Projects: Creative
Work With Real
Community Impact

From long-term regeneration programmes to short-term creative interventions, Narture delivers projects that use food and the arts to improve wellbeing, skills and community connection.

Explore Our Projects Partner With Us

Projects: Creative
Work With Real
Community Impact

From long-term regeneration programmes to short-term creative interventions, Narture delivers projects that use food and the arts to improve wellbeing, skills and community connection.

Explore Our Projects Partner With Us

Creativity as a Tool for Change

Our projects sit at the intersection of:

creativity and wellbeing
skills development and education
town centre regeneration
community connection

They may take place in our own spaces, in schools, on the high street, or in partnership with local organisations, but they all share the same purpose: making culture accessible and meaningful in everyday life.

Featured Projects

Narture: 5 Years of Making & Baking

An exhibition celebrating the first five years of narture cic – the highs, the lows and the honest realities of building a food-and-art social enterprise in Ayr.

Explore Our Projects

Why Our Projects Matter

improved mental health and wellbeing
increased creative confidence
stronger community connections
access to creative skills and equipment
sustainable creative careers

Projects Don't Exist in Isolation

Many of our projects connect directly with:

Make & Create: workshops and learning programmes
Studios: space for artists and facilitators
Shape Café Bar: public engagement and events
Knead Bakery: food as a funding and engagement tool

This joined-up model is what makes Narture unique, and allows projects to move from short-term activity into long-term creative pathways.

Work With Us

We’re always open to conversations with:

funders
commissioning bodies
community organisations
creative practitioners

If you’re interested in delivering creative projects that place people, wellbeing and culture at the centre, we’d love to explore working together.

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Past, Current & Future Projects

Narture Culture Collective

An open call for socially engaged practitioners to join Culture Collective — a year-long, community-led enquiry into what Ayr needs to thrive creatively.

Blank Canvas

A place-based, month-long artist residency in the heart of Ayr, inviting creatives to explore the intersections of food, art, sustainability and regeneration.

Vivid Rebellion

After a dementia diagnosis, Edward McLaughlin found he saw colour entirely differently. These vibrant portraits are the result.

UWS Digital Art & Design Degree Show

Recent graduates of the UWS BA(Hons) Digital Art and Design programme showcase their best work from throughout their time at university.

Queer Arts Appreciation

An exhibit in appreciation of Ayrshire's LGBT+ visual and live artists, held in celebration of Ayrshire Pride Week.

Quattro di Bacchette

A celebration of freedom from an anonymous art collective, made on residency in Collemacchia, Filignano.

Stagnation

An exhibition about creative constipation, cultural inertia, political gridlock and cavernous class divides.

Between

An installation created in response to a month spent in the High Arctic, sailing to within 400km of the North Pole.

Ahhhhhh, Me

Surreal, comedic sketches from an Instagram artist who also sells sofas. Does his exhibition count as art?

Pigmented Portraiture

Digital portraits doused in glitter, fake eyelashes and theatrical face-paint, catching sitters between unawareness and self-consciousness.

If It’s Good Enough For Fred Bloggs

Textile 'Shit Art' from affordable, easily accessible everyday materials, making the case for the working-class woman's voice in the arts.

Little Things Make Life Worth Living

Seventy small works from a printmaker of thirty years, informed by dreams, emotions and personal and collective archetypes.

Dain Hings at the Lab

A two day artist residency and interactive exhibition, recycling the space with the 'rubbish' of the shop's former use.

Twisted, Pleated, Folded

Cate Newton explores the theme of household labour, influenced by her grandmother's work as a laundry maid in Port Glasgow in the early 1900s.

It’ll Be Ready When It’s Ready

An artist's cookbook and exhibition from Alex Weir, riso printed at Narture, with sustainability and zero waste running through every part.

Follow the Thread: The Material of Life

A lifetime of embroidered artistry from Liz Baird, presented with Glenfairn House to challenge perceptions around aging and creativity.

Unbekent Residency

A six-week residency digging into the often-overlooked stories of working- and lower-class history and culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The Charmers

A sci-fi folk ballad in films, drawings and sound, following seven accused Ayrshire 'witches' recorded as 'not to be found'.

Behind The Eyes: A Love Letter to Portraiture

Soft pastel portraiture from award-winning Ayrshire artist Wendy Greig, built on the belief that the eyes are the gateway to the soul.

Chasing Tractors

A photographic showcase of South Ayrshire's farming community, born from a post-lockdown journey back into the rural landscape.

Fresh Ayr

The 2016 pop-up programme that started it all, set up to address the lack of arts opportunities in Ayr.

Water Salt Grain

Narture's inaugural exhibition at DOUGH: four commissioned artworks on water, salt and grain, all viewable from the street.

Paper Cave

A cavernous installation woven from shredded Skinny magazines, flour and water, built inch by inch inside DOUGH art space.

The Nature Library

A window exhibition with National Galleries of Scotland, artist Ursula Cheng and Recovery Ayr participants, inspired by Alberta Whittle's 'creating dangerously'.

Reminiscences

The first UK showing of Mike Stone's portrait series documenting three extended Traveller families across Dublin, Navan and Cavan.