Abby: Matters of experience is a project of Lorem Ipsum, an experienced design company headquartered in New York City.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a warm welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. I'm Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we're talking with Andrea Hadley-Johnson, who is an award winning creative producer and curator who currently works as the artistic program manager for the National Justice Museum, NJM, in Nottingham, England, developing exhibitions and creative interventions that explore ideas of crime, justice and injustice. Andrea, I love the description of your work as creative interventions, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to our show.
Andrea: Thank you so, so much for inviting me. It's a wonderful invitation.
Abby: So, Andrea, you and I share a similar background in some ways. We are both from England, but I know that we also share a little bit of a training background, you know, you trained as an artist at university, and so did I. So, tell us about the direction you took after training at college and how you ended up working in museums.
Andrea: So, I knew that I needed to do something creative, but when I left school, I really didn't know what that might be. I studied textiles and fine art together for five years, actually, and felt like I'd found my tribe. I felt like I'd slotted in with people that were exploring and playing and experimenting. So, I left that course sort of full of ideas and passion for materials and processes, and I thought, that’s it, I'm an artist now, but it didn't quite work out like that.
I sold a few little bits of work here and there and realized I didn't know how to make a living as an artist. And I got poorer and hungrier and sort of stepped in intuitively to a job styling with a small interior design company and really a career of styling and interiors grew from there before my career change into museums many, many years after that.
Brenda: Andrea, in your museum life, when were you first exposed to human-centered design? Like how did you first start to include planning for people in the work that you're doing?
Andrea: So, I have always worked openly. Always. I think people generally are a big part of my creative process. But it was about ten years ago that at Derby Museums, we began to remake the Silk Mill, which was an industrial museum that had been mothballed. And working alongside Hannah Fox, who was leading that program, we began to explore human-centered design, person-centered design, design thinking.
I don't like really fixing and thingifying some of the processes because there's a freedom in being able to understand that process and putting people at the heart of a project and standing and learning together what people might want to think, feel and do in a space or with a theme. But it is a human-centered design methodology that we began to learn together as a team, and it was it was an extraordinary process.
Brenda: So, was this just a natural part of how you think and operate, or was this something that you studied sort of more intentionally?
Andrea: I think there is a part of me that, as I sort of alluded to there, has always playfully explored and experimented with people. So, for me, part of any creative process is the what if, what if this happened instead? Or what if this person held it? Or what if? And intentionally human-centered design was put into the Museum of Making process so people out in the community were invited to come and remake the museum with us, and so that, that was a way of working that we could study and learn and improve to make that museum together with the people of Derby.
Abby: So, you studied art, you popped out, you tried to earn a living. It was super-duper tough. Where did you go next? And just talk a little bit about that experience and how you think it informs where you're at now?
Andrea: Well, it was a tough time, 1989 was when I graduated and it was tough, but I'd seen a job advertised for recent graduates working for this independent entrepreneur. It was like a mini Conran shop in Nottingham. And we came together, a group of us that were creatives. Basically, it was working in that shop selling beautifully designed products for the home. So, it was an interior design store and I got to design some of the window displays and really enjoyed it and felt like that was an extension of my practice.
And then I moved into an organization called Habitat, I don’t know whether you know of Habitat.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, I know Habitat, I'm very familiar.
Andrea: Working in one store in Nottingham, and again, it was about experimenting with product, it was curating that store and I was promoted each year in that company. So, I worked across the region, I worked in projects in Italy and Iceland and France. And I got to a point in that career where I had loved it and I had all these incredible experiences and worked with people across Europe. It was wonderful. It was a real privilege to work there. But I wasn't learning anything anymore and I literally got itchy fingers, as well. I wanted to be on the floor. I wanted to be with the products and the people that I wanted to be observing and watching how people navigate themselves around these beautiful environments.
So, I decided to go back to college. So, in my mid-thirties and I'd seen this link across to presenting products and presenting objects. And thought I would try my hand at museum studies. So, I did the course at Nottingham and to suddenly have to slow down and really read and think and analyze was a, was a different way of being for me. But I embraced it. I really loved it and I learned such a lot that I could see very clearly those parallels between my first career, you know, observing how people would pick something up and make sense of it in a gallery or a museum or a shop, you can see that those, those connections are very, very clear. What connects human beings with things in retail is not so different to what connects our heads, hearts, and hands in galleries and exhibitions.
