Tucked away on the fourth floor of the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is a collection of miniature coffins, just four inches long and containing tiny dolls. They were found in 1836 in a cave on Arthur's Seat, the volcanic outcrop in Holyrood Park in the centre of Edinburgh, but no one knows who made them or why they were left in the cave.
These bizarre exhibits, and the tantalising mystery surrounding them, caught the imagination of Edinburgh crime writer Ian Rankin. In his 12th Inspector Rebus novel, The Falls, he cleverly weaves a plot around the coffins, combining the historic and contemporary themes of body snatching and a sinister internet cybergame.
'I liked the fact that they remained a mystery and decided to give the story some fictional "closure",' Rankin told Explorer, the National Museums of Scotland's quarterly magazine. Intrigued, he arranged to get a closer look.
'I was allowed to touch them and pick them up, something I'll always remember. I was holding not only a mystery in my hands, but a part of Scottish history, too. And this is the way I feel whenever I'm walking around the museum's exhibits: I'm only inches away from some incredible story.'
Creative people of all disciplines have always sought inspiration in museums. What they produce may be entirely different to the object that inspired them, but the transformation is part of the creative process. Picasso studied African masks at the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris; dancer Isadora Duncan based her fluid style of dancing partly on Greek antiquities at the British Museum.
More recently, writer Philip Pullman has breathed literary life into various museum objects, from clocks to compasses. And artist Cornelia Parker has borrowed many museum items for her art installations.
'I like the idea of giving something new life in a different context,' she explains. 'In a museum an object is petrified and usually never used again, so I am reactivating it.' In some cases Parker makes art by using the object in an echo of its original purpose, for example making cuts with the guillotine that chopped off Marie Antoinette's head or framing and displaying the back of a Turner canvas.
But all this artistic alchemy is not just a one-way street. It stimulates new dialogues and new ways of working for museums and can give them the confidence to open up to 'non-curatorial' voices and non-traditional interpretation.
At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, performance artist Rosanna Raymond, a New Zealander of Samoan descent, created poetry and dance pieces around objects in the Pacific collections. These have now been performed around the world.
'The work of contemporary artists with origins and links to communities elsewhere is a terrific way of making the point that the historic objects the museum holds are of continuing, and perhaps increasing, importance around the world,' says Jeremy Coote, the joint head of collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. 'It's also really satisfying to know that a piece performed as far away as Hawaii all started from a museum object here.'
It can also be a way of creating new audiences. Visitor numbers and enquiries can swell if a high-profile book, film or artwork becomes linked to a museum. Just ask the Louvre in Paris, whose attendance figures have rocketed thanks to Dan Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code.
'Ian Rankin's book and the accompanying television series definitely created a renewed interest in the coffins,' says Mary Bryden, the director of public programmes at the National Museums of Scotland. 'The book added a new perspective on the fascinating mystery that surrounds them. Many other authors, artists and creative thinkers have been inspired by objects in our museums, which helps to bring our collections to a wider audience.'
While getting close to the collections can be fraught with bureaucracy, even for high-profile artists and writers, there are mutual benefits. London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has a strict appointment system for people wanting access to objects in its stores and archives. Ceramicists, jewellery makers and fashion designers regularly apply for time-limited sessions.
'We're fortunate to have wonderful collections, and many designers, including Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes, use the archives,' says Claire Wilcox, a curator in fashion at the V&A. 'It's rewarding to see someone create something new from items in the collections. It has always been within the museum's remit to encourage unusual visits for further research, and there are many examples where the outcome is not fashion but fine art. An example is the work of our current designer-in-residence Sue Lawty.'
For a small museum, it sometimes takes a leap of faith to commission big-name artists, but the rewards are evident. The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth is working with Cornelia Parker for an exhibition that will start in September and has also worked with Paula Rego, who created a series of lithographs based on Jane Eyre.
'The feedback was clear that different groups were coming to see the Rego work but also seeing it in an unusual setting,' says Andrew McCarthy, the audience development manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
'Obviously the Brontës were famous as writers but they also had an active interest in different artforms, so we are comfortable with the idea of having someone like Cornelia Parker who would look at the displays in a different way. It's about keeping objects alive. We are not looking for shock tactics or to alienate people but we'd like to challenge the status quo occasionally through special projects.'
