Culture Fund 2025-2026 Case Study: Orkney Arts Society

Our objectives were to host 5 concerts, 2 visual arts talks, 4 literary talks, a foy and to host an exhibition of paintings by George Scott Robertson in collaboration with the Pier Arts Centre.

We successfully held 5 concerts as planned, although due to the unavailability of the planned trumpet player we instead arranged for Sasha Savaloni to team up with another guitar player to form a very well-received guitar duo. We also collaborated with OIC instrumental service and Scottish Young Musicians to hold our Young Musicians festival, adjudicated by Jack Westwell – which was attended by over 100 participants from all over Orkney and is something we would like to repeat in future years.

We hosted 3 of the 4 planned literature talks – the final one will be held in April – with very good audiences for the first 2.

We ended up hosting 3 Visual Arts events, all of which proved exceptionally popular – being sell-out events. And in addition we hosted as planned, in collaboration with the Pier Arts Centre, an exhibition of paintings by George Scott Robertson, which proved of significant interest to local Stromnesians.

Lastly, we hosted our annual Foy, this time on the theme of Memories, and raising a total of £609 for Alzheimers Research UK.

The funding has been critical to us in terms of hosting our programme of activities – it provides the seed funding which enables us to seek additional funding from Chamber Music Scotland – and together the funding from OIC and CMS enable us to bring top quality musicians to Orkney over the winter months at prices which are affordable to Orcadians, as well as host Visual Arts and Literary events and our annual foy.

Our remoteness makes bringing artists to Orkney a costly business, although we aim to include artists on tour, thereby sharing travel costs with our clubs. We were successful this year in bidding for artists sponsored by the Tunnell Trust, which made it affordable to bring a quintet to Orkney. We were also successful in getting additional funding from the Touring Network to help fund our second concert from Errollyn Wallen CBE, this time in collaboration with a baritone who travelled over from Paris specially for the concert.

As in previous years, we have incorporated concerts and workshops for children and young adults which greatly enhance their quality of life and music skills. This year OIC’s funding also made it possible to host the exhibition of George Robertson’s paintings in the Pier Arts Centre – paying for some to be re-framed and for transport costs of others from Italy.