the current grassroots print and journalism landscape in Scotland. In an era marked by increasingly divisive mass media and heightened public scrutiny regarding the accuracy and biases of printed media, how are communities, journalists, and creatives reclaiming agency? What insights might this offer into the potential future of print, media, and journalism in Dumfries & Galloway?

Speakers Include

Judith Hewitt: Museum Curator (Dumfries and Galloway Council)

Judith Hewitt serves as the museum curator at Dumfries & Annan Museum. Currently, she oversees the exhibition ‘Fighting for Justice: Strikes and Protests in Dumfries 1770-1920′ as part of the Off the Margin period. This exhibition and its accompanying events program provide a comprehensive look at Dumfries’ print economy and its historical significance in shaping the working class industries of the region. 

Johnny Gailey of Out of the Blueprint

Out of the Blueprint is an eco-print studio in Leith, Edinburgh. They specialise in Japanese printing techniques like RISO and GOCCO, offering affordable, sustainable, and ethical print services for the local community. As a social enterprise, they reinvest all profits to support young people through residencies, publishing support, training, and education initiatives. 

Karin Goodwin of The Ferret

Karin Goodwin is a journalist and co-editor of Scottish media co-op The Ferret and reports on social affairs and health inequalities. She’s written for a wide range of Scottish and UK broadsheets, magazines and online platforms including the Sunday Times and the Guardian and reported for BBC Scotland’s Disclosure as well as working on other radio and film projects. She is currently writing and co-hosting podcast ‘Sheku Bayoh: The Inquiry’.

John Wallace | Film Artist & Documentary Filmmaker 

John Wallace specialises in creating installations and films that delve into human relationships with various aspects of both constructed and natural environments. His work often emphasises locations where he possesses a personal connection or intimate understanding, a concept he terms as ‘insider art’.

His artistic exploration extends into the realm of technology-mediated interactions with places. He is intrigued by the fusion of technology and environment, utilising live and historical data sources to craft dynamic audiovisual installations that respond to tangible changes occurring beyond the confines of the installation space.

Doors open at 6:00 pm

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. 

Reel to Real Cinema X The Stove Cafe: Wildfire (International Women’s Day)

March 1 @ 7:00 pm 9:00 pm

Wildfire| Cathy Brady | 2020 | 84 mins | 15 | UK & Ireland 

This month our film selection marks International Women’s Day with a screening of F-rated* film, Wildfire. Directed by Cathy Brady, this debut feature film explores the complexities of trauma and sisterly relationships set on the Irish border.

About the Film 

Inseparable sisters raised in a small town on the Irish border, Lauren and Kelly’s lives were shattered with the mysterious death of their mother. Left to pick up the pieces after her sister abruptly disappeared, Lauren is suddenly confronted with the family’s dark and traumatic past when Kelly returns home after being reported missing for a whole year. With the intense sisterhood reignited, Kelly’s desire to unearth their history is not welcomed by all in the small town, as rumours and malice spread like wildfire, threatening to push them over the edge.

* The film is triple F rated in that it is written and directed by women and features significant women on screen; and in this case all three by writer/director Cathy Brady.

“SAVAGELY POWERFUL IRISH BORDER DRAMA”
★★★★

— THE GUARDIAN

“POWERHOUSE PERFORMANCES”
★★★★

— EMPIRE

“NIKA MCGUIGAN BURNS BRIGHTLY IN
HER FINAL PERFORMANCE”
★★★★

— THE IRISH TIMES

“AN ATTRACTIVE FILM WITH HYPNOTIC LEAD PERFORMANCES”
★★★★

— LITTLE WHITE LIES

“DELICIOUSLY UNCOMFORTABLE”

— MICHAELA COEL, IWC JURY MEMBER

”SUPERB: FORCEFUL, UNCOMFORTABLE AND FIERCELY INTELLIGENT”

— Wendy Ide, The Guardian

Watch the Trailer: 
About Reel to Real 

Reel to Real Cinema is a monthly film space in the Stove Cafe, featuring an eclectic mixture of conversational films – from artist made shorts to feature length documentaries, locally made to international cinema. A space for discussion and thought-provoking films, you are welcome to join us after the film for a short discussion about the themes from this month’s selection. The Stove Cafe will be open from 5.30pm – 7pm with a special pre-film dinner option alongside hot drinks and cakes. 

Free Donations Welcome

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS FILM FEATURES STRONG LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE, AND REFERENCES TO SUICIDE. NOT SUITABLE FOR AUDIENCES UNDER 15.

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.

Reel to Real Cinema X The Stove Cafe: The Nettle Dress

February 2 @ 7:00 pm 9:00 pm

The Nettle Dress | Dylan Howitt | 2023 | 68 mins | 12A | UK 

This month, the Stove’s Reel to Real Cinema programme returns with documentary film, The Nettle Dress, exploring ‘hedgerow couture’ and slow fashion, and the power of nature and craft to support us through times of grief. 

About the Film 

Textile artist Allan Brown spends seven years making a dress by hand just from the fibre of locally foraged stinging nettles. It’s how Allan survives the passing of his wife, leaving him and their four children bereft, and how he finds a beautiful way to honour her. 

