Tag: Satellite Programme
On our 20th Anniversary
On 17 March 2006, exactly 20 years to the day from the date I sit down to write this blog, the organisation behind the Crawford Art Centre in St Andrews formally changed its name to Fife Contemporary Art and Craft (St Andrews) Ltd. Fife Contemporary, as the organisation became known, also changed its articles of association, its programme, and its methodology. Rather than operating a gallery and arts centre in St Andrews, Fife Contemporary began working across Fife, connecting the work of artists directly with communities.
What didn’t change was Fife Contemporary’s ethos. At its heart has always been the need to support the work of visual and craft artists together, and to value quality work and artist and makers and their practices as a crucial part of the cultural life of Fife and of Scotland. This continues today in our passion for exhibition‑making and in the importance we place on bringing together artists and audiences through these exhibitions. Through this programme we can stretch ideas, expand experiences, and connect people together in ways that enrich lives.
Working outwith the ties of a gallery space was daunting at first. However, it has provided Fife Contemporary with a profound opportunity to work directly with communities, including the artists based here in Fife, and to connect audiences and artists in ever more direct and expansive ways through extended projects and co‑commissioning.
Twenty years is a comparatively short time in the life of some organisations; I am very aware, as I write this, that the RSA celebrates a full 200 years of existence this same year! However, for a small organisation like Fife Contemporary, this feels like an important moment to celebrate. Fife Contemporary has continually proven that it can punch above its weight—serving as both a valuable local resource and an important contributor to the Scotland’s funded organisations, shaping national and international conversations in our field.
Dear Earth
But enough of blowing our own trumpet, I know it feels very uncouth and a bit out of character. But I wanted to share with those of you who follow us closely what we are doing and our plans for our 20th anniversary year. It has been my privilege to helm this fantastic organisation for the last four of these twenty years, and this mini‑milestone has provided a chance to reflect on where we have been, as well as to look forward to where we might be going.
It was this idea of looking both back and forward that the whole team at Fife Contemporary first considered when we came together to design our anniversary‑year exhibition and the themes we wanted to explore. Looking back at our programme and considering the priorities and concerns of the present day, we found common ground in our shared interest in the environment, and in the climate emergency, an interest we also share with our past colleagues and collaborators. Fife Contemporary’s programme has often explored themes around climate, sustainability, carbon impact, and the circular economy. Exhibitions and projects have included Kingdom of If, ReSolve: A Creative Approach to the Circular Economy, a series of artists’ symposia which led to our Artists Environmental Resource and Sharespace, and collaborations with CAN and other sustainability partners.
We felt it important to look back and reconsider some of these programmes this year, but also through our anniversary exhibition Dear Earth, which has just opened in Kirkcaldy, to consider where we now stand in relation to the climate emergency.
As we created the exhibition and invited artists to consider multiple aspects of emergency and crisis in response to our call for proposals, we realised that a substantial shift has occurred in our collective relationship to climate change and global crises: the emergence of widespread climate anxiety or future fear. This was something not addressed in our earlier climate‑themed projects.
Some of the artists featured in Dear Earth tackle this fear directly—particularly Jenny Pope’s ongoing installation tools for the optimistically challenged. Other works take a more enigmatic approach. Naomi McIntosh, Helen O’Brien, Will Carey, and Susie Johnston each, in their own way, point towards the precariousness of our current moment in time.
As we developed the exhibition, we realised we wanted to create a space specifically for exploring these feelings—and so the Climate Care Corner came into being. Katie Fowlie’s Mosslings project was a perfect fit for this space, inviting visitors to make their own comforters from foraged and dried organic materials. Seeing visitors already interacting with this piece as they created their own mossling offerings was a highlight for me of our opening weekend.
Satellite Programme
Dear Earth will run in Kirkcaldy until 13 September, and then in St Andrews from 30 September to 6 March 2027, so there is plenty of opportunity to engage with the works in the show. Alongside the exhibition, we are presenting a satellite programme of workshops, commissions, and events throughout the year to explore the themes involved—to reach back into our past programme and connect it to the present so ultimately, we can look forward with positivity.
We have already begun this through our opening programme that has just concluded on Saturday 21 March. Artists Mella Shaw and Stefanie Ying Lin Cheong joined me to reflect on their past projects with Fife Contemporary, sparking a fascinating conversation about the impact artists can have on our wider societal relationship to the environment. I’m still reflecting on this discussion as I write, and I’m pleased that we were able to record it so that it can eventually be featured in our online exhibition for Dear Earth.
Also during the opening weekend, photographer Zoe Hamill shared her expertise in creating photographic prints using plant‑based developers. It was a brilliant workshop and one we plan to repeat later in this anniversary year.
There will also be new commissions this year with other past collaborators. Alan Grieve and Eddie Summerton’s A Cairngorm Love Affair premiered in St Andrews for StAnza 2026 and will be travelling and evolving into a new form for Kirkcaldy this summer. Jonathan Baxter, who curated Kingdom of If back in 2012, will be creating a new reflection on past and present responses to the climate crisis for our St Andrews iteration of Dear Earth in September, where additional events and workshops will continue to take us into the autumn.
Next up in this busy satellite programme will be a Mosslings Workshop, Wild Worries, with Katie Fowlie. If you’ve enjoyed seeing the mosslings in the Climate Care Corner, be sure to sign up soon. We are also working with the Dundee-based project Sharing Not Hoarding to bring Dear Earth outside Fife for the summer… more to be announced soon!
I am hopeful that this will be an exciting and energising year and that you will continue to follow what we are doing through our newsletters and social media. By transforming climate anxiety and future fear into positive collaboration with our artistic community, I feel Fife Contemporary can look forward to another 20 impactful years.