Visitors to the 19th-century Bowes Museum in County Durham last winter could not have failed to notice a flock of exotic black birds stalking the snow-covered gardens outside.
Further south, Brighton’s famously decadent Royal Pavilion was infested by an eerie swarm of dark butterflies, which clung to its drapes and crawled over its delicate tableware.
Neither museum had any need to call in pest control; they were in fact taking part in Museumaker, a project funded by Arts Council England (ACE), and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s Renaissance programme.
Between 2009 and 2011, the initiative saw 16 heritage institutions collaborate with contemporary craftmakers to produce installations that, as the organisers put it, unlocked the “creative potential of collections”.
Museumaker is one of a number of schemes launched in recent years to integrate museum work more strategically with other creative industries.
Such crossovers are not a new phenomenon, but at a time when responsibility for museums and galleries is being transferred to ACE, more and more heritage institution are looking at what benefits this kind of cross-pollination can bring, particularly when there is often an existing overlap in skills, resources and audiences.
The Bowes Museum is a French-style chateau with an extensive decorative art collection. It applied to the Museumaker scheme in order to utilise its public gardens while parts of the interior were being refurbished.
“The idea was that, while all the building work was going on, a maker could bring something of the essence of the collection inside to the outside,” says Viv Vallack, the museum’s head of exhibitions.
As with all Museumaker projects, it was essential that the museum’s collection remained at the heart of the installation. Noticing a preponderance of bird motifs throughout the building, the jeweller and metalsmith Laura Baxter drew her designs from a vast a range of different objects.
“She picked out birds on everything from ceramics and textiles to carved panels,” says Bowes Museum principal keeper Jane Whittaker. “She found birds we’d forgotten were there.”
The resulting installation, Garden of Lantern Birds, featured lace-like metal silhouettes of everything from storks to peacocks dotted around the garden. At night, the birds doubled as lanterns, casting long shadows over the grounds.
“The external installation added a completely new dimension to the building,” says Vallack. “It was during the winter months, so added a decorative feature to what can be a dreary time of year.”
The project also offered the museum a chance to reinterpret its collection in a fresh and accessible way. Staff created labels to highlight the objects, sending visitors on a mission to track them down. “Seeing an element of the collections represented in such an unexpected way was very exciting and promoted discussion,” says Vallack.
The same was true in Brighton, says Nicola Coleby, keeper of exhibitions at Brighton & Hove’s Royal Pavilion and Museums.
“It was stimulating to see how the contemporary can reflect the traditional,” she says of the exhibition, A Dark Day in Paradise, which saw ceramicist Clare Twomey arrange hundreds of glazed black butterflies in the main banqueting hall to capture the building’s “grotesque excessiveness”.
“The palace can be overwhelming when you walk in,” says Coleby. “People said it made them think differently and look more closely at the collection.”
Working with a craft-maker also provided both museums with an excellent opportunity for community engagement. The Bowes Museum ran events such as a hands-on workshop where children painted Baxter’s bird silhouettes on sky lanterns that were released during the annual Halloween parade. At the Royal Pavilion, a group of young people worked with an animator to make a film using Twomey’s butterfly designs.
Although its future is uncertain due to cuts, Museumaker’s organisers say the scheme was an excellent example of how museums can fulfil the brief of the arts council’s 10-year strategy of Achieving Great Art for Everyone.
The document envisages a future in which heritage, culture and the arts diversify audiences and win funding by achieving a deeper synergy with each other through “partnerships and shared investment”.
And it’s not just ACE that has declared a strategic interest in crossover work. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills believe the creative industries, which make up 5.6% of the UK’s gross value, will be a key area for growth amid an otherwise sluggish economy.
They have announced a raft of initiatives recently to stimulate development and partnership between the creative sectors (see box below), including apprenticeship schemes, knowledge exchange hubs and a new Creative Industries Council.
The creative economy has a wide-ranging remit, spanning disciplines from performance to design, fashion and the digital arts industry. One institution that has gone further than most in blurring boundaries is London’s Design Museum, which has had a head start because of its natural links with the design sector.
Since 2007, the museum has run an annual Designers in Residence programme that offers up-and-coming designers the chance to make and display site-specific pieces in the galleries.
In previous years, residents have created everything from a Curiosity Cabinet highlighting unusual museum items to a Continuous Bench that flowed in and out of the museum’s outdoor glass tank.
