GYRE Sc045058

The four partners in GYRE – Elizabeth Roberts, Janet Wheatcroft, Andrew Wheatcroft and the three sponsors/partners in Forestry Purposes LLP have all been professionally involved life-long in the arts. Our associate, Sarah Watkins, is a trained designer and artist who brings a strong, arresting, iconoclastic and wry eye to the visual aspects of GYRE’s activities.

GYRE is the tier-one SCIO charitable vehicle which will be used to employ our wide cultural skills and expertise for the benefit of the town of Moffat, to Annandale and Eskdale, to Dumfries and Galloway, to Scotland, the UK and beyond.

All four of us have professional connections with practitioners and opinion formers at government and other levels not only in Scotland, and the UK, but also in Europe, USA, Russia, and Asia (notably China). Using our professional expertise, along with other resources available to us, we plan to put together via GYRE events of local, national and international interest on a wide variety topics, pitched at various interest groups.

The first opportunity GYRE has been offered is an invitation from Ian Harrower to participate in ‘Previously …’ in November 2014. Ian is , with partner Susan Morrison, Previously’s volunteer producer. This nation-wide festival is now in its fourth ever- more successful year. We chose to engage with ‘Previously…’, because it is an extremely appealing, fresh and original way of linking the past to the present, and is aimed at broad spectrum of the general public.

‘Previously … ‘ is grassroots but also institutional in its coverage. It celebrates Scotland imaginatively through public events, excursions and exhibitions organized in different localities, including notably site-specific events, by individuals, by large and small groups, by museums, galleries, and libraries etc. throughout Scotland.

GYRE is about reworking, polemic, debate, lively conversation – and delicious cakes. We believe in looking hard and long at the present through the magnifying glass of the past, collaborating with practitioners in disciplines such as music, dance, theatre, politics and philosophy to reassess our lives today.

We believe in using all the tools in the box - not only words but also images and performance .

To cite one example:. The Carcanet Press After Lermontov. Translations for the Bicentenary which grew out of our 2012 discussions with Ek. Genieva of VGBIL in Moffat. It is a groundbreaking piece of work, transmuting the work of 19th cent Russian national poet (and painter) Mikhail Lermontov into the Scottish poetic tradition – moving from then into now. We also brokered Richard Demarco’s Imaginary Journey of Lermontov Through Scotland’ - a suite of paintings which has been exhibited in Moscow and will return shortly to be exhibited in Scotland.

Dumfries and Galloway has set up a structure for transforming the role and social function of art . GYRE, including in its first expression under the auspices of ‘Previously…’ this November, embraces the same innovative and effective spirit .

ABOUT SOME OF US
Janet and Andrew have organized events at different times for Spring Fling in Craigieburn Garden – a launch party, an art event, a children’s story telling, and performance art. In 2012, we hosted events for MBE’s ‘Beyond the Garden Gate’. Liz has also organized events, including international and local art exhibitions, at 21 Well Road for D&G Arts Festival and Day of the Region and at other times. As alluded to above, all three of us severally or collectively have organized events and been responsible for programming for Moffat Book Events 2010-2014.

To sum up:GYRE looks forward to making a unique contribution at the heart of the family of arts organisations in Dumfries & Galloway. We welcome every opportunity to collaborate in any way we can to further the aims of the region. We actively support what you have set out to do, and look forward to continuing to play a central role in its development.

We set ourselves an international standard while we ran Moffat Book Events 2009-2014, and are well aware of the significant economic and other benefits that can come from bringing new footfall into the region, and strengthening the appeal of Dumfries and Galloway to new individuals and groups.

A proven way of doing this is by extending our cultural appeal. We have no doubt, given our experience in MBE and other initiatives, that we can carry this through.

Elizabeth Roberts
Janet Wheatcroft
Professor Andrew Wheatcroft

8 August 2014

APPENDIX


ELIZABETH ROBERTS had a career in journalism (Thomson Newspapers; staff reporter and feature writer Sunday Times) before publishing more than a dozen fiction and non-fiction books - one nominated by Book Trust as a ‘Children’s Book of the Year’ in its category . Many of her books for young people have been translated into Russian. She has translated two major books for Weidenfeld from Russian into English: The Soviet Mafia (Arkady Vaksberg) and Armenian Tragedy by Yuri Rost, Her account with theatre director Mark Rozovsky of the murder of a liberal reform-minded Russian priest, Alexander Men’, ‘A Russian Rehearsal’, based on T S Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, commissioned by Donald Smith of the Story-Telling Centre in Edinburgh is still in the repertoire at Moscow’s Theatre At the Nikitsky Gates. Her ‘Wallace’s Women’ with Margaret McSeveney was performed in Lanark and at Edinburgh’s Netherbow theatre. She has had poetry published in a group collection, run an art gallery in Moffat and hosted many arts events – play readings, painting classes and children’s story-telling - at her studio and her garden with contemporary sculpture at 21 Well Road, Moffat. She has led groups of British publishers, literary agents, artists and exhibitions to Russia. She has taught Russian at Moffat Academy and is a member of a Russian conversation group at the RAF retirement home in Moffat.

ANDREW WHEATCROFT juggles three separate but connected working lives – as an author, an international publisher of books in the humanities, and now at City University London, where he is visiting Professor in International Publishing. Since his first book in the 1970s, he has published twenty-one full-scale works in English, and he has now been translated into thirteen different languages. Since the 1990s, he has focused on Central Europe and the Middle East, and The Ottomans: dissolving images [Penguin 1993], The Habsburgs: embodying empire [Penguin 1995]. Infidels; the conflict between Islam and Christendom [Penguin 2005] and The Enemy at the Gate [Random House and Basic Books Inc. 2008] have been widely praised. He and Janet Wheatcroft also work together with Chinese publishers of books on the fine arts, fine-tuning their books for the international market. As a result, he lectures widely in China, and is currently working on a project focused on the development of western attitudes to China since the late Middle Ages.

JANET WHEATCROFT is best known as a garden journalist , but she has also edited the English language edition of Dream of Empire, a highly successful book of historic photographs of Imperial Germany. She was the horticultural consultant for David Hicks on Garden Design, a landmark title of the 1980s. Half-Scottish by birth, she took her family back to the Scottish borders, where since the 1990s, she has created an idiosyncratic and inspiring six acre garden, on a wooded hillside at Craigieburn in Southern Scotland, which is now internationally renowned. It was her idea to work on refining books on Chinese art for the international market.