With good weather forecast for the coming weekend, Cornbury Music Festival organisers are steeling themselves for a last minute rush for tickets as locals head for the Great Tew Estate near Chipping Norton to catch one of the best line-ups yet for this popular event.
Weekend and day tickets are still available to buy onsite. Jamie Cullum, Soul II Soul and Lemar top the Friday bill; Bryan Ferry headlines Saturday with All Saints, Corinne Bailey Rae, Lucinda Williams and Booker T; and Seal returns on Sunday with James Morrison, Beverley Knight, Newton Faulkner, The Shires and The Zombies.
Mindful dogs come to Cornbury Music Festival
Also heading for the festival this weekend are ten papier mache dogs, part of a larger pack of more than 100 hounds created by artist Tom Campbell in conjunction with Oxfordshire Mind. The dogs will be hanging backstage and mingling with the stars who will sign and customise their favourite pet before they are sold off to raise funds for the local mental health charity.
Tom was inspired to make the dogs after being reunited with his brother who had been missing for ten years. Tom, who usually lives in Cork in Ireland, takes up the story: ‘The reason I'm in Oxford is that my brother turned up here. I came to support him, since then he has been offered a Mind flat, so I contacted Mind at the Mill Centre in Oxford and suggested the project, having done something similar in Cork.
‘The main idea was to take the dogs “out on a walk” along the Cowley Road as it would be fun to see group of dogs on the street. I made the first ten dogs with my brother around Christmas. Since then I estimate there has been around 70 people involved, both at the Mill Centre and through open workshops from the studio I have had in the Magdalen Road.’
And what now for Tom
‘I have to go back to Cork to make some of my own art work; then I have another possible project in my hometown or Dumfries in Scotland and a residency trip in Barcelona for a few months, but I hope to come back to Oxford next year for another project possibly making even more dogs or birds or fish, loads of them!’
Published on 05 July 2016 by Ben Robinson