Brenda: So, Andrea, I'll have to say lovingly talks about hands, hearts, and minds of objects. And that's how Andrea and I met. I got, a sort of an introduction to Andrea through the executive director of the Happy Museum Project in the UK. And Andrea, I think I was your very first Skype call ever.
Andrea: You were.
Brenda: I haunted Andrea. I got a hold of her, and I said, hello, I'm this lady in New York City. I do studies with objects, and I absolutely must come to the Derby Museums, which is where Andrea was at the time. And I said, please let me come and do a study. And Andrea was open arms, and we did some really brilliant work out there talking with people in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery about Objects of Love, which was a brilliant exhibit initiative that Andrea had created, where people were coming in, bringing objects that in one way or another represented love to them. And I got to interview the people and the meanings of the objects. It was absolutely brilliant. But that's when Andrea and I met for the first time.
Andrea: Oh, that one was at the Museum and Art Gallery, and yeah, Brenda, it was amazing, actually, that week was amazing. And I have to say I met someone recently that was interviewed by you and the team, and she said she still thinks about that moment when she shared her object and you, and then seeing other people engaging with it because it was really special, really emotional for everybody, a really important piece of work.
So, it sat within the Objects of Love, Hope and Fear gallery, and that was the last project I led at Derby Museum. So, I was asked to redesign or reinvigorate the Victorian part of the museum using a collection of objects that had been looted and stolen from around the world and landed in the museum like they do. And it was quite terrifying really, because these amazing, interesting, important belongings had been in the museum store for many, many years, or decades.
And I was working for a short time with an artist called Sonia Barrett, and she was moved to tears in the museum store and said it was the first time of being in the museum where she'd seen objects that connect to her cultural heritage. So, I knew how sensitive this project would be and I really didn't want to get it wrong. And I really wanted to work with as many people as I could openly to explore where the comfort, where the discomfort was.
So, I decided that a way to do it would be to call out, with a provocation, what three things connect people across the world. I think if I remember right, it was about three and a half thousand of these little cards and tweets came back and they were emotions and they were actions and they were behaviors. So, we started to play with these responses and build a thematic analysis on the gallery floor that people could come in and be part of that process.
And then the other thing was this desire not to get it wrong, really, to think, well, how might we share these objects before the gallery is developed with the people of the city? So, I took objects out on the streets, and I tried to connect the historic object with a contemporary counterpart. So, there were some ancient, I think they were Nigerian, combs that I took with a colleague to a barber shop. Sometimes we walked up to a cafe with bowls or utensils and sat in the cafe and people would come to us and say, what have you got there? And then we could, this interesting dialog would begin. But it was about listening and hearing what people's thoughts and feelings were, rather than telling them what the object or the belonging was.
There was one really very beautiful example of an object being, where lived experience came in to identify what an object was. There's a little basket that had been woven from reeds and a lid that had become disconnected from it in the museum store, and no one really knew what they were. And someone, this amazing man we were working with, he was volunteering, and he was seeking asylum in Derby at the time, and he looked at this little basket and he said, I know what that is, it's a foraging basket and I would have used that. I used one similar when I was a child. He told us about how he used the basket and what he would have collected in it. And then we got this basket sent to a conservator and they analyzed the basket, and they found a tiny wing of an insect inside the basket and researched this insect, and it was only found in that part of the world where Empson had grown up. So, there was this wonderful mix of lived experience and an expert knowledge and research that collided in the most beautiful way.
Abby: Well, I know we have a lot to unpack there, Andrea, there was a lot that you hit on, a nd the first is that idea of collaboration, which seems so important, especially when you're talking about all of these sensitive topics that I, I see you naturally migrate to. You have this very sort of open-ended creative process, you know, when it seems to come to the brainstorming or what forms the exhibition will actually take. Can you tell us the story, because when you just painted the picture of going into the community, that's difficult. Can you tell us the story of when you went into the barber shop?
Brenda: And can you begin by explaining how it is that the museum allowed you to take a collection object outside of the museum and to the barber shop?
Andrea: Oh, yes.
Abby: You stole it, didn't you, Andrea? It's time for confession time.
Andrea: My pockets are full. Well, actually there was a really, that, a gallery that I had worked on for Derby Museums the year before, it was called Notice Nature Feel Joy, but again it was co-produced and it was a natural history gallery and I had wanted to not cover everything in, in acrylic or glass and had this really interesting conversation with a curator at the time who said, well, you can't have those things without a case over the top.
