Forgan Arts Centre
Details
Name
Forgan Arts Centre
About
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.
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.
An Arts Centre as a Garden
In 2024 we developed a new business plan for the period 2025-28. During this time the centre’s activities and operations will be 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.
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. Responding to local consultation and applying the social permaculture concept, we have identified three themes as the focus of our activity for the three-year period, 2025-28. Through these themes we will engage with local community concerns; wider social issues; our EDI (equalities, diversity and inclusion) and environmental aims; the National Performance Framework; and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, drawing inspiration from the intelligence and lifecycles of the natural environment.
Region
Fife
Website
http://www.forganartscentre.co.uk