update: 08/06/22: I have drawn a lot from my visit to Sutton Hoo – and my memories of past visits to Sutton Hoo. I have very fond memories of spending time in the house (before the refurbishment), and I have attempted to recreate that to the best of my ability in my installation of the Endangered Plant Index Rewilding Project.
Today I visited Sutton Hoo – a site of great historical importance – where I looked at an example of a house set up as a museum.
Unfortunately, the house had been re-done since I had last visited and it was no longer quite what I had hoped to see and take inspiration from for my degree show.However, it was still a valuable resource and I have taken some thoughts and ideas away from how they displayed information in the room.
The house had a definite uniformity to it in the way in which information was displayed, and there were three main elements of information display:
- Information/text on the walls
- Information/text printed onto table tops
- Information/text displayed in photo frames
The photos below show the three different methods of display in the house:
1.
2.
3.
Obviously, the National Trust had a significantly larger pot of money to take from when displaying the exhibits in the house, but two which I can definitely make use of are the Information/text on the walls and Information/text displayed in photo frames.
The photo frames method is very doable for me, and is something that I think could also look very effective. Having one or two photo frames on the desk explaining what the viewer is looking at would add an additional element of believability to the work – making it look like a more lived in environment, whilst providing information to the viewer about the work itself.
On the other hand, I could also achieve the Information/text on the walls effect through the use of PhotoTex, which I can get printed at the university. However, this would be most effective, I feel, for large pieces of information or key quotes etc. as was shown in Tranmer House at Sutton Hoo, and is therefore not the most relevant method of information display that I could use for my installation on my rewilding project.
I will therefore be exploring the idea of displaying information in photo-frames more, looking at what sort of information I should include, and to what level of detail I should go into when writing about the project and explaining what the viewer is looking at. This will be the most difficult part, I feel, as I don’t want to say too much so that the viewer can’t take their own thoughts and opinions away from the piece, but I also don’t want to say too little, so that they don’t understand the significance and reason behind the work and how it relates to the drawings on the opposite wall.