And it was a tiger skull that I'd wanted to place. And we had this fantastic, and it stays with me, conversation where that person said, it's people like you that will ruin these objects and then no one will ever get to see them in the future. Quite an extreme thing to level. But I started by saying how many tiger skulls are there in the region, in museums? And it was like, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds, and I wanted to know if this one was really special and what would happen if someone took this skull every single day for a year? What would happen?
So that, actually that skull went on the wall and it was it was perfectly fine, and it wasn't really a risk. The risk, I think, is not sharing the collection. That's the risk. And building that relationship and enabling the team to feel like it was okay because some of the people that I was working with hadn't worked like that before, therefore, they were fearful. So, to share the benefit and to celebrate the beautiful things that were beginning to happen was how I was able to influence objects leaving the museum.
So, the first object was a comb going to a barber shop. So, it was this beautiful wooden carved comb and I trotted off to a barber shop, dead excited, this is going to be amazing, and suddenly stopped at the door and thought, oh yeah, it's all men, and I opened the door a little bit and I could hear voices and there was a lot of chat, but it didn't understand the language or languages that were being spoken.
So then for me there was another fearful, oh, what if they tell me to leave? And I don't understand that I'm not supposed to be there because we don't share a language. What if I say something and the man inside don’t understand me? So, there's this big flurry of, oh my goodness, what if I get it wrong? But took a step further, took a step further and actually sharing the objects was incredible.
And then someone new arrived and they identified and were very excited that they could recognize some carvings on the comb, and it was from Ethiopia, and we were invited back and got these beautiful photographs of the wooden combs next to contemporary combs, which sparked another idea, and that was to take some of these things into people's homes to really explore how to un-other the way that people were looking at the objects before they went into their plinths and their vitrines, these ordinary, extraordinary or extraordinary ordinary belongings that had been in the museum sore. When they were placed in people's hands and they were out in the community with similar objects from a different era, it absolutely cut through all of the, all of the nonsense that happens sometimes with museum objects.
Abby: Andrea, you’re so inspirational with the work you do and the way that I think you don't realize how courageous and bold you are. It's so charming that you went in there and without language to begin with, were able to explain. And how did it work? Did they come and actually visit the museum just out of interest?
Andrea: Oh, wow. Yeah. It was incredible to see then, along the way. So, what developed and again is quite iterative is the way that these galleries develop, one needs to, of course there are milestones and dates when things have to be complete, but absolutely within that we need to plan the room to play and to totally respond to what people are saying and doing and how they're feeling in those spaces.
And the purpose for that originally, Objects of Love, for me was how might that strength of feeling and care that that people have for an object of their own, that the resonance that it has, is that something that could be translated across into a museum where people have that same level of connection.
People came in to help clean the objects and we started to hear people talking about their objects. So, each phase of the project, these beautifully cleaned and loved and careful things felt like they'd been re-ignited. And hearing people come back in and say, oh, where's that small model boat that I cleaned, that's mine, and observing people, bringing in family members to share, that was beautiful.
Brenda: And Andrea, I am remembering interviewing one of your curators at Derby about Objects of Love, and she was talking about her experiences throughout the galleries at the museum and she spoke with so much love and so much tenderness and so much gentleness about the objects. And she talked about their spirituality and how it is that they almost speak with her, and I just thought, you know, here's somebody who really, really gets it. I hope that she was not a curator who ever gave you a hard time. But if it had been the case, she was completely converted.
Andrea: I think, I think that the hard time is good as well, isn't it? When people challenge, it progresses things for the whole, for the whole organization and provocations, playful provocations, the what ifs, the how might wes, feel to me often that they're magnetic. Once we start moving around or introduce prototyping or flipping things on their heads to see them through a different lens or from a different perspective, that's when the really good stuff happens.
Abby: So, you mention un-othering the belongings a lot in your works to enable us to see them differently. I believe you have a really great story; we were talking about your recent exhibition. Is your exhibition called Darkness?
Andrea: Yeah.
Abby: So, this is at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. Can you sort of talk us through that in relation to the fact that you, you see that engagement is absolutely necessary to connect with people via these provocations? Chat a little bit about the pistol.