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
Cornelia Parker
'An enormous amount of my ideas come from museums. It probably started with The Maybe at the Serpentine in 1995 where I borrowed about 30 objects from museums around the UK, for example the blanket and pillow from Freud's couch, and the quill pen which Dickens used to write his last novel and which was found on his desk when he died. They are objects with a back history but here were used in a different context, with the potential to become something else, or a catalyst for a new artwork.
'I created an artwork based on Einstein's blackboard from a 1931 talk on the theory of relativity. We usually see Einstein with his shock of white hair standing in front of a blackboard filled with equations and here was the very blackboard in a rather dusty cupboard on a staircase in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.
'So I created a new artwork based on Einstein's equations in which they became almost abstracted from the source. I also think they are beautiful objects in their own right.
'It's an interesting interaction, when overlooked objects or parts of objects, sometimes unseen in the conservation department, move from the background to the foreground and are displayed as an artwork. Museums are sometimes sceptical at first but then become enthusiastic.
'It's often easier to deal with small museums because they don't have all the bureaucracy where you are waiting months and months to borrow something. For the Einstein work I enlisted a curator to plead on my behalf.
'From something that had lain more or less dormant they ended up really liking it and even based an exhibition around it, called Bye Bye Blackboard. So the objects become re-evaluated, and I'd like to think it's not all just me taking, more that I rub up against things and then people look at them again in a different light.'
Cornelia Parker's new work based on objects owned and used by the Brontës can be seen at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in September
Richard Nott - Balenciaga gowns
'After I sold my fashion company Workers for Freedom in 2000, I retrained as a painter. I am working on a series of paintings inspired by my favourite designer, Balenciaga. I've always loved Balenciaga - he had such a unique and modern approach and his clothes verge on sculpture. It always bothered me that people only wore these beautiful clothes for one occasion and then hung them up or put them in a glass case, or worse, stored them away in an archive where hardly anyone sees them, let alone wears them.
'The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has around 100 Balenciaga creations, mostly in the archive. A neighbour who was a curator at the V&A suggested I book some sessions to study some of them. I made drawings and took photographs, which gave me time to think about what effects I wanted.
'It was great looking at them with one of the curators, and we looked with incredible focus and concentration, not just at the outside but the inside as well, to see how they were made and the quality of the craftsmanship. I felt a great reverence and sense of privilege.
'I wanted the paintings to be like portraits. One is of an apple green and ochre shot silk coat. It was a bit worn at the edges and the worn areas have gone a bit brown, but the subtleties of colour are incredible. His fabrics tended to be stiff but light, and I wanted to capture both the sculptural quality and the lightness of the fabric.
There is no figure but hopefully it has the sense of a human presence, someone who is just leaving, so the coat looks like it's swirling out of the room. These clothes are too fragile to wear and obviously they are not going to last for ever, but you can live with a portrait every day.'
Richard Nott's Balenciaga paintings can be seen at the Browse & Darby gallery in Cork Street, London, in spring 2007
Rosanna Raymond - tapa cloth
'I felt isolated and culturally adrift when I came to Britain six years ago. I'd lost my community to learn from, but seeing the wealth of Pacific collections in British museums gave me the opportunity to work through some of the issues of why these objects were here and all their colonial connotations.
'While it was awesome to see our taonga, or cultural treasures, it was also heartbreaking to see them taken away from their context and put into boxes and cases with no names, nothing bestowed on the person who made them or the villages they came from. It was all about the collector.
'I approached the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to create a series of performance pieces around some tapa cloth brought back from Captain Cook's voyage. It's a multi-layered work called A Piece of Their Brown Cloth, which is how the collector described it. An object of curiosity to him, tapa cloth is both precious and an everyday item to Samoans. It's a spoken poem and soundscape and from there it's a natural flow for us to decorate words with movement.
'Working creatively with objects has helped me see that they can work in different ways in the 21st century, what we call "keeping them warm". Curators are sometimes horrified when I pick things up. But these objects are meant to be shaken or handled or worn. They should record the sound. They laughed when I picked up the tapa and held it to my nose, but I can smell the fire - the spiritual preservation is just as important as physical conservation.
'I work with museums because I believe it's vital to take our heritage out into the community. By doing so you are encouraging more people to see and understand another culture. More and more museums are receptive to letting us in to exchange cultural information. For too long it's been a one-way conversation.'
