We’re not telling the stories just of the artist or their paintings,
we’re showing our stories through the paintings,
and we’re showing our stories through the Gallery.
- Journeys is an ambitious and multi-disciplinary project.
It’s exploring ideas of art, identity and belonging through our collection.
The project is made up of a number of different elements.
We’ve worked with an animation artist to capture stories and responses
to our collection through conversations with six different community groups.
There is a co-produced display where we’ve worked with six local people
to tell new stories about our collection through the lens of migration.
It’s really nice to be able to talk about something which is a contemporary issue,
something that’s relevant to our audiences,
something that we can start to have a conversation with our visitors about.
We’ll also have a range of different events and workshops
and public programmes that will sit alongside these two projects.
- When we started the project we worked with all of our participants
and all of our volunteers and we asked them,
"What’s been a meaningful journey for you?"
"What’s been a journey that’s been impactful on your life?"
- I came to it feeling frustrated that people like me
just aren’t seen and represented in gallery spaces like this,
and it’s ridiculous because we’re everywhere.
Everyone has taken a journey in their life, whether it was for holiday,
or whether it was an economic migration, or whether people are refugees,
or if they’re asylum seekers.
It was out of that frustration that I wanted to make something productive
and I think that’s, sort of, the energy that I’ve brought to this project.
- I’m a migrant myself, and I’ve got a story about migration, personally,
and being in this project has actually given me a voice to speak about my experience
through the interpretations of the paintings.
- Some of the artists that we’ve chosen to spotlight here,
they’ve all travelled but for different reasons.
Canaletto came to London to earn a living, and so many of us,
either we’ve done that ourselves, or our parents did that,
or our grandparents did that.
- Canaletto inserting himself in the painting was really powerful
because in every journey, whether you like it or not,
like the theme, every journey leaves a trace.
It’s brought out another creative part of me. I wrote a poem.
I actually didn’t plan it, I wrote something down and everybody liked it.
"The King is unhappy because I was born
Yet I am a greater Royal with a crown of thorn
Out and away my family flown
Far and away we sought refuge down
The time is now and I must return
To home to receive my crown of thorn."
Actually, that has given me the will to, like, come back to the Gallery
and write a creative response to every one of the paintings.
Each of the stories of the artists is not a new story, and neither are our stories new.
We see the, sort of, same themes and the same experiences
happening over and over again, and so the journeys that we take are really very similar
to the journeys that they’ve taken, even though we’re separated, I suppose,
by centuries, and time, and generation, and class, and money.
- What’s really exciting about this display
is that it’s open to all of our visitors who come to the Gallery.
It also gives visitors the opportunity to hear community voices
represented in the Gallery, and to hear new perspectives on our collection.
- The stories within the paintings can speak to everybody,
and the idea of the community curators coming together
and telling their own personal stories,
that can be related back to, and actually find new inspiration,
through the paintings in our beautiful collection.
- I want people to come here and try to think about your journey in life.
It might be your journey to work, or maybe to another country,
and look at these paintings, and reflect on it.
How do they impact your life?
How do they reflect the things that you’ve experienced in your journey?