Introduction - Museum Collaborations

During the past nine years we have worked closely with a number of museums and galleries to highlight through the installation of new art work

specific but neglected aspects of their collections. In doing so we have assisted in the development of their strategies for broadening

participation.

We are interested in initiating ways of communicating and developing ideas with diverse audiences and artists around temporary exhibitions,

collection displays and public events.

As an integral part of past collaborations we have offered exhibition tours, illustrated lectures, the sharing of contextual materials. We encourage

opportunities for audiences to network with artists and curators.

We work on a continuous basis with museums building innovative projects around  audience development, site co-ordination, archive intervention

and social and political balance in purchasing .  Having worked with several museums (Tate the V&A, St Jorgens, The Bowes, The Hatton , The

Harris and more recently Lancashire Museums Service, Manchester Museums Service and Liverpool Museums Service) on research projects

directly concerned with artists from the black diaspora.  We are constantly in demand to develop work with a number of nationally based

internationally recognised organisations. This work is at its most effective as live and experiential, as exhibitions, small displays, web based

interactions, family or children’s events, scholarly symposia and accessible dvd /text publications.

We always demand  and often achieve open access to the workings of each organisation, including visitor information, archive and collection

resources, display and exhibition space. We are able to access the long standing expertise of marketing and publicity teams, audience

development and education teams as well as senior curators and project managers within the service.

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Forthcoming Projects                       

Tailor Singer Striker Dandy a museum intervention at Platt Hall  (Costume Museum ) a collaborative project in partnership with Manchester

MuseumsService.  Launch date January 2011.

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On-Going Collaboration

Jelly Mould Pavilion    27 Mar - 6 June 2010

                           The Liverpool Jelly Mould Pavilion Project, is a city wide multi site collaboration with Liverpool Museums Service.

The Jelly Mould Pavilions for Liverpool are launched on the 27^th March 2010 as part of a 30 piece display at Sudley House and in smaller

groups at Merseyside  Maritime  Museum,  Lady Lever Art Gallery,  Williiamson Art Gallery,  Jackson’s Art Shop  and Blackburne House Cafe.

Visit them all and make your choice.

The Pavilions project is designed  to find solutions to the challenge of how to commemorate the contribution made by the people of the African

diaspora to the history, culture and rich fabric of the city of Liverpool.

How can genuine laughter and the potential for lasting togetherness be celebrated?

Can misunderstandings and ignorance be resolved? 

How can what seems to be the permanent impact of exploitation be addressed?

The answers could be found through honest conversation, an exchange of memories and a sharing of creative achievements.

Choose the Pavilion you would like to place in the best location, with the most beautiful vista, in which you might spend time with a valued

companion to try to solve the challenge.

What are monuments for?  

The Jelly Moulds displayed are models for Pavilions in which the people of Liverpool might at last get the chance to quietly contemplate some

possibilities for change, by talking about the potential for a joining together or even by singing about our international histories and how they are

connected.

The decorated ceramic models are covered in brightly coloured patterns, familiar texts and everyday portraits. You will recognise symbols of the

city itself and its history of links to the African continent.  

Liverpool already has hundreds of monuments and memorial sculptures, many commemorative gardens, squares and contemporary artworks.

The city has heritage societies, local scholars, brilliant students  and recognised experts living and working on Merseyside, all of whom are able

to inform us about the historical events, international personalities, fallen heroes and victims of conflict; some fondly  remembered others

completely  forgotten . Why add to this?     

The project  by Lubaina Himid asks how we can anticipate inevitable change in towns and cities and how we see the practicalities of these

changes manifesting. The displays identify and propose ideas around communication and celebration to create a visual representation of future

harmony .

For more information and to view the Jelly Pavilions visit  www.jellypavilion.info

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/

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Recent Collaborations

                                         Uncomfortable Truths         Victoria & Albert Museum  London  2007

Uncomfortable Truths    

2007 saw  the bi-centenary of the parliamentary abolition of the British slave trade. To commemorate this landmark year, not just in British  

history but in human history, the V&A held a number of activities throughout 2007.   The exhibition, Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave

Trading on Contemporary Art was held at the V&A from February to June before touring to Salford Museum and Art Gallery and the Ferens

Gallery in Hull.  Traces of the Trade Discovery Trails which showed how art and design were linked into the transatlantic slave trade,

highlighted objects on display in the V&A's permanent collection during the course of the exhibition.  Supporting the exhibition were a number

of activities and events throughout 2007 including films, music, poetry, talks and tours

Read Interview with Lubaina Himid  

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/contemporary/past_exhns/uncomfortabletruths/aboutartists/himid/index.html

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                       Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service           Lancashire Museums Service 2007

Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service was a museum intervention for the Judges Lodgings Lancaster and part of a two year

collaboration with Lancashire Museums Service. The project was managed by Susan Ashworth (Lancashire Museums) and Susan Walsh

(UCLAN).  During the summer of 2007 as part of a larger project ABOLISHED initiated by STAMP and the Museums Service, Lubaina Himid

staged a display of painted ceramic "cartoons” for the dining room and kitchen of the museum, to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the Act

of Parliament abolishing  the slave trade in Britain.