Rosanna Raymond is artist in residence at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and her work is part ofPasifika Styles, an exhibition on Pacific art and culture that opened at the museum in May
These bizarre exhibits, and the tantalising mystery surrounding them, caught the imagination of Edinburgh crime writer Ian Rankin. In his 12th Inspector Rebus novel, The Falls, he cleverly weaves a plot around the coffins, combining the historic and contemporary themes of body snatching and a sinister internet cybergame.
'I liked the fact that they remained a mystery and decided to give the story some fictional "closure",' Rankin told Explorer, the National Museums of Scotland's quarterly magazine. Intrigued, he arranged to get a closer look.
'I was allowed to touch them and pick them up, something I'll always remember. I was holding not only a mystery in my hands, but a part of Scottish history, too. And this is the way I feel whenever I'm walking around the museum's exhibits: I'm only inches away from some incredible story.'
Creative people of all disciplines have always sought inspiration in museums. What they produce may be entirely different to the object that inspired them, but the transformation is part of the creative process. Picasso studied African masks at the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris; dancer Isadora Duncan based her fluid style of dancing partly on Greek antiquities at the British Museum.
More recently, writer Philip Pullman has breathed literary life into various museum objects, from clocks to compasses. And artist Cornelia Parker has borrowed many museum items for her art installations.
'I like the idea of giving something new life in a different context,' she explains. 'In a museum an object is petrified and usually never used again, so I am reactivating it.' In some cases Parker makes art by using the object in an echo of its original purpose, for example making cuts with the guillotine that chopped off Marie Antoinette's head or framing and displaying the back of a Turner canvas.
But all this artistic alchemy is not just a one-way street. It stimulates new dialogues and new ways of working for museums and can give them the confidence to open up to 'non-curatorial' voices and non-traditional interpretation.
At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, performance artist Rosanna Raymond, a New Zealander of Samoan descent, created poetry and dance pieces around objects in the Pacific collections. These have now been performed around the world.
'The work of contemporary artists with origins and links to communities elsewhere is a terrific way of making the point that the historic objects the museum holds are of continuing, and perhaps increasing, importance around the world,' says Jeremy Coote, the joint head of collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. 'It's also really satisfying to know that a piece performed as far away as Hawaii all started from a museum object here.'
It can also be a way of creating new audiences. Visitor numbers and enquiries can swell if a high-profile book, film or artwork becomes linked to a museum. Just ask the Louvre in Paris, whose attendance figures have rocketed thanks to Dan Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code.
'Ian Rankin's book and the accompanying television series definitely created a renewed interest in the coffins,' says Mary Bryden, the director of public programmes at the National Museums of Scotland. 'The book added a new perspective on the fascinating mystery that surrounds them. Many other authors, artists and creative thinkers have been inspired by objects in our museums, which helps to bring our collections to a wider audience.'
While getting close to the collections can be fraught with bureaucracy, even for high-profile artists and writers, there are mutual benefits. London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has a strict appointment system for people wanting access to objects in its stores and archives. Ceramicists, jewellery makers and fashion designers regularly apply for time-limited sessions.
'We're fortunate to have wonderful collections, and many designers, including Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes, use the archives,' says Claire Wilcox, a curator in fashion at the V&A. 'It's rewarding to see someone create something new from items in the collections. It has always been within the museum's remit to encourage unusual visits for further research, and there are many examples where the outcome is not fashion but fine art. An example is the work of our current designer-in-residence Sue Lawty.'
For a small museum, it sometimes takes a leap of faith to commission big-name artists, but the rewards are evident. The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth is working with Cornelia Parker for an exhibition that will start in September and has also worked with Paula Rego, who created a series of lithographs based on Jane Eyre.
'The feedback was clear that different groups were coming to see the Rego work but also seeing it in an unusual setting,' says Andrew McCarthy, the audience development manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
'Obviously the Brontës were famous as writers but they also had an active interest in different artforms, so we are comfortable with the idea of having someone like Cornelia Parker who would look at the displays in a different way. It's about keeping objects alive. We are not looking for shock tactics or to alienate people but we'd like to challenge the status quo occasionally through special projects.'