Alumni include architects, textile designers and electronic engineers. The programme is an example of how mutually beneficial collaboration can be, says Margaret Cubbage, a curator at the museum.
“For the designers, when they start out they’ve normally been in a little bubble and they haven’t had much interaction with the public. The residency really helps them think about how accessible their work is.”
The residents have a chance to explore ideas on a much bigger scale than would otherwise be possible, says Cubbage. “They have to meet certain criteria within the museum context but we encourage a creative approach. They can try out new ideas that would be financially impossible in the real world.”
In return, the residents make the museum more dynamic for visitors. “It’s great because the space looks completely different every year,” says Cubbage.
Residents participate in learning activities, public events and talks. “They’re very visible throughout the residency,” says Cubbage. “Last year the designers set up studios at the bottom of the stairs and worked there. People could talk to them about their work.”
Cubbage says this insight into the design process helps visitors see why some of the museum’s more functional objects warrant being “put on a plinth in a museum context”.
The museum continues a relationship with the designers long after their residencies have ended. Last year it hosted a one-night event, Resident, Steady, Go!, in which current and past residents took over the museum, staging intriguing interventions – the most popular being an “avatar suit” with a camera and headpiece that allowed visitors to view themselves moving in a virtual world.
In Bristol, cultural and arts institutions have taken a city-wide approach to closer integration. Philip Walker, manager of public programmes at Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives, says it’s more effective to promote a strategy of inclusion rather than having “venues fighting each other for visitors and investment”.
“In these economically testing times, this approach will pay dividends,” says Walker. “We can work stronger together as we make not only economies of scale, but also present a more coherent city-wide offer for visitors.”
The city’s newest venue, the £27m M Shed (see link to review below), has become a hub for creative activity and partnerships, says Walker.
During the city’s Encounters film festival, M Shed teamed up with the media venue Watershed, and the Arnolfini arts centre to screen archival films, drawing in crowds of festivalgoers.
The museum has also produced media content and applications and worked with local writers for the Bristol Festival of Literature. Not all of its collaboration is strategically planned – M Shed also enjoys an informal partnership with its close neighbour, Aardman Animations, creator of the Wallace and Gromit films.
Aardman devised a boardgame as an exhibit for the museum and allows it to display old animations free of charge. The studio has also edited films for M Shed, saving it money on production. In return, the museum loaned a large model ship to animators when they were pitching their latest film, Pirates.
Working with the film studio helps the museum foster a strong sense of local identity. “To people from Bristol, Aardman is a source of pride,” says curator Andrew King.
In the coming years, museums will need to become much more external in their thinking, says Walker. “We need to treat our museums as venues that are an active part of a city’s current life, not as passive repositories.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
M Shed, Museums Journal October 2011, p46
The digital arts and software industry is the fastest growing area of the creative economy.
One EU-funded project, Icon, recently published a R&D paper exploring how cultural heritage institutions could develop new revenue streams through marketing 3D models of their objects.
Icon participants, including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), are working with digital artists and eventually aim to establish a virtual library.
James Stevenson, the V&A’s photographic manager, says such a repository could potentially be an invaluable resource to film-makers and games designers seeking accurate models. It’s cost effective too, he says.
“At the moment, studios buy models from suppliers who make things from scratch by looking at photos. For them to do something of the same quality as we get from our 3D-object imaging in one day would take a month.”
Collaboration is essential for the project to succeed. “[3D] equipment costs tens of thousands of pounds, which is very high for cultural heritage. It also requires complex skills,” says Stevenson.
Working symbiotically with digital artists would allow museums access to resources they could not otherwise afford.
James Stevenson will be speaking about digital assets in an exhibition seminar at the Museums Association conference and exhibition in Brighton on 3 October. Click here for more information
Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture
A £500,000 fund to encourage arts and cultural organisations to work alongside those with digital expertise.
www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/digital-rdfund-arts-culture
National Skills Academy Creative & Cultural
The academy will establish a network of training providers and employers to support skills needs of the creative and cultural industries.
http://nsa-ccskills.co.uk
Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy
Four hubs with an equal share of £19.2m funding to develop partnerships and commercial opportunities between academia and the creative economy.
www.ahrc.ac.uk/About/Policy/Pages/KnowledgeTransferPolicy.aspx
Further south, Brighton’s famously decadent Royal Pavilion was infested by an eerie swarm of dark butterflies, which clung to its drapes and crawled over its delicate tableware.
