Pop-up women take over corner of museum

The Women’s Pop-Up Museum will be holding a community launch event on November 29 at 11am at Hastings Museum. Bev Jenkins reports.

The project was started by Hastings’ own Women’s Voice in March 2014 and was expected to run until June 2014. The Heritage Lottery funded project aimed to explore why women, especially those from marginalised communities, don’t visit and engage with museums. All good stuff, but no one quite expected the project to keep growing and continuing way after the funding had ended.

The original project had women start with what they would put in a museum, what objects from their homes they valued and what stories they could tell about those objects. Chris Sanders of createlearnconnect was a fantastic co-ordinator of the programme and kick-started us into thinking about our homes, what we keep as special and what meanings and stories those objects hold.

We created work around our original objects using textiles, mosaic, tiles and writing. Some of these original objects – pages from Grandad’s diary, Mum’s glamorous skirt and handbag, wedding photos, a Sindy doll and so on are on display at the museum. Some of our objects were more ideas – the idea that you had to be sprinkled with fairy dust to live by the sea, a love of butterflies, women who inspired us.

The work displayed at the museum by the Women’s Pop-Up is a vibrant mix of texture, stories, collage and art. A later group of workshops was held by Julia Andrews-Clifford creating our own ‘Herstory in a box’. We ideally thought of women we were inspired by and worked at creating 3D collages we could take home and display. Some of us took the idea in a different direction, and one woman even re-created the elements from her teenage bedroom.

The textile group kept meeting and creating; from the idea of making the usual kind of bunting for this exhibition they came to bunting made from women who inspire us. Some of these women are shown in the photo above, and include real-life women from grandmothers to artists such as Frieda Kahlo.

The Women’s Pop-Up Museum plans to keep going, making and thinking, and invites local women to sign up at the exhibition for free workshops to be held in January 2015. The pop-up exhibition will run from 20 November until mid-January 2015. it’s fFree and all are welcome.

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See also Women’s pop up museum.

Also in: Community Arts