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
Cornelia Parker
'An enormous amount of my ideas come from museums. It probably started with The Maybe at the Serpentine in 1995 where I borrowed about 30 objects from museums around the UK, for example the blanket and pillow from Freud's couch, and the quill pen which Dickens used to write his last novel and which was found on his desk when he died. They are objects with a back history but here were used in a different context, with the potential to become something else, or a catalyst for a new artwork.
'I created an artwork based on Einstein's blackboard from a 1931 talk on the theory of relativity. We usually see Einstein with his shock of white hair standing in front of a blackboard filled with equations and here was the very blackboard in a rather dusty cupboard on a staircase in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.
'So I created a new artwork based on Einstein's equations in which they became almost abstracted from the source. I also think they are beautiful objects in their own right.
'It's an interesting interaction, when overlooked objects or parts of objects, sometimes unseen in the conservation department, move from the background to the foreground and are displayed as an artwork. Museums are sometimes sceptical at first but then become enthusiastic.
'It's often easier to deal with small museums because they don't have all the bureaucracy where you are waiting months and months to borrow something. For the Einstein work I enlisted a curator to plead on my behalf.
'From something that had lain more or less dormant they ended up really liking it and even based an exhibition around it, called Bye Bye Blackboard. So the objects become re-evaluated, and I'd like to think it's not all just me taking, more that I rub up against things and then people look at them again in a different light.'
Cornelia Parker's new work based on objects owned and used by the Brontës can be seen at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in September
Richard Nott - Balenciaga gowns
'After I sold my fashion company Workers for Freedom in 2000, I retrained as a painter. I am working on a series of paintings inspired by my favourite designer, Balenciaga. I've always loved Balenciaga - he had such a unique and modern approach and his clothes verge on sculpture. It always bothered me that people only wore these beautiful clothes for one occasion and then hung them up or put them in a glass case, or worse, stored them away in an archive where hardly anyone sees them, let alone wears them.
'The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has around 100 Balenciaga creations, mostly in the archive. A neighbour who was a curator at the V&A suggested I book some sessions to study some of them. I made drawings and took photographs, which gave me time to think about what effects I wanted.
'It was great looking at them with one of the curators, and we looked with incredible focus and concentration, not just at the outside but the inside as well, to see how they were made and the quality of the craftsmanship. I felt a great reverence and sense of privilege.
'I wanted the paintings to be like portraits. One is of an apple green and ochre shot silk coat. It was a bit worn at the edges and the worn areas have gone a bit brown, but the subtleties of colour are incredible. His fabrics tended to be stiff but light, and I wanted to capture both the sculptural quality and the lightness of the fabric.
There is no figure but hopefully it has the sense of a human presence, someone who is just leaving, so the coat looks like it's swirling out of the room. These clothes are too fragile to wear and obviously they are not going to last for ever, but you can live with a portrait every day.'
Richard Nott's Balenciaga paintings can be seen at the Browse & Darby gallery in Cork Street, London, in spring 2007
Rosanna Raymond - tapa cloth
'I felt isolated and culturally adrift when I came to Britain six years ago. I'd lost my community to learn from, but seeing the wealth of Pacific collections in British museums gave me the opportunity to work through some of the issues of why these objects were here and all their colonial connotations.
'While it was awesome to see our taonga, or cultural treasures, it was also heartbreaking to see them taken away from their context and put into boxes and cases with no names, nothing bestowed on the person who made them or the villages they came from. It was all about the collector.
'I approached the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to create a series of performance pieces around some tapa cloth brought back from Captain Cook's voyage. It's a multi-layered work called A Piece of Their Brown Cloth, which is how the collector described it. An object of curiosity to him, tapa cloth is both precious and an everyday item to Samoans. It's a spoken poem and soundscape and from there it's a natural flow for us to decorate words with movement.
'Working creatively with objects has helped me see that they can work in different ways in the 21st century, what we call "keeping them warm". Curators are sometimes horrified when I pick things up. But these objects are meant to be shaken or handled or worn. They should record the sound. They laughed when I picked up the tapa and held it to my nose, but I can smell the fire - the spiritual preservation is just as important as physical conservation.
'I work with museums because I believe it's vital to take our heritage out into the community. By doing so you are encouraging more people to see and understand another culture. More and more museums are receptive to letting us in to exchange cultural information. For too long it's been a one-way conversation.'
Rosanna Raymond is artist in residence at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and her work is part ofPasifika Styles, an exhibition on Pacific art and culture that opened at the museum in May