Andrea: So, this project began about 18 months ago with this iconic photographer. His name's Brian Griffin. He's a super talent and his work is sort of infused with surrealism, I'd say. And Brian and I have worked together before, and he came up to Nottingham to explore the museum with me and we started to talk about some of the object collections, and we went into the museum store.
We were moving around and sort of got this long list of things that Brian perhaps would like to photograph. So, we had, I think there were 12 objects to select from. Brian has often worked with props, but these were the real deal. These were artifacts that had been used and they had a resonance around crime, law and punishment and the brutality of some of the stories that, or the connotations connected to those objects: brutality and trauma. And so, we did this call out for people to come and join the project, and they selected their object and people placed these objects on or around their body. And we ended up with this extraordinary – I think they’re extraordinary – sequence of 12, I've called them object person portraits.
And one of the objects in the collection was a pistol. Don't know what year the pistol came into the museum collection, I think it was in the 1970s. It wasn't necessarily a contemporary pistol. And right at this stage of installation, a colleague said, actually, I think that's a safeguarding issue. And we, we can’t show some of them or all of them, and particularly the pistol because of gun crime emerging in the UK, you know, there's been knife crime. It's a serious issue. We're a National Justice Museum, there's some amazing work that the learning teams do with schools or young people that might be at risk of getting involved in knife crime. And it isn't something that we'd mess around with.
We had those conversations. It was a very serious, within the play and within the experimentation. It matters. It really matters that we have those conversations. For me, it was censorship, and for me it was an issue around, well, what is the point of having that pistol in our collection if we can't use it? So, yeah, it was a really big challenge and actually it, I had a real wobble about my practice at that point of yeah, working like this, working so openly, these fluid, meaningful, representative conversations that we have with people are so important and it's, it's constant, the dialog is constant, and we are responding. I am responding accordingly all the way through.
And then had some more conversations about, well, actually, if it's a safeguarding issue for someone to see a photograph of the pistol with somebody in a non-provocative pose, then what is happening in the museum when people walk past the gallows and what is happening when people walk past repulsive things like a scold’s bridle that would have been placed over a woman's head with a metal plate in her mouth to stop her speaking in medieval times.
If we look at that one image and that decision through that very rigorous process like we have, then we need to step back and look at the whole museum, thinking about trauma informed practice. But having seen the event launch and hearing what people said about it and hearing how it provoked new thoughts, it felt like the building was fizzing and popping with these incredible moments of ignition and connection.
Brenda: Andrea, you said once that, you know, if you're going to be in the business of museums, that you need to see social justice as your business, as your responsibility. And I love how it is that you see museums as a critical point to bring relevant subjects together to bring social justice.
Andrea: Yeah, I suppose from my personal experience, my dad grew up in care in the, well he's 80 this year, so he grew up in care from a baby to the age of about 16, and then at the end of that process he was street homeless. He didn't have anywhere to go. He didn't have anywhere to be. But he used to say to me, if you have a loaf of bread, you have enough to give half to somebody else. And this is this is a kind of mantra that he'd always have as I grew up.
And there's something about the practice and the privilege. I have a privilege to be in the job that I'm in. It's a privilege for me to be able to be with those things and develop those projects and to coach and develop and, and work beside all these amazing people, it is my responsibility to dismantle exclusive practice in order to, for that institution to become more inclusive.
You know, people talk about virtue signaling and performing inclusivity, but it's got to be really, it's got to happen, and it's got to change. And it is a vital moment of agitation and flux. Post-COVID, there are opportunities to do things differently, and we have to just do them, not sit and talk about them. It doesn't take very much to hop out onto the steps of the museum and have a conversation with people to test an idea. That isn't courageous. That's just about being a human being connecting with another human being.
What people say, what people offer, are the essential ingredients for the future of that collection. So, researchers in the future aren’t going to come back into the museum and see the same stories and the same people presenting as the most important. Equitable practice comes from tipping the status quo and actively dismantling the barriers. They don't just dissolve. You have to get out there and do that.
Abby: Wow. Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. As we discussed, it's so important to give ideas time to shape, to trust your inner voice, and I know to be bold and thoughtful in our practices whilst breaking down these institutional barriers. It's a lot to do, but as you said, rewarding work and kind of what we all signed up for. So, thank you so much, Andrea.
Andrea: Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure sharing and listening and being together. Thank you.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. Take care and see you all next time.
