Cultural Crossings with Art, Poetry and Music
CENTRAL BOOKING’s Sandstone Steps project
in collaboration with Hugh Bryden
Scotland: May – September 2024
New York: Early 2025
Our Scottish project, Sandstone Steps, with the theme of the sandstone quarries at the center. Exploring and celebrating the cultural flux through the artistic, literary, and musical influences that crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues today.
In preparation for the project, Maddy spent a full week in June with Hugh Bryden in Dumfries and Galloway, as he introduced her around to people and his home landscape. They were meeting, greeting and arranging with supporters, collaborators and organizations.
Two composers (Rohin Khemani and Ben Bryden) and two poets (JoAnne McFarland and Hugh McMillan), one each representing New York and Dumfries, will join Maddy and Hugh in a collaboration on a multi-media limited edition sculptural artist’s book. Maddy will be an artist in residence at the Gracefield Arts Centre in 2024 to produce a portfolio of linocut prints with Hugh Bryden, as the major visual art component.
The elements will be drawn together into publications, events and exhibitions. It begins with a music concert and launch at the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival that takes place over the last two weeks in May. Following that, a two-month artist’s book exhibition of New York based CENTRAL BOOKING artists with prominent Scots artists, at the Gracefield Art Centre. And we will finish with the Wigtown Book Festival at the end of September in Wigtown, Scotland’s Book Town. In between, expect even more programming of exhibitions and events- and a book documenting it all.
