August-November 2020
Installation
Curator and technical production lead, Collaborative project with homegrown artists for The Stove Network
Dumfries

‘The High Street is somewhere we though we knew, and now it’s different, it’s elsewhere.’

When the lockdown struck, all activity at the Stove was put on hold. What quickly started to emerge was a project titled Homegrown, gathering and sharing the conversations, creativity and new narratives being drawn in real time during the lockdown by Stove members and community, hosted through online platforms including social media channels and the Stove website.

Elsewhere grew from this, a research project that looked to re-locate the online creative practice of Homegrown onto the High Street of Dumfries as means of exploring public space during a time when we as a community were responding to, and recovering from the effects of COVID on our sense of place.

Elsewhere aimed to experiment with new forms of communal experience, gathering and exchange, investigating the unfamiliar in the local and creating a space to share, reflect and create new ideas for public space going forward, coming together whilst social distancing.

Elsewhere was about low-key testing – pop up investigations for small, transient audiences. The aspirations of Elsewhere were to explore pausing whilst out beyond the confines of our homes, and at all times of day. Elsewhere invited audiences to make tentative steps back into their town centres and high streets.

Elsewhere was a project I curated, and also led on the installation and technical creation of the main Elsewhere weekend. Involving the re-imagining of two shop fronts as a base for the project, and the development and support of artists commissions leading to window exhibitions, murals and light and sound installations.

Elsewhere also played a role as part of the wider project, Atlas Pandemica: Maps to a Kinder World a series of ten projects exploring the affects of covid-19 on the communities of Dumfries and Galloway. The details of this work are due for publication in April 2021.