I'm very interested in how the site of the exhibition could be a useful site
and could be a place for coming up with solutions to social need. I think the
project was fantastic as a way of reminding you to be conscious of
different audiences and to think about how the people who can see an exhibition
that I've done collaborate and participate in it I think it's one of
those projects that potentially it's going to be in my mind for years and
years
Cabinets stories is about taking exhibitions directly to the audience
there is one cabinet which is the traditional form of museum display and
there are seven curators participating in the project. Each curator has
developed a display put within the cabinet for one week
the curator then comes in and leads a workshop or a talk with the audience. My
exhibition was titled unfolding fashion I've been curating at the fan museum
which is a particularly niche arts organization for nearly six years, to get
an opportunity to work in fact in a totally different manner with audiences
who might never necessarily come to the museum that really appeal to me. When I
was coming up with the idea for the exhibition I wanted to think
particularly about the audiences and one of the things that I thought they had in
common was they had access to time and in those particular communities time could
somehow has negative impacts so things like boredom or apathy or
isolation and I wanted to think about how time could be changed into a
positive asset and that's when I started thinking about laborious or
time-consuming crafts I feel quite strongly that museums can offer
transformative experiences, it's somewhere we can go unlike anywhere else
that perhaps makes the stop and think what it means to be human. One of the
main aims of the project was to work with groups and communities who may not
be regularly accessing museums may never have been to a museum before or maybe at
that point in their life where they're not able to access museums. I was very
aware that the prison workshop was going to take me out of my comfort zone and it
was certainly the workshop that was the most challenging for me I found it quite
upsetting and deeply moving. I wanted the audience to have a moment an opportunity
to take ownership of the cabinet and have an exhibition of their own within
the cabinet and so we invited London College of Fashion BA Photography students
to come in and take photographs of the audience members and for the audience members
to either be wearing an item of clothing or holding an item of clothing
that was important to them. For instance a Hindu
woman borrowed a sari from a prison warder and she put it on a Vietnamese
woman who had never experienced wearing that type of clothing and they started
talking and it was perhaps a sort of conversation external to prison that
they might otherwise not have had. We felt that working with older people who
were living in a care home would be an ideal group of people to work with
firstly because it was likely that they wouldn't be able to regularly go out and
regularly access museums and exhibitions but also that we felt it would be
interesting to explore ideas of clothing and memory. There is a really memorable
moment from workshop at home for older people I was talking to a guy there who
had had a career as a textile designer and a textile colourist and had worked in
incredibly complex technical and industrial fields, it really clearly made
a connection. I've been interested in fashion from
being a small boy, one I was really interested in was the lad that had his
anoraks found that very interesting. And that amount
of stress that they said that she couldn't do it any longer a very very
fine detail that somebody made on one of the dresses it was marvelous. I was
looking forward to the course because my mother was a dressmaker so I was quite
involved in fashion right from a small girl, you did pass around some quite
ancient garments and particularly I think there was a some underwear and try
a baby's dress which did interest me because one at one time my mother was
reduced to doing out work and it was making babies dresses and I was the one
who went and fetched the work and took it back to the workshop
and it's about the lowest and many poor women have to or in those days they had
to resort to that, you see. I've always believed in the power of clothing to
communicate to wide audiences and this project has verified that for me
absolutely. What was also really revealing to me was how the people that
worked within those environments are also the audience and how engaged they were
in the project and we had a lot of feedback in terms of how it boosted
morale for a number of the people that were working within those quite
challenging environments. I remember a pair of shoes the had a cartoon on it
all over I think that was quite clever it's a very good conversation starter you
can just, you know, sit and then cross your feet and then someone will start probably
reading the cartoon and start talking to you. Anything that challenges ideas about
access to culture and that actively seeks out help marginalized communities
and brings culture to them and begins creative activity is a very very
positive action. There was a genuine exchange of ideas between the curators
and the participants and it really felt like it was an exchange of knowledge and
exchange of experience and it was something that everyone who took part in
the project really benefited from. It wasn't hard to sell it to the staff team
or the members either, importance of creativity and recovery I think is, you
know, very well recognized it was a fantastic project and I think that if
we're going to be able to solve how people make sense of what's going on for
them and then translated to how they live their lives outside needs to be
less of a divide between what happens in sessions like this and what happens
in the general world and I think this project sort of symbolically
represented that
From a curatorial perspective having an exhibition within a charity shop Emmaus
has been a fantastic experience in terms of the playful workshops that we can
develop, working on styling workshops working with the stock within the shop
developing workshops around the idea of repair and sustainability it's a bit like being
a kid in the sweetie shop there are an infinite number of workshop proposals
that we could develop and different audiences with whom we can engage