Museumaker Launches Commissioned Products - June 7th 2010
7 June 2010.
museumaker is a prestigious national project involving sixteen museums across four participating regions. It is supported by Arts Council England (ACE), Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and Renaissance; and is unlocking the creative potential of collections through imaginative interchanges between the heritage and contemporary craft sectors. As well as offering new experiences for existing museum visitors, museumaker will establish innovative ways of developing audiences, including young people. Each museum has commissioned one or more outstanding makers to create intriguing new work in response to the venue and its collections. A maker-led participatory project, engaging a wide range of visitors, will be integral to each programme.
At Woodhorn, the amazing collection of paintings by the Ashington Group of Artists or Pitmen Painters has been the inspiration for the project and the main the focus of the museumaker commissions has been retail development. Artists Rebecca Chitty and Jessamy Kelly have been working with retail consultant and artist Kit Grover to develop a number of unique products for sale in the museum shop.
Rebecca Chitty, a conceptual artist whose company designs interior products and gifts, and whose regular customers include Tate Modern, has worked on two products: the first is a stunning black and gold ceramic bowl inspired by a miner’s helmet and the second is a blue plaque plate marking the Ashington Group of Artists.
Jessamy Kelly is a designer maker of contemporary glass and ceramics, and a specialist in both traditional handcrafted techniques and industrial glass with clients including Edinburgh Crystal and Kevin McCloud’s homeware brand ‘Place’. For Woodhorn, Jessamy has provided a new take on an old favourite, the snow dome, to produce the Soot Storm.
“Woodhorn’s inspirational new products will be available to the public for the first time on Saturday 12 June, the day of the Northumberland Miners’ Picnic,” says Director Keith Merrin. “It seems appropriate to launch them on what was traditionally such an important day in the mining community’s calendar. The products are stunning and I’m sure that in time they will be become real collectors’ pieces.”
The museumaker project at Woodhorn also has a participatory element and over the next couple of months students from local colleges and high-schools will be invited to take part in a substantial two week creative industries project. Supported by the London College of Fashion, Woodhorn plans to take the most promising of the designs into production for the shop.
“We are thrilled with the results of museumaker so far,” says Keith. “It has enabled us to produce several highly desirable quality products that are unique to Woodhorn, and also to engage with young people in the area. I am sure they will be inspired by both the collections at Woodhorn and by the possibility of seeing their own ideas turned into a product that could end up around the globe.”
museumaker, which started in the East Midlands, is offering makers unprecedented opportunities to create work. The partner museums embrace large city institutions, small independent rural museums and two universities. They also include contemporary and historic buildings such as a guildhall, a lead mine, an almshouse and show piece palaces from London to Lincolnshire; Northumberland to Sussex. In the North East other museumaker centres include Killhope the North of England Lead Mining Museum, The Bowes Museum and, working together, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), the Dorman Museum and the Captain Cook Birthplace Trust.
Further information on the Woodhorn aspect of museumaker plus the other 15 projects can be found at www.museumaker.com