12 June 2018

Today, the prototype group came to the Museum to explore some of the collection, to help formulate their ideas and to make some key decisions about their work.

As our collection is not accessible online, we have been providing print outs to the junior curators to give them ideas for what they might use in their display. It is not ideal, and so this was a good opportunity to bring them to the Museum to touch and see the objects they were interested in, and to start to make some curatorial decisions.

We went into the collection store and pulled out some of the dresses, and also looked at some accessories. One of our favourites was a handbag that had three separate pockets – the junior curators called it the ‘pass the parcel handbag’.

After we had explored a range of dresses and accessories from the collection it was time to make some decisions. We used post it notes to shuffle around ideas and to create a chronology. They decided that their exhibit would focus on dresses that were about ‘special events’, but they would also reflect on what these dresses could tell us about women’s rights and their role in society over time. In museum studies, we refer to this as ‘object centred interpretation’, and it was amazing to see them develop this idea on their own.

By the end of the visit, the group had made a few hard decisions about the key pieces in their display. These pieces will form the basis of their work from now on. The next step is to select and curate the smaller pieces, research their stories and build up their display.

We also had a visit from the 3D printing group this week. This group wanted to have a look at some alternative objects to work with and remeasure some the objects they had picked previously. We found a beautiful collection of letters from an old newspaper printing press that they thought could make a good interactive for kids visiting the exhibition. The next step is to model these to see how they look, and then print some tests to decide what to do next.