Brenda: Be well everyone.
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Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a warm welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. I'm Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we're talking with Andrea Hadley-Johnson, who is an award winning creative producer and curator who currently works as the artistic program manager for the National Justice Museum, NJM, in Nottingham, England, developing exhibitions and creative interventions that explore ideas of crime, justice and injustice. Andrea, I love the description of your work as creative interventions, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to our show.
Andrea: Thank you so, so much for inviting me. It's a wonderful invitation.
Abby: So, Andrea, you and I share a similar background in some ways. We are both from England, but I know that we also share a little bit of a training background, you know, you trained as an artist at university, and so did I. So, tell us about the direction you took after training at college and how you ended up working in museums.
Andrea: So, I knew that I needed to do something creative, but when I left school, I really didn't know what that might be. I studied textiles and fine art together for five years, actually, and felt like I'd found my tribe. I felt like I'd slotted in with people that were exploring and playing and experimenting. So, I left that course sort of full of ideas and passion for materials and processes, and I thought, that’s it, I'm an artist now, but it didn't quite work out like that.
I sold a few little bits of work here and there and realized I didn't know how to make a living as an artist. And I got poorer and hungrier and sort of stepped in intuitively to a job styling with a small interior design company and really a career of styling and interiors grew from there before my career change into museums many, many years after that.
Brenda: Andrea, in your museum life, when were you first exposed to human-centered design? Like how did you first start to include planning for people in the work that you're doing?
Andrea: So, I have always worked openly. Always. I think people generally are a big part of my creative process. But it was about ten years ago that at Derby Museums, we began to remake the Silk Mill, which was an industrial museum that had been mothballed. And working alongside Hannah Fox, who was leading that program, we began to explore human-centered design, person-centered design, design thinking.
I don't like really fixing and thingifying some of the processes because there's a freedom in being able to understand that process and putting people at the heart of a project and standing and learning together what people might want to think, feel and do in a space or with a theme. But it is a human-centered design methodology that we began to learn together as a team, and it was it was an extraordinary process.
Brenda: So, was this just a natural part of how you think and operate, or was this something that you studied sort of more intentionally?
Andrea: I think there is a part of me that, as I sort of alluded to there, has always playfully explored and experimented with people. So, for me, part of any creative process is the what if, what if this happened instead? Or what if this person held it? Or what if? And intentionally human-centered design was put into the Museum of Making process so people out in the community were invited to come and remake the museum with us, and so that, that was a way of working that we could study and learn and improve to make that museum together with the people of Derby.
Abby: So, you studied art, you popped out, you tried to earn a living. It was super-duper tough. Where did you go next? And just talk a little bit about that experience and how you think it informs where you're at now?
Andrea: Well, it was a tough time, 1989 was when I graduated and it was tough, but I'd seen a job advertised for recent graduates working for this independent entrepreneur. It was like a mini Conran shop in Nottingham. And we came together, a group of us that were creatives. Basically, it was working in that shop selling beautifully designed products for the home. So, it was an interior design store and I got to design some of the window displays and really enjoyed it and felt like that was an extension of my practice.
And then I moved into an organization called Habitat, I don’t know whether you know of Habitat.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, I know Habitat, I'm very familiar.
Andrea: Working in one store in Nottingham, and again, it was about experimenting with product, it was curating that store and I was promoted each year in that company. So, I worked across the region, I worked in projects in Italy and Iceland and France. And I got to a point in that career where I had loved it and I had all these incredible experiences and worked with people across Europe. It was wonderful. It was a real privilege to work there. But I wasn't learning anything anymore and I literally got itchy fingers, as well. I wanted to be on the floor. I wanted to be with the products and the people that I wanted to be observing and watching how people navigate themselves around these beautiful environments.
So, I decided to go back to college. So, in my mid-thirties and I'd seen this link across to presenting products and presenting objects. And thought I would try my hand at museum studies. So, I did the course at Nottingham and to suddenly have to slow down and really read and think and analyze was a, was a different way of being for me. But I embraced it. I really loved it and I learned such a lot that I could see very clearly those parallels between my first career, you know, observing how people would pick something up and make sense of it in a gallery or a museum or a shop, you can see that those, those connections are very, very clear. What connects human beings with things in retail is not so different to what connects our heads, hearts, and hands in galleries and exhibitions.
