Edge School: Lesson One: Paper

Saturday 29 August, 1pm-5pm

You’re invited to join Edge School, a new peer-to-peer learning programme at Forgan Arts Centre for LGBTQIA+ creatives in Fife.

Join us to explore the garden as a metaphor for spaces of cultivation, rooting and unexpected encounters through art, craft, landwork, permaculture, writing and food.

Edge School is free and for LQBTQIA+ creative folk over 16 years old. This queer-led programme will encourage community building, experimentation and creativity.

Edge School understands queerness as an ongoing horizon: a way of collectively imagining and rehearsing more just, joyful, and liberatory futures.

Through creative practice and shared inquiry, the programme creates space to experiment with what those futures might look like, and how they might be cultivated together.

Edge School: Lesson One – Paper

Together we’ll explore papermaking, queer-coded plants from the garden, and storytelling, creating handmade paper that holds traces of personal histories and shared narratives for the future.

Please bring along literature, photographs, letters, drawings, or other paper ephemera that you would like to embed—or “smuggle”—into your handmade paper.

We’ll start with a communal lunch of soup before settling into the workshop.

About the Artist

Christopher Ivor Adam is an artist and Gaelic choir leader (b. 1999, Paisley; lives and works in Dundee) makes prints, paintings, drawings, films, songs and stories.

Adam works instinctively to make marks across a range of media, especially oil paint and lithography, creating characters and personalities to tell stories in idioms indigenous to his native Scotland. His work is drawn between imagination and historical records, and flits between Gaelic, Scots and English.

Some recent projects have tackled the link between traditional styles of singing and conspiracy theories; a violent regime seeking to restore Fife’s medieval Gaelic past; and paintings inspired by a fellow shape note singer’s carving of her own gravestone, as practice.

This project is built upon the relationships that we have and continue to develop with local artists, ally’s, communities and organisations in North East Fife from 2024-26 during Queering the Clachan and Queer Makers Club.  

Edge School takes its roots from the eighteenth-century Irish hedge schools; informal and often secret spaces of learning that emerged in response to legal and social oppression. Held in homes, barns, and outdoor spaces, hedge schools were community-led sites of knowledge-sharing and resistance. 

Influenced by José Esteban Muñoz’s proposition that “queerness is not yet here,” Edge School understands queerness as an ongoing horizon: a way of collectively imagining and rehearsing more just, joyful, and liberatory futures. 

Funded by Fife Communities Mental Health Fund.