When will we be paid...

THE ORGANISERS of a major arts project are trying to plug a £30,000 funding gap to salvage its future.

More than 250 pieces of art are all set to be installed at the new Midpark mental health hospital in Dumfries.

But the impending liquidation of regional body dgArts has meant NHS bosses face opening in four weeks’ time without the art installations which were earmarked to aid treatment and form a key part of the design of the building.

dgArts held the finances for the project, known as Healing Spaces, so their collapse means final bills have not been paid to 17 individuals and businesses who are finishing the art work.

The Standard revealed earlier this month how dgArts had used the unspent remains of the  £164,000 Healing Spaces money to provide cash flow before its demise at the start of the month. Their pending liquidation will turn the independent Healing Spaces team into a creditor.

 Donald Urquhart, who is the lead artist on the project, told the Standard he feels there is no hope of seeing the money again.

He said: “Ninety per cent of the money has been spent but we need the rest of it to be able to pay invoices and release the finished artwork. It could be salvaged but we need the remaining £30,000 to do it. Everything is ready to go and it would be a tragedy if a year’s worth of work went to waste as most of these pieces could not be used anywhere else.”

Healing Spaces project manager, Jane McArthur, said: “A lot of the artwork has been carried out by patients and it would be terrible if people that are vulnerable and fragile lose out on this.”

And she said local businesses are also losing out.

One of those businesses was Phil’s Frames on Buccleuch Street in Dumfries which has the job of framing much of the artwork and installing toughened glass over it.

Owner Phil Currie says he can’t continue the work until an outstanding bill of around £3,000 is paid.

“I want to get this off my books and get the job finished but if I can’t then I’ll be left with all the raw materials for it,” he told the Standard.

Focus will now turn on both the NHS and the council to plug that gap in funding. Asked yesterday whether they would be prepared to provide the cash so their hospital could open as planned, a health board spokeswoman said: “NHS Dumfries and Galloway has made formal contact with dgArts regarding the status of the Healing Spaces project and until the position becomes clear financially, it would not be appropriate for the NHS board to make public comment. With regard to the Midpark Hospital, it is on schedule and will be operational by the end of November 2011.”

The council was a core funder of dgArts and last month withheld one of its final payments to the group because of fears over liquidation. They’ve also been asked to help cover the funding gap.

A spokesman said yesterday: “The council is currently supporting the work of dgArts’ appointed advisors, Armstrong Watson, to establish the financial impact on all dgArts’ creditors, of which the council is one. We are advised that it would be inappropriate at this stage to consider treating any one of the creditors differently than the others.”

 South of Scotland MSP Joan McAlpine has also taken the matter up and has written both to the council and Creative Scotland to try and get them involved.

Posted by MMac

dgArts notice of closure

dgArts sent out this email this official notice of closure this afternoon:

This is the end. dgArts

The news of the sudden demise of dgArts, whilst not completely surprising given the level of funding the organisation has lost recently, was shocking in its delivery. The current situation has lost good people their jobs and has left projects incomplete and artists out of pocket.
Instant insolvency, with a hefty fee to the insolvency specialists the council have brought in, appears a brutal end to an organisation that's been at the forefront of the cultural sector in D&G for the best part of 30 years. A measured approach was called for and apparently ignored.


Inevitably tomorrow's local press will have the story. Anticipate headlines of woe, tales of gloom and doom mixed in with a soupçon of the blame and shame game, all topped off with the obligatory, 'what good are the arts when there's potholes to be filled?' clarion call beloved by the hard of thinking in our local letters pages.

Readers of this blog should now get involved in what replaces dgArts. The Catstrand is hosting an event on Monday the 3rd at 4pm for the regions Independents, the agenda had already planned to look at the role dgArts played in the regions creative delivery. Now it's your chance to say what you think should happen.


Naturally all our thoughts lie with Alan, Caroline, Danny, Rachel and Stephanie who held the fort in the most trying of situations and we at the Commonty wish all of them the very best for the future.

Posted by MMac & MB

dgArts - the final act

For those of you looking for news of dgArts - it does seem that the organisation has stopped trading. We will bring more news as it becomes available, but this is obviously a traumatic turn of events for everyone involved.

posted by MB

Response from dgArts

Those of you watching the blog will have see that there has been great interest of late in the 'state of play' with regard to dgArts and their future as one of the key foundations of the arts in the region...posts and comments on the issue can be found here

The Board of dgArts have now made an important contribution to the discussion by posting the following comment on the Commonty (for technical reasons that are beyond our ken the blog is refusing to accept the text as a 'comment' - hence why it appears as an independent Post here)....

Hi Matt, thank you for your comments and article on the future of dgArts. Back at the beginning of this year the board of dgArts worked many hours together to devise a new business plan for the organisation - a plan which we felt would best utilise funding from the public purse. The board of dgArts is committed to providing an independent arts organisation that services the whole of Dumfries & Galloway, that supports the main art forms of literature, performing arts and public art and that attracts major national opportunities to our region.

We presented our new business plan to Dumfries & Galloway Council, our strategic partner, with much optimism and hoped that this was a strategy that stakeholders would buy into. If the new direction of dgArts isn’t what you and other stakeholders want then no problem but let’s not miss out on fantastic opportunities for this region which can be delivered by having a mobilised network - such as this - in place. Unfortunately the delay in recruiting a new director has been prolonged by those who are still trying to make up their minds about what they want for arts in the region but time is critical!

dgArts’ role is to consider communities’ arts needs on a regionwide basis. The company has shown what can be achieved when we collaborate – Homecoming, Burns Light and BigManWalking have been cited as recently as yesterday at the BigBurnsSupper information event. These were the sum of widespread individual and community efforts, and involved skilled coordination by the company. The result was a creation on a scale that merited national and international notice for Dumfries and Galloway.

