Past Forward: NLHF gallery redevelopment (2022-24)

Photography (images 2-5): John Chase

I assisted the Project Curator on an £5.4million NLHF project involving the redevelopment of three permanent galleries covering everything from social history and industry to natural history. I undertook collections and documentation work deinstalling the old galleries, returning objects to the store, while also preparing objects selected for the new galleries. Throughout the project I was responsible for liasing with conservators and external contractors regarding collections. I also carried out research for text labels. Working in collaboration with community engagement staff, I provided advice and assistance on designing the Giant’s sash community project. I was also responsible for textile mountmaking in the social history galleries.

Fashioning Our World: Sustainable fashion project and exhibition (2022-24)

Inspired by the use of reduced-scale mannequins by couturiers like Madeleine Vionnet and Christian Dior to save fabric, I designed and made 30 quarter-scale mannequins for the Fashioning Our World project. These were designed as the basis for an outreach and engagement project with Arts University Bournemouth students and as a way to engage with sustainable fashion experts, artists, and designers including Rahemur Rahman and Zandra Rhodes. The resulting garments addressed a range of issues from single-use plastic waste to the personal stories revealed by wear and alterations reflected in Salisbury Museum’s textile collection.

I also provided research towards the feedback wall, conceived as an interactive art piece highlighting textile waste, with each of 315 pegs representing a garment sent to landfill every 17 seconds.

Galaxy of Objects: Data visualisation art installation (2017)

How can we understand the vastness of outer space on a human scale? This art installation features a series of 3D printed ceramic sculptures based on exoplanets on NASA’s Kepler Planet Candidate List, with the entire Milky Way galaxy condensed into a space that would fit between Svalbard and Brazil, and our heliosphere reduced to an approximate 5cm in length, a scale of 960,000,000 : 1.

Each of these Kepler Planet Candidates was plotted onto a map of the UK and the ceramic sculptures made with a mix of high-silica-content clay mimicking the materials found in planetary formation and soil collected from each associated location on earth, rooting the sculptures in the human landscape. Alongside this I also created a pair of books documenting the process, including soil sample collagraph prints and photography, juxtaposing the planet candidates with their earthly counterparts.