Museum Collections, Audiences and Accessing Knowledge.
The project is a sequence of exhibitions that draw together methods of making with the public in response to important cultural figures and museums’ historical collections. They are: Time Present and Time Past, 2016; Wuthering Heights – A Manuscript, 2017-18; Vase: Silkeborg 2018. Twomey developed this research through three commissions at: William Morris Gallery, The Parsonage Museum, and Museum Jorn. See Portfolio Booklet for documentation of research dimensions.
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qq877
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Time Present and Time Past, William Morris Gallery, London, June–September 2016; Wuthering Heights-A Manuscript, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, April 2017–January 2018; Vase: Silkeborg (part of Clay!) Museum Jorn, Denmark, February-June 2018
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- June
- Year of first exhibition
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Research began with in-depth discussions with curators and an exploration of the archives. In all three places, Twomey identified the ideas and actions of the individuals who had shaped the history of those museums, leading to a response through which visitors might begin to bring visually undervalued ideas and actions to life. From a live studio, where the public worked as apprentices alongside a master gold painter (Morris), to the 10,000 visitors who recreated the long-lost manuscript of Wuthering Heights (Bronte), to the production of 60 white vases in which visitors’ marker pen drawings were captured in 24 carat gold (Jorn), the methods and approaches directly reflect the cultural positions of these noted figures. Morris’s role as a conduit for passing on craft-skills to his apprentices, Jorns’ pleas for the public to be creative, and the fact that no writing has taken place at the former home of Bronte since her death, were inspirations for the research in which art as an aesthetic judgment is not abandoned in acts of participation.
Through live processes, audiences were drawn into new relationships with the museums. Their creations, temporarily, became part of the museums, and, for many, transformed their notions of the institutions and their collections. For museums, new insights into how participatory projects reconceptualise the relationship between audience and museum altered their own fixed historical narratives, transforming relationships through live personal dialogues.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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