Perth Museum

Waters Rising

Waters Rising was the second temporary exhibition at Perth Museum, running from November 2024 to March 2025. In this display we explored the impacts of flooding on local communities, global storytelling and biodiversity with a strong focus on the climate crisis and climate action.

We wanted to portray the most authentic picture of environmental activists, working with the individuals themselves to demonstrate their impact across Scotland and the UK. We collaborated with groups to gather stories, ephemera and experiences to include in our central display of posters and placards.

One group we worked particularly closely with was GalGael Trust. We built the relationship from the ground up and it culminated in a loan of the scroll of the Declaration of Independence from the Govan Free State initiative, Cop26. We also worked with our closest Extinction Rebellion group, based in Dundee. They were brilliant, with their enthusiasm and passion shining through in the wide range of stories, artefacts and banners we received from them.

We made a real effort to have each group represent themselves in their labels and to not filter their experiences through our curatorial voice.

We took an open and direct approach with groups and started discussing the display early in the development process. We understood that some groups would be less open to discussing their experiences due to prejudices resulting from recent negative media representation.

The Public Order Bill (May 2023) has meant that many protesters engaging in direct action, or even just associated with affiliated groups, have been imprisoned. The implications meant some groups were more forthcoming with information than others, and we didn’t want this to create an imbalance in the display –⁠ so we had to carefully curate which objects made the cut.

Managing relationships with our council partners was an additional challenge when producing this display. We had to be sure that they felt reassured in our decision to showcase climate action stories even if they sparked unrest or pushback from climate denial groups.

Our biggest learning takeaway from this project was how to create meaningful and lasting relationships with community groups, including activists, and how important it is to give them agency over how they are represented in the museum environment.

For Waters Rising, we challenged ourselves to reduce the carbon impact of our exhibition and only use sustainable materials in production. We used 100% recyclable cardboard labels and created the displays using existing material from past shows (apart from one sheet of MDF).

This challenge also went beyond building materials. We only accepted loans from UK institutions, with a majority coming from Scottish institutions nearby, and asked for digital reproductions of works from further afield. We commissioned mounts for objects to be made from offcuts of Perspex, and we held more nature-based events in collaboration with our sustainability officers in the libraries.

As we're a very small team I took on lots of the carbon calculating myself, and had we had more resources I would have loved to spend more time on it. What I had collated, I then published in-gallery in the form of an environmental impacts panel. This allowed visitors to see the extent to which we're working towards a sustainable future, as well as how unexpectedly wasteful exhibitions can be behind the scenes.

Following the exhibition, we now take a more considered approach to graphics and we used 100% recyclable materials for our section panels in Macbeth (the exhibition following Waters Rising). We hope to continue this in future for all our forthcoming exhibitions

Niamh Finlay is the curator of Waters Rising at Perth Museum