Brenda: So, Andrea, I'll have to say lovingly talks about hands, hearts, and minds of objects. And that's how Andrea and I met. I got, a sort of an introduction to Andrea through the executive director of the Happy Museum Project in the UK. And Andrea, I think I was your very first Skype call ever.
Andrea: You were.
Brenda: I haunted Andrea. I got a hold of her, and I said, hello, I'm this lady in New York City. I do studies with objects, and I absolutely must come to the Derby Museums, which is where Andrea was at the time. And I said, please let me come and do a study. And Andrea was open arms, and we did some really brilliant work out there talking with people in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery about Objects of Love, which was a brilliant exhibit initiative that Andrea had created, where people were coming in, bringing objects that in one way or another represented love to them. And I got to interview the people and the meanings of the objects. It was absolutely brilliant. But that's when Andrea and I met for the first time.
Andrea: Oh, that one was at the Museum and Art Gallery, and yeah, Brenda, it was amazing, actually, that week was amazing. And I have to say I met someone recently that was interviewed by you and the team, and she said she still thinks about that moment when she shared her object and you, and then seeing other people engaging with it because it was really special, really emotional for everybody, a really important piece of work.
So, it sat within the Objects of Love, Hope and Fear gallery, and that was the last project I led at Derby Museum. So, I was asked to redesign or reinvigorate the Victorian part of the museum using a collection of objects that had been looted and stolen from around the world and landed in the museum like they do. And it was quite terrifying really, because these amazing, interesting, important belongings had been in the museum store for many, many years, or decades.
And I was working for a short time with an artist called Sonia Barrett, and she was moved to tears in the museum store and said it was the first time of being in the museum where she'd seen objects that connect to her cultural heritage. So, I knew how sensitive this project would be and I really didn't want to get it wrong. And I really wanted to work with as many people as I could openly to explore where the comfort, where the discomfort was.
So, I decided that a way to do it would be to call out, with a provocation, what three things connect people across the world. I think if I remember right, it was about three and a half thousand of these little cards and tweets came back and they were emotions and they were actions and they were behaviors. So, we started to play with these responses and build a thematic analysis on the gallery floor that people could come in and be part of that process.
And then the other thing was this desire not to get it wrong, really, to think, well, how might we share these objects before the gallery is developed with the people of the city? So, I took objects out on the streets, and I tried to connect the historic object with a contemporary counterpart. So, there were some ancient, I think they were Nigerian, combs that I took with a colleague to a barber shop. Sometimes we walked up to a cafe with bowls or utensils and sat in the cafe and people would come to us and say, what have you got there? And then we could, this interesting dialog would begin. But it was about listening and hearing what people's thoughts and feelings were, rather than telling them what the object or the belonging was.
There was one really very beautiful example of an object being, where lived experience came in to identify what an object was. There's a little basket that had been woven from reeds and a lid that had become disconnected from it in the museum store, and no one really knew what they were. And someone, this amazing man we were working with, he was volunteering, and he was seeking asylum in Derby at the time, and he looked at this little basket and he said, I know what that is, it's a foraging basket and I would have used that. I used one similar when I was a child. He told us about how he used the basket and what he would have collected in it. And then we got this basket sent to a conservator and they analyzed the basket, and they found a tiny wing of an insect inside the basket and researched this insect, and it was only found in that part of the world where Empson had grown up. So, there was this wonderful mix of lived experience and an expert knowledge and research that collided in the most beautiful way.
Abby: Well, I know we have a lot to unpack there, Andrea, there was a lot that you hit on, a nd the first is that idea of collaboration, which seems so important, especially when you're talking about all of these sensitive topics that I, I see you naturally migrate to. You have this very sort of open-ended creative process, you know, when it seems to come to the brainstorming or what forms the exhibition will actually take. Can you tell us the story, because when you just painted the picture of going into the community, that's difficult. Can you tell us the story of when you went into the barber shop?
Brenda: And can you begin by explaining how it is that the museum allowed you to take a collection object outside of the museum and to the barber shop?
Andrea: Oh, yes.
Abby: You stole it, didn't you, Andrea? It's time for confession time.
Andrea: My pockets are full. Well, actually there was a really, that, a gallery that I had worked on for Derby Museums the year before, it was called Notice Nature Feel Joy, but again it was co-produced and it was a natural history gallery and I had wanted to not cover everything in, in acrylic or glass and had this really interesting conversation with a curator at the time who said, well, you can't have those things without a case over the top.