Great opportunities lie ahead and, as you rightly point out, time is critical, not least to implement our accepted proposal to host a large scale event with UZ International to mark the Year of Creative Scotland in 2012 . We would hate to lose this massive opportunity as well as the valuable work dgArts supports in the region and we could lose out badly if there’s no infrastructure or capability here to support. Given the proven success of the work implemented by dgArts for the Year of Homecoming 2009 we know that this has impressed those who have approached us now for the next themed year. Let’s not forget how that project put Dumfries & Galloway on the national map!

So we need buy in from funders and stakeholders and you are absolutely right …… we need to work together and do it now -

The Board of dgArts.

The dgArts question

The mood of the times has been one of uncertainty and sudden unexpected shifts in the status quo (credit crunch, Arab Spring/Summer, SNP landslide et al). In our own way the Arts in D+G have been part of this larger momentum too. We seem to lurch between catastrophic disappearance of people and services to euphoric moments of clarity when it seems that new growth is springing up in their place.

Throughout all of this period one of the largest question marks has hung over dgArts….we are all familiar with the story: dgArts received revenue funding from Creative Scotland for some years – notice of the withdrawal of this support was given last year and dgArts underwent a painful ‘re-structuring’ process which saw 5 redundancies and the staff reduced to a core of 3 – supported by money from D+G Council (£90,000 for the year). It was clear, however that the continued council support was not ‘unconditional’ and dgArts had until the end of the current financial year to present a clear vision for their future – and good value for precious public expenditure in the Arts.

 

In May 2011 dgArts announced the departure of their director Susan Garnsworthy and that ‘a new director would be joining the team’. Around this time I was aware a great goodwill in the arts community towards dgArts and an excitement about a wide-ranging discussion of what dgArts could evolve into, to best serve the arts audience and creative community of the region. In particular, we were all racking our brains to think of people who we could ‘headhunt’ for the new director’s role when the position was advertised. With someone in post, charged with re-imagining the organisation, we were all ready to work together for the common-good of the Arts in the region.

As we creep into September there is still no sign of advertisement for a new director….with the best will in the world, an appointment process of this significance could easily take 2-3 months. This would leave a new director about the same amount of time to find their feet, make an assessment of the situation and build a proposal for continued support from the public purse for 2012-13?

I truly hope that dgArts have something up their sleeves – all the people involved there are  well-intentioned and committed.

BUT in the midst of this period of general uncertainty – new energy is bubbling in the Arts in the region eg: Glenkens Community Arts Trust, Creative Arts Business Network, The Stove, EventLab Dumfries, Wide Open, Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust, Theatre Royal refurbishment (please note this is an entirely personal opinion I am NOT speaking on behalf of ANY of these groups). All of these groups need to build relationships with the D+G Council (and with national organisations - particularly Creative Scotland). Whether it is fair or not, dgArts have come to be seen as a touchstone of the value of public arts spending in the region….ie as far as the Council is concerned -everything else is on hold until ‘we see what happens with dgArts’.

I think we all need to be working together for benefit of the region – to do this we desperately need the Council to have a strong vision for the importance of the arts. This requires lobbying from all of us – but it also requires some resolution of the ‘dgArts question’


This is an open invitation to dgArts and everyone with something to contribute to the situation - to use The Commonty as a forum for this discussion.

This is a personal opinion piece posted by Matt Baker
 

More from the Midsteeple

The process of re-inventing dgArts has reached another important crossroads. Current director Susan Garnsworthy has resigned and will leave the organisation at the end of May. Alan Thompson will remain in-post temporarily, to manage dgArts whilst a new director is recruited and appointed.

 

The organisation has announced that it will focus on Performing Arts, Public Art and Literature from here on. It seems that there is a valuable process underway to assess the contemporary state of the arts in D+G, with the aim of best judging exactly what role is best suited to dgArts.

Recent artist-led developments (like The Commonty!) are very much part of the big picture now…..it might be really useful to everyone, if people felt able to pitch in thoughts about how they would like to see dgArts  operating in the future.

If they are going to be a ‘development agency’…who should they be working with to develop projects? How can they continue their valuable work in supporting small-scale community events? Do they just need to present themselves as a ‘one-stop’ shop for supporting delivery of ideas coming forward from the creative community and local groups…rather than trying to drive projects that they build in collaboration with other agencies?

In the immediate term we all need to rack our brains and raid our address books for ideas of people who could make a brilliant new director for dgArts…..any suggestions on the blog? The suggestion seems to be that someone from the Performing Arts is what dgArts would like…..

In the meantime, all the very best wishes to Susan in her next venture and many thanks for all she has contributed at dgArts.

murmurs from the Midsteeple

The white smoke is not quite rising from the midsteeple lum yet, but some details are beginning to emerge about the long awaited 'review' of the organisation (actually something of a crisis forced on DGArts by Creative Scotland's decision to withdraw revenue funding leaving the organisation with £190,000 less in their annual budget!)
It seems that the core staff will be reduced to 3 - a Director, a full time admin/front of house person and a part-time finance officer. The 'project officers' (eg literature and public art) are funded from external sources these will definitely continue for the duration of current contracts and it is to be greatly hoped that the funding for these posts will renewed.
There were some very talented and committed people at DGArts - lets hope they all find new and productive roads really soon.