Neither museum had any need to call in pest control; they were in fact taking part in Museumaker, a project funded by Arts Council England (ACE), and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s Renaissance programme.
Between 2009 and 2011, the initiative saw 16 heritage institutions collaborate with contemporary craftmakers to produce installations that, as the organisers put it, unlocked the “creative potential of collections”.
Museumaker is one of a number of schemes launched in recent years to integrate museum work more strategically with other creative industries.
Such crossovers are not a new phenomenon, but at a time when responsibility for museums and galleries is being transferred to ACE, more and more heritage institution are looking at what benefits this kind of cross-pollination can bring, particularly when there is often an existing overlap in skills, resources and audiences.
The Bowes Museum is a French-style chateau with an extensive decorative art collection. It applied to the Museumaker scheme in order to utilise its public gardens while parts of the interior were being refurbished.
“The idea was that, while all the building work was going on, a maker could bring something of the essence of the collection inside to the outside,” says Viv Vallack, the museum’s head of exhibitions.
As with all Museumaker projects, it was essential that the museum’s collection remained at the heart of the installation. Noticing a preponderance of bird motifs throughout the building, the jeweller and metalsmith Laura Baxter drew her designs from a vast a range of different objects.
“She picked out birds on everything from ceramics and textiles to carved panels,” says Bowes Museum principal keeper Jane Whittaker. “She found birds we’d forgotten were there.”
The resulting installation, Garden of Lantern Birds, featured lace-like metal silhouettes of everything from storks to peacocks dotted around the garden. At night, the birds doubled as lanterns, casting long shadows over the grounds.
“The external installation added a completely new dimension to the building,” says Vallack. “It was during the winter months, so added a decorative feature to what can be a dreary time of year.”
The project also offered the museum a chance to reinterpret its collection in a fresh and accessible way. Staff created labels to highlight the objects, sending visitors on a mission to track them down. “Seeing an element of the collections represented in such an unexpected way was very exciting and promoted discussion,” says Vallack.
The same was true in Brighton, says Nicola Coleby, keeper of exhibitions at Brighton & Hove’s Royal Pavilion and Museums.
“It was stimulating to see how the contemporary can reflect the traditional,” she says of the exhibition, A Dark Day in Paradise, which saw ceramicist Clare Twomey arrange hundreds of glazed black butterflies in the main banqueting hall to capture the building’s “grotesque excessiveness”.
“The palace can be overwhelming when you walk in,” says Coleby. “People said it made them think differently and look more closely at the collection.”
Working with a craft-maker also provided both museums with an excellent opportunity for community engagement. The Bowes Museum ran events such as a hands-on workshop where children painted Baxter’s bird silhouettes on sky lanterns that were released during the annual Halloween parade. At the Royal Pavilion, a group of young people worked with an animator to make a film using Twomey’s butterfly designs.
Although its future is uncertain due to cuts, Museumaker’s organisers say the scheme was an excellent example of how museums can fulfil the brief of the arts council’s 10-year strategy of Achieving Great Art for Everyone.
The document envisages a future in which heritage, culture and the arts diversify audiences and win funding by achieving a deeper synergy with each other through “partnerships and shared investment”.
And it’s not just ACE that has declared a strategic interest in crossover work. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills believe the creative industries, which make up 5.6% of the UK’s gross value, will be a key area for growth amid an otherwise sluggish economy.
They have announced a raft of initiatives recently to stimulate development and partnership between the creative sectors (see box below), including apprenticeship schemes, knowledge exchange hubs and a new Creative Industries Council.
The creative economy has a wide-ranging remit, spanning disciplines from performance to design, fashion and the digital arts industry. One institution that has gone further than most in blurring boundaries is London’s Design Museum, which has had a head start because of its natural links with the design sector.
Since 2007, the museum has run an annual Designers in Residence programme that offers up-and-coming designers the chance to make and display site-specific pieces in the galleries.
In previous years, residents have created everything from a Curiosity Cabinet highlighting unusual museum items to a Continuous Bench that flowed in and out of the museum’s outdoor glass tank.
