July Visit to Bristol Museum Part 2
I gave my first workshop the next morning at the Museum, to The People’s Panel, a group who represent non-traditional museum audiences and have worked with the museum on interpreting work before, notable the Love exhibition that toured to the National Gallery.
I began by asking them to describe a gift they had been given in the last year and it was interesting to hear how many gifts received were unwanted, but were kept – someone said she felt that she was often given things that the giver liked rather than that corresponded to who she really was. Another spoke about how she hides a gift she really dislikes behind other ornaments in her cabinet , but gets it out when the giver comes round…I wanted us to conjure images of objects in our minds as a group, as this is what the public will be doing as they browse the wrapped gifts and maybe seek to match them with descriptions in the Register Book and also on texts around the space.
I showed them some of my work –from a gift /exchange/ participation angle- in the context of my own life experiences of love, loss and attachment and they seem to be quickly able to access the emotional context of the project. We spent some time handling Kate’s Japanese gifts and I spoke about Furoshiki and also the use of wrapping in Pacific island divinity culture –ie to preserve the power of objects and protect the keepers .
I then unveiled my wrapped Gifts and asked them to guess what they might be, giving them the narrative of each object – this was a moving moment as I spoke about my mother. Finally, almost everyone had brought at least one object to donate –among them a door handle that had once been part of a sculpture, then spent 30 years on a shed door, and now is returning to art – and they filled in the donation form. I realised from this session that there is great value in working directly with more groups not only to contextualise the gifting of the objects, but also to engage in the wrapping process itself as a collective, creative act