Professor Himid conducted several guided tours and gave a number of illustrated lectures to local audiences interested in the history of the visual

representation of Black people in European art. Visiting academics from the USA, the Caribbean and continental Europe as well as  groups of

young people from across Lancashire, who wished to learn more about the museum and its collection, were encouraged to discuss issues

around the slave trade in Lancaster and its impact on the wealth and architecture of the city.

Swallow  Hard : The Lancaster Dinner Service is  an intervention, a mapping and an excavation. It is a fragile monument to an invisible

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                                                    Inside the Invisible       St. Jorgens Museum Bergen Norway 2001  

                        
                                                                                                                                                                                            
                                                           
                                                  St Jorgens Museum Bergen Norway
 

The collaboration with St Jorgen’s Museum developed from discussions following a visit to the museum in 2000. Audiences to the 18^th century

buildings tended to be visitors interested in the history of medicine in general and leprosy in particular. The curator was keen to develop

relationships with the local community surrounding the museum, he also wished to expand the possibility of local school visits, history workshops

and annual events around contemporary art. The main emphasis for the intervention was not the medical innovation that took place there  or the

structure of the fine wooden buildings dating from 1706.  Lubaina Himid used the two short residency periods to develop ways of connecting the

people of the contemporary city of Bergen in Norway to the inhabitants of the former hospital; the leprosy patients themselves.

Inside the Invisible

The last leprosy patients in Norway died in 1946.  They were Europeans.  Leprosy is a disease of poverty, neglect and terrible living conditions:

this was the reality for many Norwegians until the end of the nineteenth century.  Inside the Invisible was an exhibition made for the St Jorgen’s

Leprosy Museum  in Bergen, Norway in 2001, for which I painted 100 small works on raw linen, each with an English and Norwegian text.  

Imagine your warmest jacket has stitched inside it, close to your heart, a patterned patch, five inches by five inches.  It reminds you of life before

you were struck with a disease that took away pieces of your flesh, your foot, your hand, your nose, your ear.  You look at your piece of fabric now

and again just to remember. 

Most of the leprosy patients in Bergen were fisherman – farmers who worked in conditions of 20 degrees below zero on the high seas in very,

very wet weather, mostly in the dark.  They lived for much of the time on the beach and slept under their boats in vile and inhumane conditions. 

Some patients or inmates were members of the clergy, musicians, painters, builders, clockmakers, as well as farmers or boat-builders. There

were women who, in their former lives, cooked, mended, washed, nursed, gave birth and prayed, as well as all the usual childrearing and food

growing and attempting to keep warm and dry that was the norm.  They too were infected with leprosy. 

I wanted to make a series of works that might give these people a voice.  They were individuals, real, idiosyncratic, sexual, thinking people.  They

had memories, hopes, families.  In the same way that slaves were more than slaves, lepers are more than just people with bits of their bodies

missing through disease.

The museum, an eighteenth-century wooden church and wooden buildings was reconstructed in 1706 after a fire, at first to separate and

segregate the diseased from the clean, then as a place to experiment to find a cure and then to house  people who were cured but unacceptable

to society.  There is a lodge, a barn, two wards on two levels, two large kitchens with open ovens, an herb garden and a courtyard.  Those who

visit today are very interested in Hansen, the doctor who, with a colleague, identified the leprosy bacteria.  They look at his room, his instruments

and his belongings.

Each painting has a different pattern in many colours.  A yellow background might have orange swirls or blue spots or a green check.  A blue

background could have purple triangles and orange lines, a green background could have yellow ticks or white circles or brown lines.   Each one

was always five inches square painted in the centre of a canvas eight inches square.  You look at the pattern, see it, read the text, ‘This is my

boat, my brother helped me build it’, and either see the boat or do not. Someone who did not see the object, however hard she looked, decided

that the owner of the pattern/object did not want her to look into this private memory, it therefore remained hidden.  Each text was handwritten on a

tiny card luggage label in Norwegian on one side and in English on the other.  This was then attached with string to the back of the paintings and

hung down.  You could read whichever side you wanted to.  Each work existed as a memory, a secret, a history, a fact.  Now it has gone.

At the end of the nineteenth century, those who contracted leprosy could be cured, as they can be cured today, but patients usually lost a physical

part of themselves.  The leper was still thought of as dirty, disabled or not whole, thus invisible.

When you enter the main hall, it looks the same as ever, dark, polished and quiet, with no sign of the sick, sore and rotting people sleeping three

to a room.  The work was placed in the small rooms in the kitchens and on the stairwell: 

These are my dancing shoes, I do not need them now.

I used this tureen on Sundays.

This is a special hook for mending nets.

These oars were made by my uncle                     (texts from Inside the Invisible)

I hoped that the Norwegian audience would try and see the objects, invisible in the paintings, many of which related to fishing and farming, but

some that referred to family life, creative life and a more contemporary working life.  It was meant to respond to the places as well as the people,

to help make visible to the Bergen visitors a piece of economic history somewhat buried in a new wealth.  I also wanted to be part of making the

former hospital less frightening and yet more real.  A place of beauty and inner calm beyond the outer terror of a slow, stinking death, on the one

hand, while remembering that it then became a place for the cured, but neglected and rejected, almost a prison.  In that new place, new family and

friends could perhaps be made and a new future possible.

