Monument: The Golden Thread.
This exhibition output is Twomey’s response to the news that the Netherlands’ Zuiderzee Museum could no longer maintain Monument, a massive ceramic sculpture that the museum had commissioned her to install inside its building in 2009. Its weight was becoming too much for the building, and the museum took the unusual step of commissioning its creator to mark its passing. Monument: The Golden Thread was a dismantlement project that enabled Twomey to quite literally to share her work with visitors by having them take a piece of it home. For one week in April 2019, each visitor could select a fragment of the sculpture – an unbroken historic Dutch tile, if they could find it – which was then registered in the name of its new owner and stamped with a gold wax seal to authenticate the transfer of ownership. Twomey’s project reconceives the notion of participation as a tool to draw visitors into a closer relationship with the museum and the history embedded in its collection. 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
- qqxvz
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Zuiderzee Museum, Enkhuizen, The Netherlands, April 2019
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- April
- Year of first exhibition
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- 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
- Twomey’s research showed how artists can work creatively with museums on deaccessioning artwork, while strengthening ties with the audience. Visitors took home one of the historic Dutch tiles in order to commit to the preservation of their own cultural heritage. The dismantlement project drew more than 1,500 visitors. In the process, the Zuiderzee gained insights into its visitors and learnt that elements of a collection need not necessarily reside in perpetuity within the museum. Without diminishing its curatorial role, the museum found it could share ownership of the region’s cultural heritage with members of the public who had formally agreed to care for it. The project gained new insights into what constitutes value for a museum-goer, and what scale might mean for public viewers of sculpture.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
