Portsmouth City Museum: Sites of exchange

Porstmouth City Museum is being used as a case study to test and develop research methods, to examine alternative approaches to space-making, --dialogue, writing, drawing and image-- that foreground the sensory and poetic aspects of the built environment. This work sits with a series of interdisciplinary works, as, ‘Interior Archaeologies,’ Perth 2012; ‘Thinking through drawing: Sites of exchange,’ Nordes 2013, ‘Silent conversations,’ Winchester Cathedral 2013; ‘materialising conversations,’ University of Portsmouth 2014 and ‘Making conversation,’ RMIT Melbourne 2014. These works are situated within architectural and drawing discourses, they aim to develop sensory language and embodied methodologies with which to engage with the built environment. The works use the too and fro of drawing, of conversation, to create alternative ways to make space from the inside out.
The Museum has a large collection of glass and ceramics dating from the 1940’s onwards, the collection contains local artefacts as well as notable works by ceramicists as Lucy Rie. The museum would like to make this collection available to the public.

A small room has become available at the museum and it will function as a research space to engage with the archive. We are proposing to install a table in the space on which we can work, to engage the public in verbal, nonverbal, drawn and tactile conversations about the ceramic collection. We will collect everyday stories and responses to the artefacts through conversational processes. Dialogues that we collect will then inform an installation in the space, a curated exhibition of the ceramics.

Digital media students have worked on a 3D app to facilitate engagement with the collection. The app will potentially invite the public to view an object, write something about it, in order for the audience to ‘curate’ their own online collection. It will collect the stories and voices of people in the city. A prototype of this app is underway.

Conversations take many different forms and shapes and they go in unexpected directions, the project intends to gather voices, lines, points of intersection, to accumulate stories, ideas and interaction with the ceramics archive at Portsmouth City Museum through participatory engagement.

The project aims to activate the archive and engage new audiences whilst collecting the voices of the city through both digital and analogue means. Artists will work with the museum to create new work and an installation in the City Museum.