Co-designing the gallery

Curiosity, Creativity and Collaboration: co-designing the new Fashion Gallery together with local young people

By Julieann Worrall Hood, freelance project artist.

‘All words are pegs to hang ideas on.’

-Henry Ward Beecher

Central to the Look Again Project was connecting with local young people to co-design a new Fashion Gallery. To paraphrase Beecher, together we found that ‘All objects are pegs to hang ideas on.’ 

Ideas and understanding evolve through time, with changing contexts and audiences, multiplying the possible interpretations for objects and displays in museums. Museum curators and designers innovate in response to these changing needs and contexts, and if we would like to design museums that are more engaging and relevant for young people, who better to collaborate with on re-imaging those collections than young people themselves!

Young people from local schools, specialist groups, colleges and universities explored The Salisbury Museum’s collection of clothing and accessories through a series of workshops and events with artists, makers, museum professionals, and heritage volunteers from The Arts Society who were cataloguing the collection. Further education students from Wiltshire College, Salisbury campus, participated in artist led, experimental textiles workshops at the museum inspired by objects in the collection and went on to develop designs and pieces combining traditional methods with contemporary and recycled materials. Undergraduates from the Arts University Bournemouth closely studied a selection of garments from the collection and made beautifully observed replicas that were displayed during the Fashion Gallery and assessed as part of their degree course.

The Collective, a group of young people from around Salisbury, came together for weekly, after school sessions at The Salisbury Museum, collaborating with the project team on reimagining the Fashion Gallery. Together we found out about the history and stories of a diverse array of objects in the fashion collection, questioning and critically evaluating the materials, construction methods and contexts through discussion and practical art and design workshops. Our aim was to select objects from this large collection that had local significance, that would engage visitors and connect with younger audiences through design and content. The Collective universally agreed that the old gallery appeared outdated in its design and the display mannequins were ‘creepy’, so the process began of selecting alternative objects for display, and developing more engaging ways to display them and tell their stories.

Design thinking starts with asking ‘What if?’ It starts with exploring potential ideas and making unexpected connections in a space where anything is possible. Children and young people have great possibilities for creative, divergent thinking - both physically, because of the way the human brain develops over time, and because their ideas haven’t yet been trained into very particular or specialist ways of thinking due to their job or expertise. 

The museum team, the artists, designers and the young people each brought different points of view and creative ideas to the project. Through curatorial workshops at Roche Court Sculpture Park we explored how the placement, grouping and ordering of the display of contemporary artworks can change our experience of viewing and engaging with them, bringing out different meanings and themes. By applying divergent thinking methods like these back at the museum we selected and grouped objects in various ways to explore how aesthetics, stories and historical and current context, could speak to a contemporary audience.

During weekly after school workshops The Collective closely examined a selection of the textiles, accessories and historical clothing (known as ‘objects’ by museum professionals), making drawings, prints and collages towards designing the labels and interpretation panels that would go into the new Fashion Gallery. The first task was to design a pull-up banner that could be placed in the first of the newly designed gallery cases alongside the replica garments made by the Arts University Bournemouth undergraduates. The purpose was to inform visitors about the project whilst work was underway and create intrigue about what was coming next. 

In Autumn 2019 graphic designer Bexi Harris, of local company Unstuck Design, came along to sessions with The Collective to discuss design ideas and share insights into the methods used by graphic designers. We learnt about working within the museum’s design guidelines for fonts and branding and about how to engage visitors with a ‘call to action’. The Collective responded by devising #fashionshapeshistory for use on promotional materials and on the Look Again project social media posts as a way that the public could follow the project and find out more. 

A banner design was created by bringing together several elements from the group’s collages and drawings. A fascinating idea developed to use fragmented images of certain objects to visually tell the story of the project, the coming together of new ideas and objects that hadn’t been on display before. So much of our lives today depend on visual literacy, visual storytelling, and conveying information and ideas through images - rather like visual versions of soundbites. Through this interdisciplinary and intergenerational collaboration new ways of communicating were explored.

Fortuitously while the project team were developing ideas for the design of display and interpretation panels in the new gallery, the museum was hosting the prestigious Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing prize. The Collective were able to investigate a huge range of experimental drawing techniques through the artworks selected for the prize exhibition. We discussed and evaluated the different styles and uses of materials, composition, line and use of pattern and scale, all of which fed back into practical drawing, collage and printmaking that we did during the sessions.

Throughout the project volunteers from The Arts Society were diligently re-cataloguing the large number of objects in the Fashion collection. We found out exciting snippets of information about objects that we were using as the basis for the gallery panel designs and later had the opportunity to welcome some of the volunteers, along with the objects they were investigating, into sessions with The Collective to share what they had learned and unearthed. Together with writer Ade Morris we worked together to tell the story of a selection of objects, bringing them to life by imagining those who had made and worn them. We explored ways of providing more information about key objects without cluttering up the gallery with text panels.

Further information and images were brought together and presented about several objects, accessible through mobile phones by scanning QR codes in the gallery.

‘The video workshops are really exciting - lots of new ways of drawing and new materials too.’

- A Collective group member

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 our project, along with most other things, was forced to pause. Some members of The Collective took the initiative to continue with drawing and designing whilst in lockdown at home and, when circumstances allowed, the team developed a flexible response by formally moving the project online. As the project Artist-Educator I created a series of experimental drawing and printmaking videos for the young people of the project to receive information from.

‘Having all the art materials hand delivered in a pack was amazing and really made it possible for me to get involved in the project.’

-A Collective group member

Each member of The Collective received a box of art materials, information booklets about the methods used, and photographs of the selected objects, so they had everything they needed to make the most of the online workshops.

The online workshops were available to be done at your own pace, in your own time, with further support and opportunities for creative discussion taking place during a series of team Zoom sessions where we all shared what we had been making. We also explored how the drawings and prints could be used for the gallery display panels with graphic designer Bexi Harris, who we’d worked with on the gallery banner design. It was great to see everyone’s faces again and have a chance to all discuss and debate the design ideas, even if online. The quality and amount of artwork created by The Collective was outstanding and as we all got used to the online Zoom sessions everyone became increasingly confident to share opinions and offer suggestions that informed the final designs for the new Fashion gallery.

The young people in The Collective delivered their artwork for digital scanning for use in the display panel designs that we had all worked on together. It was with great excitement that the new Fashion Gallery was opened in August 2021 by the iconic British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, where the young people from The Collective could share the outcomes with friends and family and the wider museum team and community; a fitting celebration for this collaborative, intergenerational and cross disciplinary project.