Edge School

Edge School is a new peer-to-peer learning programme for LGBTQIA+ creatives at Forgan Arts Centre.

Edge School explores the garden as a metaphor for spaces of cultivation, rooting and unexpected encounters through art, craft, landwork, permaculture, writing and food. 

Through creative practice and collective exploration, this programme creates space to experiment with what those futures might look like, and how they might be cultivated together. 

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.

Next Session

Lesson Four

Saturday 28 November 1-5pm

This Lesson will be led by Forgan Art Centre’s current Artist in Residence Nxa Parinussa.

Past Programme

Lesson Three – Disruption 

24 October 

We took a school trip to Cooper Gallery, Dundee. Were we contributed to the Cooper Gallery’s event, Queering the Classroom: Refusal, Love and Disruption.   

This event was part of Jamming The Ignorant Art School programme curated and organised by Cooper Gallery. 

Queering the Classroom: Refusal, Love, and Disruption took place at Cooper Gallery in Dundee. The programmed activities included a participatory performance workshop, card game, and discussions.  

Edge School responded to the exhibition’s themes and ideas with a poem, The Big River, written and perfromed by Edge School memebr Emile.

Emile said –

Human rights are not a given, they must be fought for – and once won, guarded preciously – as they can be taken away from us. It is possible to be erased. 

This is an erasure poem and, apart from the refrain, the words are taken directly from the scene we read together and inspired by themes we spoke about: belonging, safety, acceptance, the desire to protect what is precious, joy, creativity and the importance of names and being seen by community.  

Contributing artists included Gordon Douglas, Annie Jael Kwan, nxa parinussa, and Edge School. Discussions were facilitated by James Bell and artist-designed refreshment by Jek McAllister. 

Lesson Two–Conditions

26 September

What are the conditions that make a creative practice possible? 

What supports your practice? What inspires it? What does it depend upon? What obstacles does it encounter? And what enables it to grow? 

Together with artists Emelio Kerr Beale and Clara Hancock, we mapped  the people, places, materials, tools, resources, relationships, and conditions that make our creative work possible, exploring how queer networks, communities, and forms of care shape our practices. 

The map were translated into textiles, using a heat press to perserve drawings and ideas into a table coth that will be used at Future Edge School Lessons. Through this process, we  explored another form of translation: from thought to image, image to material, and individual practice to shared experience. 

We began with a collective reading from Brian Friel’s Translations, a play set in a hedge school in County Donegal in 1833, within an Irish-speaking community. The play opened up questions around language, mapping, and the ways that places are named, translated, organised, and understood. 

About the Artists 

Emelio Kerr Beale predominantly works with drawing, sculpture, and textiles. Interested in how we communicate with the world, and how the world communicates back, Emelio often draws on personal and social histories to explore the tensions between the stories we tell and the stories we are told. 

Clara Hancock is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the everyday entanglement of language, infrastructure, and affect. Working primarily with sound alongside moving image, installation, and writing, their practice is shaped by the failures and possibilities of language, and by the use of sound and sculptural materials as ways of approaching the ineffable. 

Together, Emelio and Clara are interested in collaborative practice, methods of sharing, and structures of support. Their workshop explores how artist-led pedagogies can create routes for rethinking individual practices, recognising that creative practice always folds outwards: it makes the world around us, and is simultaneously made by the world it inhabits. 

Lesson One – Paper

29 August

Edge School first lesson was with artist Christopher Ivor Adam. We came together to form a new cohort, set collective intentions, and begin building relationships through shared making.

We explored papermaking, queer-coded plants from the garden, and storytelling, created handmade paper that holds traces of personal histories and shared narratives for the future.

Christopher Ivor Adam (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.

Travel 

We ask attendees to use low carbon methods of transport wherever possible and accessible. 

Forgan Arts Centre can be reached via two bus services: Moffat & Williamson 77 and Stagecoach 99 (which requires a short walk), which can be caught at Dundee, St Andrews and Leuchars. Leuchars and Dundee are the closest train stations, both can be reached through direct trains from London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Our local coach services include Ember (which can take bikes), Megabus and Citylink. There are road-free and quiet cycle routes from Dundee and nearby villages, and bikes can be stored securely during your stay. We have four parking spaces at Forgan Arts Centre for Blue Badge Holders. Other drivers we ask to park at Waterstone Crook Car Park (a 2 min walk from the centre), which also has electric car charging points. 

We have a small budget to cover travel costs, we acknowledge the barriers that queer communities can face in remote, peripheral, and underserved areas.