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| Rachel's desk (and coworker) while working from home. |
A guest blog from Rachel Heminway Hurst, Curator of
World Art, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove and MEG events officer. Rachel tells us what she's been up to in lockdown, if you'd like to let us know about your lockdown experience then get in touch!
Towards the end of March I was gearing up for spring conferences,
research visits, holiday activities,busy juggling multiple project
commitments, with core collections work responsibilities that are on-going and
seemingly never ending at times, and will no doubt feel a familiar scenario for
most museum staff! When all of a sudden we went into lockdown. I left my office
as usual on Monday 16th March thinking I would be back there the next day and haven’t
set foot in my office, the museum or the stores since. It still felt like
winter then, and now we are enjoying full summer weather and have just passed
the longest day of the year.
Before the lockdown, I was feeling quite overwhelmed by the number
of commitments ahead of me, when all of a sudden everything just ground to a
halt. One by one events were cancelled, researchers and project partners
stopped emailing, our museum postponed moving to Trust on April 1st 2020,
and all the competing deadlines just melted away and everything was ‘postponed’,
and not just work, it felt like life had been postponed.
Like many people in the UK, I developed a mild case of the corona
virus during the first week of lockdown, and spent 6 weeks on a bit of a
rollercoaster of good and not so good days. My head was foggy during this time
and I could only concentrate on one thing at a time and gave up trying to
multitask and carry on working as normal. I decided that this was an opportunity
to focus on just one task, and finish something I had been working on without
much success since 2016.
I usually work from home one day a week and keep a lot of digital
work files on my home computer, and I also have a freelance colleague and project
curator, Kathleen Lawther, who is tech savvy unlike myself! So we set about
completing a web resource that we have only had the time to work on in a
piecemeal way up to now. The lockdown allowed me to focus clearly on one
project and one goal, and this felt really liberating.
Myself and Helen Mears, Keeper of World Art have been working on
the Fashioning Africa Project since 2015, we have been collecting garments,
textiles and art that reflect fashion and style in post 1960s Africa and Africa
UK diaspora, this work had been guided by an external Collecting Panel. It turned
into a huge but extremely rewarding project, including working with numerous partners
and donors, hosting many events and papers given at conferences, some objects
from the new collection have featured in displays at Brighton Museum, and some
objects will be going on loan. But creating our web resource has at last given
us a platform on which to share the new collection and most importantly the
stories that accompany these objects.
Working with the Collecting Panel meant we were guided by people
who are specialists in African Fashion both through personal experience and through
academic training. Their input
enabled us to source objects that reflected the personal styles and stories of
individuals as well as designers and specific communities. Our focus was on
building a collection where individuals voices and stories were told, and we
collected photographs of donors wearing their outfits, testimonies, quotes,
pamphlets and pieces of creative writing that all accompanied the outfits. As
well as film footage and oral histories.
We have collected over 400 objects
and although we haven’t yet finished professionally photographing them all or
processing all of the accompanying media, creating the web resource has enabled
us to provide access to a large number of them with their accompanying stories.
If it were not for being in lockdown and being able to work on this in a
sustained way and daily over the last few months, creating this resource would
not have been possible, and this would have been a missed opportunity. I also
feel as if I would be letting people down, people trusted us and offered their
objects and stories and wanted to share these. When finishing an interview with
Ewe kente weavers and twins Fred and Richmond Akpo in Ghana, I asked if there
was anything else they wanted to tell us or share and they said ‘We just
want people to know we are here and what we do’.
This work has also afforded me the
time to make contact with donors and partners to check information with them, and
through this contact, a chance to check in and catch up with one another. So
yes other things haven’t got done, which is hugely frustrating - we don’t have collections
database access at home and haven’t been able to access the stores or
facilitate events and the uncertainty over budgets and resources means other
projects are delayed. But I feel that I have really benefitted from this period
of time to take stock, to focus on this important work, gather everything
together and process it, and get something finished, and I am really pleased to
be able to share the results. The question is now, when things begin to pick up
and gather momentum, how do I sustain this focus and clarity? I do know that I
will make a concerted effort to try and plan in blocks of time to enable this
type of important work to happen.
Rachel Heminway Hurst, Curator of
World Art, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.