Lubaina Himid 2002

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                                                        Distance No Object      Bowes Museum  - Barnard Castle  2004/5

                                                                                        Galleon/Shack  - Lubaina Himid 

The exhibition and intervention Distance No Object pays homage to the process of collecting objects from far afield, of bringing them together in

order for the flow of humanity’s generations to make sense of and to place value in them. In the early discussions with the artists who have

contributed to Distance No Object The Bowes Museum was seen in many respects as a 19^th century symbol of Noah’s Ark, home to a myriad of

objects spanning many centuries, presided over by John and Josephine Bowes as Mr and Mrs Noah. The artists have explored the idea of

Museum as a massive container of cultural artifacts that were at one point individual objects, but are now part of a public collection.

Adrian Jenkins

Director.

Artists : Lubaina Himid, Susan Walsh,  Mark Parkinson,   Patricia Walsh.

Given that the context for this exhibition/intervention is the gathering, transporting, display, care taking, restoration and sustainability of public

collections ; to understand what happens in back rooms and boardrooms or who works hand in glove with whom to make it possible, could bring

to light more questions than it is comfortable to answer. The more you know about how a thing works, the more you marvel that it works at all.

Lubaina Himid Guest curator.

Lubaina Himid

The title for this project was 40 days and 40 nights and I imagined my paintings being part of a huge display of toy Noah's arks borrowed from

collections all over the world in a show which may have included arks owned by tzars, presidents, popes, movie stars and mad academics.  I

envisaged a massive painted wooden ark leaning casually against the Bowes Museum which was to have been made by a Newcastle theatre

company's scenery department, designed by me for children to play on, plus as a surprise for the opening evening, there was to be a slide show

of weird and amazing boat buildings projected massively on the front of the museum, a sort of son et lumiere, my favourite kind of outdoor

entertainment.  It is clear however that I have reluctantly and yet eventually adapted some wild dreams.  That I then decided to turn these ideas for

spectacle into a deeper and longer lasting visual conversation between four artists with far reaching and yet oddly parallel vision has been even

more exciting.

Museums promise much and can deliver in the most eccentric and extraordinary manner.  Artists are usually ready for this.

In this particular set of painted juxtapositions of buildings and boats there is a clash between the zones of safety and danger, of stillness and

movement and of the living and the dead, they join together in order to mix memory with strategy.

The paintings and drawings of arks map the mixing and mis-matching which takes place during the process of creative research.  This then

enables a display of the maximum number of possiblities, which is often deeply embedded in the debates around how the visual experiencing of

objects can develop and opens out the probability of a vista of yet more visualising.  In other words the more you look, the more you see and the

more able you are to see other ways of seeing, other ways of working and other ways of making things to see.  

                                                                                             A Priceless Boon - Lubaina Himid  

Susan Walsh                

In the making of this new work for Distance No Object the creating of containers en masse within another huge container is one of the key

intentions, though the idea of storage as an abstract concept which weaves through the threads of history and memory over time defines another. 

Drawers are usually for storing objects, for hiding them, keeping them safe, preserving and discarding them. “83 Drawers” has a dual

persona, one familiar, approachable, domestic, alongside another, an untouchable display in a museum context. The original pieces of furniture

which housed the drawers were not seen as valuable either in monetary or historical terms; they were adequately but not beautifully made, with

little specific craftsmanship, old but not antique, seen today as unfashionable and often recycled. As “83 Drawers” spreads and stretches in self

competing disorder across the large museum wall we are witness to the spectacle of a unit revealing its deconstructed self , open to view, but

only for show.   

                                                                                                                       83 Drawers  Susan Walsh

Mark Parkinson

Investigating approaches to painting, the use of medium, the way we paint, challenging easel painting by holding the structure freely in one hand

and applying paint through the other - this allows a more fluid approach to painting, an almost organic process in which artist, support, media

and brush work in unison without normally rigid intervention of easel or wall.  This approach allows both left and right hand to be involved in the

process, aiding lightness of touch that is needed to produce fine surfaces free of brush marks.  This allows the viewer to engage with the illusion

of space on the surface of painting without having to engage with its construction.

                                                                                         
                                                                                         Untitled  Mark Parkinson

Patricia Walsh

Pink Summits -

Interior:  A woman and a man are seated back to back in a long, otherwise empty, narrow room.  Each faces a window.  The room is well lit by

natural light streaming in through the two windows.

Exterior:  Unseen daily hubbub, slightly audible, drifting upon the air.

S.  I'd say - yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black.

H.  Look, have I ever steered you wrong before? (Waits)  Have I ?

S.   No. (Pause)  Well...yes actually.  The auction in Paris.

H.   Alright, apart from that incident.  No I haven't. So whats the problem?

                                                                                       Photgraph from the Heroes series 2004 Patricia Walsh

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