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Part of the MLA London Knowledge Exchange Programme, one of the workshops Unexpected angles and surprising collaborations was an exciting one to curate. Hosted by UCL Museum and Collections in Bloomsbury in their collection spaces; Museum of Zoology and Strang Print Room, it was an ideal environment, surrounded by rare and eclectic collections, to explore unexpected collaboration experiences of the UCL, the Public Catalogue Foundation and the Contemporary Art Society’s and see how these had been established and nurtured. The workshop explored the less obvious collaborations that could stem from elements of the UCL’s collections and practical exercises around the collections focussed on how to develop a methodology that could be carried over to each participant’s collections.
The questions that were addressed were:
This workshop was a fun and intense one, and everybody enjoyed using the collections in a practical way for innovative thought. As a curator, bringing together materials of knowledge transfer for the participants through collections and organisations that utilised collections in surprising ways was a fun and nice design challenge. Sketchbook stickers were created to provide context and background on each organisation taking part and also from the Strang Print Room and Museum of Zoology illustrating objects from their collections.
As part of the workshop exercise participants split between the two collection spaces and undertook an exercise around the collection which was provided on a sketchbook sticker and facilitated by Victoria or Ellen Collins, Research and Policy Officer, MLA London. Part of this exercise was to get the participants thinking about Knowledge Transfer projects through drawing, looking and thinking outside the box through interaction with specific objects from the collections which were introduced by the curators. This was a huge success and as Nina Pearlman from UCL commented afterwards, in the couple of hours of the workshops, we had just started to uncover the real question – the session could have gone on for longer to really probe and develop.
As you can see from the Visual Story, capturing the story of the workshop as a curator, was a fun one, as there was so much to collect and gather. This project excited UCL and MLA London and UCL use this story as a promotion of how their collections can be used, MLA London have developed further workshops specifically for museums based on this format, and the participants have started to think about how important collections are for discourse in safe and anonymous environments and have gone on to have meetings in museum spaces, and incorporate archives into business plans.
Julie Reynolds, Sparknow Curator
