A museum in miniature

Objects of our affection
Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, 26 June 2013

We're working with a group of carers to re-label objects at Warrington Museum, creating new viewpoints and stories from items we've encountered in the museum displays and the stores. Not only is this a chance to creatively re-think some of the museum collection, it is also a much-needed respite for the carers from their demanding roles.

By the Fire Sylvia

Seagull, Josie 2013

This week we started in the handling stores, I invited participants to choose 5 objects from 5 different boxes. Objects had to remind them of someone or something, or a time in their life.

They were then given the task of writing about each of their objects in 5 lines. A break from the writing came with an opportunity to play with clay- creating a miniature of one or more of their objects in air dry clay. Then back to the words, choosing the most pertinent line and re-writing it 5 times on a swing tag- changing the order of the words each time. 

Their museum in miniature made me re-look at the objects: In response to taxidermy seagull, Josie wrote 'Never to smell sea or drift along on the wind'... For a clog, Sylvia evoked the memory of the sound and light with 'Sparkling, twinkling with each step' 

I enjoy the thought provoking final line of Derek's swing tag, 'chosen for printing its memories'

Pressed Leaf, Dave 2013

Sparking Clog, Sylvia 2013

Book, Carol 2013

Barge Jug, Derek 2013

Lying in Wait, Christine 2013

Printing Memories, Derek 2013

Derek, Sylvia, Carol and Christine

post pluvium

Oldham, Making Memories project

Smell is a memory-prompt. The smells of coffee, or a roast dinner, or eau de cologne carry with them a huge freight of memories and meanings for different people. We've rarely worked with scents and so we decided it was time for a try-out during a reminiscence-art session. We brought rose water, perfume, vanilla, bread, coffee, oranges and lemons to the workshop, some small bottles and some clay to make labels.

Research we'd done suggested that smell can help people with dementia diagnosis to remember, cutting through the confusion. But in our morning workshop it became clear that the struggle to find an association was too big for people in later stages of dementias. Something different and fascinating happened instead: they talked beautifully about the process of trying to remember.

An emotional highpoint of our morning was a tiny but significant incident. One particular participant has big difficulties with recollection and language itself. She smelled some fresh bread and was able to utter the word 'loaf'. It brought enormous joy to her, that rekindled spark of naming and the happiness stayed with her the rest of the morning.

The afternoon was with a group who again had various dementias, this time less developed. They're a very likeable group of people, but sometimes fractious and there had been some growling between them before we started. The session itself was great fun, but had an undercurrent of the conflict remaining. People bring their lives to these sessions and sometimes life is messy.

Lois and I are probably the most ruthless critics of our work and afterwards we were discussing the session when Milly the volunteer who'd helped us popped back into the room. She had a message from one of the participants: “Margaret would like to say that she had an excellent afternoon with you. She said you're a great change from all the familiar faces here and the TV too. She'd like you to come back, tomorrow.”

I've been looking over my notes from the session and would like to end with this little poem from Sydney, talking about the delicious smell of the world after a rainstorm. Sydney was a scholar of both Latin and Greek - the phrase post pluvium is his translation of 'after the rain':

after the rain-storm
a row of night-scented
and virginia stock
after it rained a strong scent
of the old roses
rosa canina
rosa, rhodon
bourbon roses floribunda
after the rain
post pluvium.

Oldham Royals

We've been working in partnership with Gallery Oldham to devise new ways of working with memory boxes to stimulate reminiscence. On Wednesday we revisited our reminiscence around the topic of the Royals, royal commemorative crockery, biscuit tins and souvenirs. The theme is a rich one because it highlights such big gaps in the social fabric, between rich and poor, past and present, Empire and UK.

Many of the folk we work with remember the inter-war period vividly and the royals were celebrities of the day. Several of the women in our group had been taught how to curtsey and most people witnessed the Queen's visit to Oldham. There was the usual mix of grumpiness and acceptance about the royals. Unusually, one person had been to the Palace to receive an award (he was tight-lipped about what it was) and could describe a Buck Palace tea – very good Battenburg cake apparently. His description of the Queen: 'She is very gracious, but extremely small.'

The point of this session was to go with people's reminiscence and then stand the whole thing on its head and invite people to depict themselves as a King or Queen, drawing either a likeness or a symbol of themselves onto a paper cup.

The sensitive, quirky portraits that emerged were joyful celebrations of the individual, gently subverting social pecking orders.

STEPS

1 Prepare a paper cup by painting the background patterns. You'll need a colour that brings to mind royal crockery – blue was the colour we opted for. Paint a simple background, leaving an oval space for a portrait and perhaps some extra spaces for dates, a motto and some patterning.

2. Invite participants to make a portrait of themselves as a king or queen. This might take the form of a traditional portrait, or might be a symbolic crown, or an initial followed by the Regina R (for instance, Mildred would be MR) or even some abstract marks.

3. Ask them to add a date, perhaps their date of birth.

4. Ask them to add some words in the space left for the motto. Perhaps it could be a family saying, an idea of what they'd do if they were monarch, a memory of a time when they felt like king/queen, or most importantly of all describe the cake of their dreams.

Themes to discuss

Reminiscence about Royal events. Views on Royalty. Personal reflections on a time when they felt like a VIP.


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knitted costume

Oldham 1 May 2013 Making Memories

We've been making mini-poems on ceramic tiles, working with older people who have a dementia diagnosis. The pieces recall the tiled walls and pool interiors of old swimming pools and the public wash houses that were sometimes next-door to the pool.

The tiny poems can be read singly, or else as units of one larger poem. For people who might struggle to maintain attention for a long time, and additionally have some physical problems (eg. eyesight, arthritis) very compact written pieces are a good method. The poet/artist Ian Hamilton Finlay is a wonderful source of poetic strategies that are short but resonate with much bigger ideas.

Both groups we worked with were full of enthusiasm for public baths as a conversation topic, but the conversation swam off into directions we didn't expect. For a start, many didn't know how to swim because the school gave them a few sketchy lessons and left the rest to their parents who were too busy to teach their kids to stay afloat. So what we might now think of as a universal play experience was fearful to some. A second surprise for me was that alongside many swimming pools, wash houses were also to be found, sharing a boiler room for that rare commodity hot water. The wash houses provided the facility of a bath for people who didn't have such a luxurious thing. In the wash houses, people also did their laundry. Sydney recollected: 'Women with big arms, mangling.'

The pieces were made by rolling out some air dry clay, cutting out a square and then using old printers' typesetting letters to print words into the clay surface. These poems were only one or two words long, so the choice and the treatment of the words was very important. People selected a short phrase from their reminiscence that had particular meaning to them. The writing process added another layer of meaning – for some the little metal print blocks were a confusion and their lettering 'took a walk' – which added incident and emphasis in unexpected places.

One of the pieces that gave me (and the maker) much pleasure simply said 'SYLVIA PADDLE', the words accompanied by a line of circular marks like punctuation morphing into bubbles. Sylvia explained that this little statement felt like an order – she didn't enjoy swimming and this was an instruction to get in the sea, do what she was told. I like the way it is in the present tense, as if the memory Sylvia is still here, still on the verge of being told what to do, or resist.

Another of these mini-poems is 'BITTER RIVER', the words arcing across the tile like water in a valley. And in fact this was a reference to swimming in a bitterly cold river valley up on the moors of childhood. To my mind the phrase also conjures the bitterness of salt in the sea, of chlorine in a swimming pool and of the carbolic soap, beloved of many mums in the era.

For more photos please visit http://www.flickr.com/