Stunningly filmed by award-winning documentary maker Dylan Howitt, The Nettle Dress follows Allan’s journey through seasons and years, foraging, spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing the cloth, before finally sharing a healing vision of the dress back in the woods where the nettles were picked, worn by one of his daughters. 

A labour of love in the truest sense, The Nettle Dress is a modern-day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of nature and slow craft. It’s one story representing a huge groundswell of people rediscovering the joys of making. 

Watch the Trailer: 
About Reel to Real 

Reel to Real Cinema is a monthly film space in the Stove Cafe, featuring an eclectic mixture of conversational films – from artist made shorts to feature length documentaries, locally made to international cinema. A space for discussion and thought-provoking films, you are welcome to join us after the film for a short discussion about the themes from this month’s selection. The Stove Cafe will be open from 5.30pm – 7pm with a special pre-film dinner option alongside hot drinks and cakes. 

Free Donations Welcome
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.

Reel to Real Cinema X The Stove Cafe: Sound For The Future (The Scottish Premiere)

January 12 @ 7:00 pm 9:00 pm

Sound For The Future | Matt Hulse | 2020 | 1 hr 42 | 15 |UK

Reel to Real returns for the New Year with The Scottish Premiere screening of Matt Hulse’s Sound For the Future, part essay film, part exploration of post-punk British music and DIY culture. A family history seen through the fractured lens of art, self-exploration, music, politics and attitude, Sound For The Future is a passionate, hilarious and brazenly honest delve into the creative process.

About the Film

On the surface, acclaimed artist-filmmaker Matt Hulse’s affectionate recreation of the time he and his siblings formed Britain’s youngest post-punk band THE HIPPIES in 1979 can be viewed as a wistful and energetic memoir. But dig beneath and you’ll find a powerful, battered and bruised ode to childhood and the experiences which make us us.

We join Matt as he reimagines The Hippies in the modern day, recruiting a group of teenage Scottish actors to play the parts of himself, his sister Polly and brother Toby in a series of workshops and experiments to revive that momentous moment.

Part essay film, part exploration of post-punk British music and DIY culture, the creation of The Hippies was fuelled by Matt hearing Gang Of Four’s debut EP, kickstarting a lifelong creative and personal odyssey. Sound For The Future features music from XTC, Gang Of Four, Sleaford Mods, The Stranglers and The Hippies and the film also features one of the final appearances of Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill before his untimely death in 2020.

Watch the Film Trailer here:

About Reel to Real

Reel to Real Cinema is a monthly film space in the Stove Cafe, featuring an eclectic mixture of conversational films – from artist made shorts to feature length documentaries, locally made to international cinema. A space for discussion and thought-provoking films, you are welcome to join us after the film for a short discussion about the themes from this month’s selection. The Stove cafe will be open from 5.30pm – 7pm with a special pre-film dinner option alongside hot drinks and cakes.

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
Musings News Project Updates

Queer Club

Entirely community-run, Queer Club advocates for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community through creativity, conversation, and most importantly, fun

Images and videography by Patrick Rooney

An activist space for members of the LGBTQIA+ community locally to get together, Queer Club is an opportunity for the queer community, its allies and advocates to conjure up big plans and get making.

The Open Hoose group hit the ground running, setting up and managing the 2022 Dumfries Pride festival in its first four months.

Dumfries Pride’s jam-packed programme of activity spanned the month of July, including a pop-up hub/shop (Queer Quarter) on the High Street, creative workshops, film nights, drag shows and so much more!

The Dumfries Pride calendar culminated in the celebratory and momentous Pride march around Dumfries town centre, with a masquerade ball taking place in the evening for all of the community to come together and celebrate an inspiring month of LGBTQ+ solidarity.

So what’s next for Queer Club?


As we’re now well into Autumn, Queer Club continues to host monthly meet-ups at The Stove, with plenty of fun activities to take part in, there really is something for everyone!

  • Queerbroidery: Take part in this mindful but fun activity, using embroidery to celebrate Queerness with fun and vibrant stitch patterns
  • Zine making: For lovers of collage and print, the Zine is one of the most accessible (and enjoyable) crafts you can do. Using old magazines, newspapers, photos and advertisements, the Zine is all about making, mending and transforming the old into the new, from the ordinary, comes the miraculous!
  • Beginner’s DJing with Double Down Disco: The art of DJing is all about weaving your own unique taste with that of the crowd. Read the room, blend the tunes and get moving. Get hands-on with the decks and try out the Stove’s Function One Sound System (it’s a beaut!), guided by the legendary Les Ross.
  • Book club: Read something of late you just HAVE to let others know about? Whether it was Wuthering Heights or the Bluthering Blows, we want to celebrate, educate and get inspired by queer, trans, non-binary and LGBTQ+ writers across the world. Bring along a book, whether a novel, non-fiction, poetry or comic and let’s get reading!

Queer Club is ran by, with, for and about the local LGBTQ+ community. It’s open to the wider community, whether advocate or ally, queer or questioning. It’s a safe, inclusive and friendly space for everyone to take part. 