And it was a tiger skull that I'd wanted to place. And we had this fantastic, and it stays with me, conversation where that person said, it's people like you that will ruin these objects and then no one will ever get to see them in the future. Quite an extreme thing to level. But I started by saying how many tiger skulls are there in the region, in museums? And it was like, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds, and I wanted to know if this one was really special and what would happen if someone took this skull every single day for a year? What would happen?
So that, actually that skull went on the wall and it was it was perfectly fine, and it wasn't really a risk. The risk, I think, is not sharing the collection. That's the risk. And building that relationship and enabling the team to feel like it was okay because some of the people that I was working with hadn't worked like that before, therefore, they were fearful. So, to share the benefit and to celebrate the beautiful things that were beginning to happen was how I was able to influence objects leaving the museum.
So, the first object was a comb going to a barber shop. So, it was this beautiful wooden carved comb and I trotted off to a barber shop, dead excited, this is going to be amazing, and suddenly stopped at the door and thought, oh yeah, it's all men, and I opened the door a little bit and I could hear voices and there was a lot of chat, but it didn't understand the language or languages that were being spoken.
So then for me there was another fearful, oh, what if they tell me to leave? And I don't understand that I'm not supposed to be there because we don't share a language. What if I say something and the man inside don’t understand me? So, there's this big flurry of, oh my goodness, what if I get it wrong? But took a step further, took a step further and actually sharing the objects was incredible.
And then someone new arrived and they identified and were very excited that they could recognize some carvings on the comb, and it was from Ethiopia, and we were invited back and got these beautiful photographs of the wooden combs next to contemporary combs, which sparked another idea, and that was to take some of these things into people's homes to really explore how to un-other the way that people were looking at the objects before they went into their plinths and their vitrines, these ordinary, extraordinary or extraordinary ordinary belongings that had been in the museum sore. When they were placed in people's hands and they were out in the community with similar objects from a different era, it absolutely cut through all of the, all of the nonsense that happens sometimes with museum objects.
Abby: Andrea, you’re so inspirational with the work you do and the way that I think you don't realize how courageous and bold you are. It's so charming that you went in there and without language to begin with, were able to explain. And how did it work? Did they come and actually visit the museum just out of interest?
Andrea: Oh, wow. Yeah. It was incredible to see then, along the way. So, what developed and again is quite iterative is the way that these galleries develop, one needs to, of course there are milestones and dates when things have to be complete, but absolutely within that we need to plan the room to play and to totally respond to what people are saying and doing and how they're feeling in those spaces.
And the purpose for that originally, Objects of Love, for me was how might that strength of feeling and care that that people have for an object of their own, that the resonance that it has, is that something that could be translated across into a museum where people have that same level of connection.
People came in to help clean the objects and we started to hear people talking about their objects. So, each phase of the project, these beautifully cleaned and loved and careful things felt like they'd been re-ignited. And hearing people come back in and say, oh, where's that small model boat that I cleaned, that's mine, and observing people, bringing in family members to share, that was beautiful.
Brenda: And Andrea, I am remembering interviewing one of your curators at Derby about Objects of Love, and she was talking about her experiences throughout the galleries at the museum and she spoke with so much love and so much tenderness and so much gentleness about the objects. And she talked about their spirituality and how it is that they almost speak with her, and I just thought, you know, here's somebody who really, really gets it. I hope that she was not a curator who ever gave you a hard time. But if it had been the case, she was completely converted.
Andrea: I think, I think that the hard time is good as well, isn't it? When people challenge, it progresses things for the whole, for the whole organization and provocations, playful provocations, the what ifs, the how might wes, feel to me often that they're magnetic. Once we start moving around or introduce prototyping or flipping things on their heads to see them through a different lens or from a different perspective, that's when the really good stuff happens.
Abby: So, you mention un-othering the belongings a lot in your works to enable us to see them differently. I believe you have a really great story; we were talking about your recent exhibition. Is your exhibition called Darkness?
Andrea: Yeah.
Abby: So, this is at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. Can you sort of talk us through that in relation to the fact that you, you see that engagement is absolutely necessary to connect with people via these provocations? Chat a little bit about the pistol.
