The Flora Event

The Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival was delighted to facilitate a special collaboration between the Dumfries Museum, Dumfries Pride, and DJ McDowall of The Imaginarium for an evening celebrating the extraordinary life of local lass, suffragette, medical pioneer, radical activist, and queer icon Dr. Flora Murray on the centenary of her death on Wednesday, July 26th, at Dumfries Museum.

They co-curated a very special evening of musical and spoken word tributes featuring folk musicians Rachel Walker and Aaron Jones, who had recently written a song about Flora for their album ‘Despite the Wind and the Rain,’ which celebrated underrepresented women in Scottish History. The night also featured performances from Susi Briggs, an author, storyteller, poet, and musician from Dumfries & Galloway; she premiered her new poem about Flora as part of the celebration. Cairn Chorus, a community performance choir based in Moniaive and Thornhill, also performed some songs of protest from their recent Rise Up Singing events, to pay homage to Flora the Suffragette and activist. Audiences were also piped into the Dumfries Museum by the incredible Lani O’Neill, who had over 14 years of performance experience and was a local queer piper with a passion for national and international traditional music.