Interested in joining the Queer Club steering group? Then come along and speak with one of our members on the night. They’d be delighted to get to know you.

Join in the next Queer Club session by signing up via our events page, here.

Are you inspired by this Open Hoose group? Want to learn more about Open Hoose and find out how you can start or develop a project for the community? Check out our Open Hoose page for more information.

Categories
News Project Updates

Solway to Svalbard

Solway to Svalbard is an immersive, multi-artform response to the spring migration of barnacle geese.

This unique piece of theatre brings together original music with cinematic visuals, evocative soundscapes, and live storytelling. Created by composer Stuart Macpherson, filmmaker Emma Dove and sound recordist Pete Smith the project was developed over the course of five years, enabled by support from Creative Scotland, PRS Foundation, Help Musicians UK, Tenk Traena AiR, Galleri Svalbard, DG Arts Live, The Stove Network, DGU and the National Theatre of Scotland’s Engine Room programme.

Forming part of Dumfries & Galloway’s Wild Goose Festival, which is produced by The Stove Network and held in Dumfries and surrounding areas, the festival unites key partners from the region in an exploration of nature, creativity, and place, Solway to Svalbard follows the migratory rough of Svalbard’s Barnacle geese from Southwest Scotland to the High Arctic and back. The final artwork is highlighted as this year’s finale event with the world premier will take place at the Loreburn Hall in Dumfries on Saturday 29th October.

“We have all put so much work into this project and I think we have really created something that not only gives audiences and insight into the geese’s journey but also the journey we have gone on as the friends in creating the work.”

Pete Smith – Sound Recordist

More About the Project

From their wintering site on the wetlands of the Solway Firth, through staging sites in Norway, to their breeding grounds in the High Arctic, the barnacle geese journey across shifting environments in search of food and safety. Following the geese on their journey were a team of three clunky humans who charted the flight path of these birds, encountering different communities along the way, seeking answers to their own questions of home and resources.

Solway to Svalbard is the culmination of the research, inspiration, documentation, ideas, thoughts, and feelings for these three collaborators and through their in-depth development, a richness of material has been generated that captures very special and intimate moments of the barnacle geese’s migration.

But where did is all begin?

“Fancy spending a couple of days filming and recording geese at the wetlands?” I don’t think any of us had any idea of the journey that we had just started when we got together for that initial reccie!”

Stuart MacPherson – Composer

The Solway Firth’ mudflats and coastal grasslands make up one of the largest intertidal habitats in the UK attracting tens of thousands of geese and other wildfowl and waders each autumn, the story of Solway to Svalbard stars here…

“Caerlaverock WWT was the first wildlife reserve I went to as a child. I remember ‘hiding in a hide’ and peeking out the small windows, looking at the vast numbers of grazing barnacle geese and listening to their noisy squabbling. It made a real impression on me, so, when Stuart first got in touch and asked me to come along on a recce for the project I jumped at the opportunity.”

Pete Smith – Sound Recordist

The development process of this project has encompassed research trips to the High Arctic, writing and filming sessions in the wetlands of the Solway Firth, writing residencies in Scotland and Norway, pop-up musical performances in Caerlaverock Castle and a work in progress performance in a working man’s club in Dumfries for the National Theatre of Scotland’s ‘Just Start Here’ festival. 

Wide-shot panoramic footage of their journey evokes the scope and scale of the landscapes they travel through with close up environmental detailed shots. An immersive textured sound design weaves field recordings of the geese. Recorded interviews and stories recounted by local people in the Arctic and the Solway comment upon our integral but often forgotten interconnectedness with the natural world and the reality of environmental change on us all. An original score written as a response to the different environments and habitats weaves through the show. At the heart of the work – Stuart, Pete and Emma’s personal story – their account of navigating these people, places and landscapes and how their time with the geese changed and shifted their perspectives. 

“When Stuart approached me to work on Solway to Svalbard, I felt an immediate connection to the piece. I naively imagined setting up my camera down on the Solway Firth and patiently waiting for skeins of geese to fly in perfect formations overhead. The reality really was much more of a wild goose chase – a lesson in our limits as clunky humans stuck to the ground, as well as an incredible journey of discovery of the places, habitats and people that are connected by the barnacle geese and their round trip to the high arctic.”

Emma Dove – Filmmaker

Image by Stuart Macpherson

Solway to Svalbard is a work about the natural world, our relationships with it. We’re currently living in a moment where a radical reconsideration of our relationship to our planet is required, and as gentle, tender, and intimate as the work is – it has never felt more urgent or necessary.

Audiences will learn about the geese, their habitat – what is changing and why that’s important. The barnacle geese are a conservation success story to celebrate but they are also an indicator species – their shifting behaviours and journeys pointing to rising temperatures and climate change.  Above all, Solway to Svalbard is a work about feeling and connection. Immersed in the sights and sounds and movement of the geese and orchestrated by live music – audiences will be invited to feel their own interconnectedness with the natural world.

Solway to Svalbard is a live performance incorporating original orchestral music, film screening, and unique audio design. BSL interpreted, tickets for the premier of Solway to Svalbard are on sale now.

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