Andrea: So, this project began about 18 months ago with this iconic photographer. His name's Brian Griffin. He's a super talent and his work is sort of infused with surrealism, I'd say. And Brian and I have worked together before, and he came up to Nottingham to explore the museum with me and we started to talk about some of the object collections, and we went into the museum store.
We were moving around and sort of got this long list of things that Brian perhaps would like to photograph. So, we had, I think there were 12 objects to select from. Brian has often worked with props, but these were the real deal. These were artifacts that had been used and they had a resonance around crime, law and punishment and the brutality of some of the stories that, or the connotations connected to those objects: brutality and trauma. And so, we did this call out for people to come and join the project, and they selected their object and people placed these objects on or around their body. And we ended up with this extraordinary – I think they’re extraordinary – sequence of 12, I've called them object person portraits.
And one of the objects in the collection was a pistol. Don't know what year the pistol came into the museum collection, I think it was in the 1970s. It wasn't necessarily a contemporary pistol. And right at this stage of installation, a colleague said, actually, I think that's a safeguarding issue. And we, we can’t show some of them or all of them, and particularly the pistol because of gun crime emerging in the UK, you know, there's been knife crime. It's a serious issue. We're a National Justice Museum, there's some amazing work that the learning teams do with schools or young people that might be at risk of getting involved in knife crime. And it isn't something that we'd mess around with.
We had those conversations. It was a very serious, within the play and within the experimentation. It matters. It really matters that we have those conversations. For me, it was censorship, and for me it was an issue around, well, what is the point of having that pistol in our collection if we can't use it? So, yeah, it was a really big challenge and actually it, I had a real wobble about my practice at that point of yeah, working like this, working so openly, these fluid, meaningful, representative conversations that we have with people are so important and it's, it's constant, the dialog is constant, and we are responding. I am responding accordingly all the way through.
And then had some more conversations about, well, actually, if it's a safeguarding issue for someone to see a photograph of the pistol with somebody in a non-provocative pose, then what is happening in the museum when people walk past the gallows and what is happening when people walk past repulsive things like a scold’s bridle that would have been placed over a woman's head with a metal plate in her mouth to stop her speaking in medieval times.
If we look at that one image and that decision through that very rigorous process like we have, then we need to step back and look at the whole museum, thinking about trauma informed practice. But having seen the event launch and hearing what people said about it and hearing how it provoked new thoughts, it felt like the building was fizzing and popping with these incredible moments of ignition and connection.
Brenda: Andrea, you said once that, you know, if you're going to be in the business of museums, that you need to see social justice as your business, as your responsibility. And I love how it is that you see museums as a critical point to bring relevant subjects together to bring social justice.
Andrea: Yeah, I suppose from my personal experience, my dad grew up in care in the, well he's 80 this year, so he grew up in care from a baby to the age of about 16, and then at the end of that process he was street homeless. He didn't have anywhere to go. He didn't have anywhere to be. But he used to say to me, if you have a loaf of bread, you have enough to give half to somebody else. And this is this is a kind of mantra that he'd always have as I grew up.
And there's something about the practice and the privilege. I have a privilege to be in the job that I'm in. It's a privilege for me to be able to be with those things and develop those projects and to coach and develop and, and work beside all these amazing people, it is my responsibility to dismantle exclusive practice in order to, for that institution to become more inclusive.
You know, people talk about virtue signaling and performing inclusivity, but it's got to be really, it's got to happen, and it's got to change. And it is a vital moment of agitation and flux. Post-COVID, there are opportunities to do things differently, and we have to just do them, not sit and talk about them. It doesn't take very much to hop out onto the steps of the museum and have a conversation with people to test an idea. That isn't courageous. That's just about being a human being connecting with another human being.
What people say, what people offer, are the essential ingredients for the future of that collection. So, researchers in the future aren’t going to come back into the museum and see the same stories and the same people presenting as the most important. Equitable practice comes from tipping the status quo and actively dismantling the barriers. They don't just dissolve. You have to get out there and do that.
Abby: Wow. Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. As we discussed, it's so important to give ideas time to shape, to trust your inner voice, and I know to be bold and thoughtful in our practices whilst breaking down these institutional barriers. It's a lot to do, but as you said, rewarding work and kind of what we all signed up for. So, thank you so much, Andrea.
Andrea: Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure sharing and listening and being together. Thank you.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. Take care and see you all next time.
Brenda: Be well everyone.
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Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
