How do you collectively create an exhibition?
A collective made up of local community groups, an artist and Horniman staff have been looking at this question as they develop a new exhibition for Autumn 2019.
The exhibition will take place in The Studio, a new contemporary arts space at the Horniman, which puts community groups and artists at the centre of our exhibitions and public programme.
Beth Sissons tells us about the first phase of the groups’ progress from their first meetings at end of last year.
Everyone in the collective was eager to get started back in October 2018, and we began the first meeting by discussing possible themes and terms to anchor the project.
Ideas
Working alongside the artist Katie Schwab, the group discussed co-curating an exhibition around the theme of memory and future-making.
We discussed what the words memory, future-making, collective and studio meant to everyone. These terms can easily seem vague or intimidating, so we decided to define them in a way that inspires us and in doing so, we now feel more creative ownership over them.
We looked at Katie’s artwork and the processes involved in creating them. A patchwork sample encouraged a discussion on the traditions of crafting and the sense of community that coming together to sew, make or mend can foster.
Techniques and materials can also reflect a theme.
We looked at some knotted and woven pieces she had learned to make from a net-maker. The collective liked the idea of knots linking to memory, such as tying a knot in a handkerchief to remember something.
It has been wonderful to hear personal stories from members of the group, relating to their family or culture, in which a craft technique, such as rug making, is passed down and often becomes symbolic of a particular relationship or a rite of passage. These ideas all link in strongly with our themes.
Thinking about objects
The group started looking at objects from the Hands on Base.
These included a pair of beaded moccasins, a woven basket and a wooden figurine. We thought about who might have made these objects, what they would have been used for and how they made us feel. These are all important points we will think about when curating our own exhibition.
The collective was excited to start selecting the initial set of objects, chosen from the anthropology collection, and which will form the basis of the exhibition.
We are beginning this seemingly daunting task — whittling down 80,000 objects to 300 for our first selection! — by deciding on keywords we feel best relate to the project’s themes:
- knots
- threads
- basket
- amber
- carve
- eyes (looking forward and back)
- technology
- weaving
- box
As well as reflecting the themes of memory and future-making, these are practical words that we can enter into the collections online to produce relevant search results.
The group also decided that any objects we choose should all be multi-sensory, culturally important and meaningful to everyone in the group, in order to create an engaging and thought-provoking exhibition.
A trip to the stores
Using these words, Katie the artist, went to look in the Horniman stores to get an initial idea of the type of objects we might be most interested in for the exhibition.
I had a great first visit to the stores. Adrian (Collections Manager) and Sarah (Deputy Keeper of Anthropology) showed me around the three floors of the building. There are hundreds of boxes and carefully packed items stacked all the way up to the ceiling!
We didn’t look inside any boxes (saving that for the next visit) but there is definitely a big collection of baskets and boxes to look at- there are also lots of woven textiles and mats - lots of things that link back to our words! There is an interesting filing system which used to be hand-written but is now computer-based, with categories such as ‘Ear hygiene’ and ‘Backscratchers’. Katie
Whilst at the stores, Katie saw several objects which chimed well with our themes, included old signs used to label objects, as well as baskets, spools of thread, handwriting samples and fishing nets.
Katie was particularly drawn to the imbenge baskets. Imbenge baskets come from South Africa and are made to cover the top of large beer bottles.
They are made from colourful telephone wire, which is woven into a circle, creating a beautiful spiral pattern. The idea of basketry, weaving and knots has come up a lot in our discussions.
Some of these baskets can be found in the World Gallery, see if you can spot them.
Show and tell
The collective were asked to bring in something they had made themselves, and it was wonderful to see the creativity and skill that had gone into making each craft. Each piece of artwork was incredibly unique and left us all feeling very inspired.
Seeing these objects together made us think about how we might display them; how would they appear in relation to each other, and could we find links between the objects, in order to tell a story with them.
Gallery inspiration
The collective explored the different galleries at the Horniman: the Natural History, World, and Music Galleries, as well as the temporary exhibition about colour. Each had a very different feel to them, and we discussed our first impressions.
Some galleries made us feel curious, excited and welcomed, while others evoked memories or felt more imposing.
We thought about what we liked about each gallery, and what we might do differently.
This gave us a great starting point to think about how we want visitors to our own exhibition to feel, and how we might achieve that.
Everyone agreed that we want to focus on making our exhibition as accessible and as engaging as we can to the widest range of people.
In November we visited the first co-curated exhibition in The Studio, The Lore of the Land. Just as we had analysed the other galleries, we thought about what our first impressions were and how the use of the space made each of us feel.
There was plenty of inspiration and new ideas to be taken from the exhibition, from the use of smell and sound to convey messages, to ways we might link archived objects with our own artwork. It was exciting to start thinking about how we might use the space ourselves for our own exhibition in the autumn of 2019.
The group met Charlotte Joy, one of the Deputy Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman. She talked us through her anthropology fieldwork and her own research in Djenné, Mali. She showed us handcrafted items, made by craftspeople in Djenné, including beaded necklaces, silver rings and bracelets, and embroidered fabric squares they would sell to tourists.
We talked with her about the controversy surrounding the ownership of museum objects, the circumstances in which they were first collected and the decolonisation of museums.
Knots and threads
Our discussions around our theme of memory and future-making have included the ideas of weaving, basketry, knots and threads.
With this in mind, we visited the Tate Modern to see an exhibition showcasing Anni Albers: an influential artist who combined the traditional craft of weaving with modern art.
We also saw No Ghost Just a Shell featuring projected films of a manga character called Annlee. The project is a collaboration between different artists and focuses on the unfixed and varied identities of Annlee.
It has been very interesting to see two such contrasting exhibitions. The difference in their content, use of space and atmosphere has given us inspiration about how we might transform The Studio and reflect the Studio collective identity.
Back to the stores
On 5 December, the collective visited the Horniman Study Collections Centre to look at the huge range of objects that are not on display.
Objects which aligned with our themes included Imbenge baskets, the barrel from a barrel organ, a sample of a transatlantic cable, a cassette tape and a printing block.
We viewed a range of African textiles screen printed or resist designed to form intricate patterns. To create the resist designs, a pattern is painted onto the fabric in mud, wax or starch, which protects the fabric when it is dyed.
These objects sparked ideas. It was interesting to think about the longevity of woven fabrics, and the techniques used to create them, compared to the short-lived technology of the cassette tape.
In thinking about creative processes, the collective talked about how certain techniques can be more sacred than the object itself. This is a particularly important point to think about when we consider what we will reveal through objects and their stories within our exhibition.
Through discussion, we decided to exhibit some objects from the collection, as well as keeping the main focus on objects that could be handled, alongside our own artwork.
The collective was unanimous that it would be essential to keep the exhibition tactile and sensory, which will make it engaging and accessible to as many visitors as possible.
Our search through the database after this visit used a new set of keywords as inspiration:
- rope
- cable
- resist
- protest
- thread
- loom
- repair
Interesting objects we came across from these searches included a hammock from Sierra Leone, floor rugs from Afghanistan, one of the first Acorn computers, a Kanga sarong, baskets made from coiled grass, and a weight from a loom.
The collective also learned about traditional craft techniques, such as Shibori, a Japanese dying technique, and Kintsugi, a Japanese technique for repairing broken objects with a line of gold, to make them more beautiful.
Stay tuned to find out what happened during the next phase of the project for the collective.
