Methodology
In 2024, Forgan Arts Centre developed a strategic plan to guide us from 2025 to 2028. At the heart of this plan is a new way of thinking: An Arts Centre as a Garden.
This is a creative experiment – imagining the centre not just as a venue, but as a living, breathing ecosystem. Like a garden, it’s a place where people, plants, and other creatures coexist, connect, and support one another through mutual care, reciprocity and creativity.
An Arts Centre as a Garden is inspired by the principles of social permaculture, which takes cues from nature to shape healthier, more collaborative human systems. We are committed to embedding climate-conscious practices and environmental sustainability in everything we do.
Annual Themes
Responding to community consultation and applying social permaculture, we have identified three themes as the focus of our activity for the years 2025-2028:
Talking Forests
Ecology of Migration
Queering Nature
Through these themes we will engage with local community concerns and wider social issues, drawing inspiration from the intelligence and lifecycles of the natural environment.
Talking Forests, 2025-2026
Inspired by the mycorrhizal networks ancient trees use to care for saplings we will nurture mutually beneficial intergenerational relationships.
In North East Fife, the youngest and oldest people in our communities lack opportunities and miss out on chances to thrive. Like any flourishing ecosystem, we believe communities are at their best when all ages are valued and connected.
Around the world, ageing populations are reshaping how we live. Closer to home, older people are facing isolation, while younger generations are up against shrinking opportunities. When these age groups drift apart, we lose the stories, skills, and shared learning that help communities grow.
At Forgan Arts Centre, we’re learning from our more-than-human kin. In forests, mature trees use underground fungal networks to support young saplings with nutrients and wisdom. As forest ecologist Suzanne Simard writes, elder trees take responsibility for ‘sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an everchanging landscape’. Inspired by these systems of exchange, we’re building creative spaces where generations meet, share, and learn from each other.
Through the theme of Talking Forests, and led by our artists and communities, we will connect curiosity with experience – supporting young people to grow, and older people to stay active, included, and valued. It’s local work with global relevance: shaping a future that’s more creative, connected and nourishing.
Ecology of Migration, 2026-2027
Replicating the diversity of flourishing ecosystems in our communities to build resilience in a changing climate.
Our communities are changing. As the climate crisis deepens and global instability continues, more people are crossing borders and building new lives — some settling here in Fife. According to the UN Refugee Agency, by mid-2025, 117.3 million people worldwide had been forced to flee their homes because of persecution, conflict and violence. Today, 1 in every 70 people on Earth has been displaced.
At the same time, the natural world around us is shifting too. All over Scotland, some animals and plants struggle to adapt to climate disruption, while others move, settle, and flourish in new environments. Some are even returning, like beavers. In doing so, they create new worlds where life can continue to grow and thrive, in new ways.
What if we began to see movement not as an exception, but as a natural part of life on a changing planet? As writer Sonia Shah reflects: “We’ve constructed a story about our past, our bodies, and the natural world in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.”
We’re exploring what this perspective could mean for us. Healthy ecosystems are often the most diverse: when one part is under pressure, another can step in, helping to repair and rebuild. We believe communities work in much the same way. By exploring and embracing Fife’s migration stories – past and present, human and more-than human – we can build more resilient, creative and just communities.
Queering Nature, 2027-2028
Explore queerness in nature to broaden our understanding of the naturally diverse ways of being in the world.
We have been educated to believe nature is binary. The idea was cemented by Carl Linnaeus in his 1735 taxonomy, Systema Naturae, where all plants were identified as either male or female, in fact, he used the terminology ‘bride and groom’. Our consultation and work with schools evidenced a concern and fear of the erosion of traditional binaries in sex and gender. Through explorations in nature and the work of queer garden-designer Patrick Featherstone, we will unlearn the idea that nature is binary and celebrate nature’s place in queer culture. Seeing queerness in nature is validating, only 5%[3] of plants reproduce in the binary way we were taught in school, it is in fact the fluid non-heteronormative ways of being that are most common. Through explorations in the natural world, we’ll expand our capacity for understanding diverse identities and question our own misconceptions.