Alumni include architects, textile designers and electronic engineers. The programme is an example of how mutually beneficial collaboration can be, says Margaret Cubbage, a curator at the museum.
“For the designers, when they start out they’ve normally been in a little bubble and they haven’t had much interaction with the public. The residency really helps them think about how accessible their work is.”
The residents have a chance to explore ideas on a much bigger scale than would otherwise be possible, says Cubbage. “They have to meet certain criteria within the museum context but we encourage a creative approach. They can try out new ideas that would be financially impossible in the real world.”
In return, the residents make the museum more dynamic for visitors. “It’s great because the space looks completely different every year,” says Cubbage.
Residents participate in learning activities, public events and talks. “They’re very visible throughout the residency,” says Cubbage. “Last year the designers set up studios at the bottom of the stairs and worked there. People could talk to them about their work.”
Cubbage says this insight into the design process helps visitors see why some of the museum’s more functional objects warrant being “put on a plinth in a museum context”.
The museum continues a relationship with the designers long after their residencies have ended. Last year it hosted a one-night event, Resident, Steady, Go!, in which current and past residents took over the museum, staging intriguing interventions – the most popular being an “avatar suit” with a camera and headpiece that allowed visitors to view themselves moving in a virtual world.
In Bristol, cultural and arts institutions have taken a city-wide approach to closer integration. Philip Walker, manager of public programmes at Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives, says it’s more effective to promote a strategy of inclusion rather than having “venues fighting each other for visitors and investment”.
“In these economically testing times, this approach will pay dividends,” says Walker. “We can work stronger together as we make not only economies of scale, but also present a more coherent city-wide offer for visitors.”
The city’s newest venue, the £27m M Shed (see link to review below), has become a hub for creative activity and partnerships, says Walker.
During the city’s Encounters film festival, M Shed teamed up with the media venue Watershed, and the Arnolfini arts centre to screen archival films, drawing in crowds of festivalgoers.
The museum has also produced media content and applications and worked with local writers for the Bristol Festival of Literature. Not all of its collaboration is strategically planned – M Shed also enjoys an informal partnership with its close neighbour, Aardman Animations, creator of the Wallace and Gromit films.
Aardman devised a boardgame as an exhibit for the museum and allows it to display old animations free of charge. The studio has also edited films for M Shed, saving it money on production. In return, the museum loaned a large model ship to animators when they were pitching their latest film, Pirates.
Working with the film studio helps the museum foster a strong sense of local identity. “To people from Bristol, Aardman is a source of pride,” says curator Andrew King.
In the coming years, museums will need to become much more external in their thinking, says Walker. “We need to treat our museums as venues that are an active part of a city’s current life, not as passive repositories.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
M Shed, Museums Journal October 2011, p46
Museums and the digital arts
The digital arts and software industry is the fastest growing area of the creative economy.
One EU-funded project, Icon, recently published a R&D paper exploring how cultural heritage institutions could develop new revenue streams through marketing 3D models of their objects.
Icon participants, including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), are working with digital artists and eventually aim to establish a virtual library.
James Stevenson, the V&A’s photographic manager, says such a repository could potentially be an invaluable resource to film-makers and games designers seeking accurate models. It’s cost effective too, he says.
“At the moment, studios buy models from suppliers who make things from scratch by looking at photos. For them to do something of the same quality as we get from our 3D-object imaging in one day would take a month.”
Collaboration is essential for the project to succeed. “[3D] equipment costs tens of thousands of pounds, which is very high for cultural heritage. It also requires complex skills,” says Stevenson.
Working symbiotically with digital artists would allow museums access to resources they could not otherwise afford.
James Stevenson will be speaking about digital assets in an exhibition seminar at the Museums Association conference and exhibition in Brighton on 3 October. Click here for more information
Creative support
Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture
A £500,000 fund to encourage arts and cultural organisations to work alongside those with digital expertise.
www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/digital-rdfund-arts-culture
National Skills Academy Creative & Cultural
The academy will establish a network of training providers and employers to support skills needs of the creative and cultural industries.
http://nsa-ccskills.co.uk
Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy
Four hubs with an equal share of £19.2m funding to develop partnerships and commercial opportunities between academia and the creative economy.
www.ahrc.ac.uk/About/Policy/Pages/KnowledgeTransferPolicy.aspx