Forgan Arts Centre is a home for artistic production, experimentation, and learning in North East Fife.
Purpose
Forgan Arts Centre sits on the edge of the village of Newport-on-Tay in the Tay Bridgehead Ward of North East Fife. It is a community-led arts centre delivering creative activities for the people of Fife, and beyond. Our programme includes art and craft classes, workshops, artist-led projects that respond to community need, artist commissions, residencies, placements, and public events. We provide allotments, artist studios, and professional making facilities. We have on-site accommodation in the Gardener’s Cottage.
Through diverse creative practices, we work with artists while listening to our communities to address individual and collective challenges that resonate locally and globally. We are a part of the local ecology providing access to creativity and a site for the exploration and understanding of the natural environment. We provide a warm welcome and take an approach to accessibility that supports individual need.
Vision
Nurture a connected, sustainable, and welcoming community through creative ways and means.
Methodology
The centre’s activities and operations are conceptualised as An Arts Centre as a Garden. This is an experiment: imagining an art centre as a garden where a multisensory and sentient ecology of plants, people, and creatures support one another through mutually beneficial relationships and reciprocity.
An Arts Centre as a Garden is an example of social permaculture, a concept by which communities look to natural environments to model co-existence and co-creation.
Our Aims
The ethics of permaculture are ‘people care, earth care, and fair share’ and these extend to An Arts Centre as a Garden, informing our aims.
Aim 1: Cultivate life-long creative practices.
Objectives:
- Provide space for interdisciplinary exchange, the sharing of ideas, innovation, and critical thinking.
- Provision of classes, courses, and workshops in a broad range of creative practices that are accessible, taught by experienced artists and master crafts people.
- Maintain excellent professional making facilities and tools, inside and outdoors, across creative disciplines.
Aim 2: Nurture a resilient, connected community rooted in reciprocity.
Objectives:
- Support local people to address local and global issues through creativity.
- Understand the needs of people locally and regionally through deep listening and developing generative, accessible activities.
- Embed the Place Principle as foundational and develop relationships across sectors and geographical borders.
Aim 3: Place the natural environment at the heart of our activities.
Objectives:
- Create opportunities for artists, participants, and visitors to study and explore nature through creative practices.
- Use the land as a site for accessible climate action, learning, food production and bio-diversity improvement, building a pathway beyond Net Zero 2045.
- Protect the natural environment through the care and maintenance of the land, investing in adaptations that will safeguard it from extreme weather and a changing climate.
Aim 4: Provide a sustainable home in the community.
Objectives:
- Offer an open house, a warm welcome, and equity of opportunity for community, artists, and team.
- Foster organisational and financial sustainability to ensure long term security through collaboration and collectivity.
- Prioritise Net Zero 2045 and planning for beyond this target to land cooling and carbon extraction and sequestration, long term.
History
Forgan Arts Centre was established by members of the local community in 1974 to provide a place for creative learning. It is a membership organisation. We purchased the Leng Home in 2022 via Community Asset Transfer, with enthusiastic support from local people. The estate is the historic home of the Leng family, radically progressive philanthropists, and advocates of accessible educational reform through creativity. We proudly continue this tradition.
The estate comprises three buildings, the Leng Home, the Gardener’s Cottage, and the Kiln House, as well as over three acres of grounds including mature woodland, hedgerows, food growing plots, and accessible lawns. The site is an invaluable heritage asset, and the team are custodians of the grounds, stewarding the land and buildings for the benefit of our communities. Building on five decades of experience delivering creative education, we have developed our programme in relation to our new context at the Leng Home. We are cultivating a site that has people, place, and the planet at its heart.
