After a soft launch of the website for testing on the 24th of March, our exhibition went live to the world on Monday the 28th of March as a way of kicking off our “Wellbeing Week” of outreach programming. The period leading up to the launch was one of intense activity, requiring a significant amount of logistical coordination to get the co-curators, technical staff, and project members into the same room at the same time. This was only enhanced by a series of delays beyond our control, in particular, problems caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Thankfully, we had scheduled for unforeseen delays, and ensured that the project could be readily adapted to new scheduling.

We felt that the final output of the project remained true to the values we held throughout. At its core, we activated the collections by power sharing: letting the people who are most affected by the topics we were addressing do the talking. But it was also successful in another way. It allowed us to learn so many things about the process of co-curation in practice.

Lessons on… Divisions and Elitism

One of our student co-curators noted that it was odd for the students to be in groups, but the staff to be individuals. Such a decision was made for purely pragmatic reasons; we received such positive feedback from the student body, with so many applications, that we wished to include as many as possible. At the same time, we struggled to get engagement from staff. Looking back, our project output does reflect the elitism and divisions that are often inherent within the university structures; something we had hoped to avoid. Spending extra resources on recruiting staff would therefore have been a valuable path to take.

Lessons on… Power-Sharing Design

The designs of our site pages were intended to reflect the power-sharing dynamic of the project as a whole. We wanted the CRC’s voice and our own to be in the background. This was a significant departure from the other exhibitions on the platform. Hence, co-curators were introduced first, then their reasons for the artwork selections before all else. It is only at the end of the page that information is given about the artwork beyond its basic metadata, and even here, the interpretation was written with feedback from the co-curators and drafted to reflect the informal and wellbeing focus of the exhibition. We strove to ensure that information was still available (under clickable “full information” tabs) and traffic was directed to the CRC via the “additional engagement gallery” at the end of each page.

Lessons on… Wellbeing and Ill-Health

Our focus on wellbeing allowed us to steer clear of the tricky ethical terrain of mental ill-health and allowed us to focus on providing an active resource for supporting the visitors’ mental health as a whole. Yet we had to remain aware of the reality that we were still working on a project within the field of mental health as a whole. This motivated the inclusion of a resources page, linked directly from the home page and directing traffic away from the site towards organisations such as the Samaritans or the Wellbeing Centre on campus. This was a trade-off we felt that was worth making; it would reduce the visitor count, but ensure visitors in need of support were able to find it.

Yet we did not always succeed, in the post-it note to the right we received a critical response at one of our wellbeing stations. A lack of clarity at those stations meant that this person saw the project as an attempt to provide treatment for mental ill-health, not as a tool for more general mental wellbeing. A clearer explanation, along with resources (perhaps leaflets or QR codes direct to the website) is needed to ensure that the aims of such engagement strategies are clear and to avoid harmful misunderstandings arising.

Key Lesson:

At its core, our project was one of balancing acts: scheduling against scale, values against practical realities,  the needs of the institution against the aims of the project. It highlighted to me that there can be no ideal co-produced project, no utopia of power sharing. Projects such as this, and those more generally, have to make hard decisions that strive to stick their core mission, while being aware of what is lost.

Apr 21, 2022

In the previous post, I highlighted the difficulties we face in narrowing the over 6,000 collections items into a manageable 20-30 from which our co-curators would select pieces for mindful engagement. We have since arranged a meeting with Bernadette Hall (Bern) from Science Galleries Melbourne and  Heng Yeng Tan from the National Gallery Singapore who had previous experience of using arts and heritage pieces in a mindful setting to help us to create our final shortlist. To say it was informative would be a massive understatement.

Our strategy when approaching the selection process was to focus on the piece: the colours and materials involved, its subject matter, and so forth. While we did think about various other factors (e.g. ensuring a diverse array of artists and types of item, ensuring digitisation), our panellists really drew our attention to the fact that practical considerations should be at the fore of our decision making. They asked us to consider:

• Public access to the item (Is it easy to find in the catalogue? Can the digital visitor gain access to the physical piece?)
• Information about the item (Is there a detailed description? Do we know who the author is? Would it require curatorial work to fill in necessary information on the catalogue?)
• Copyright & Usage (Is the digitised item able to be used by the public? Can we use it in our advertising and outreach materials?)

Immediately, this allowed us to rapidly narrow the selection even further. Combined with our original aim of selecting a diverse array of item types and origins, we soon had a shortlist within our bounds.

The second lesson was really helpful. As mentioned in the past blog post, we had been playing it safe in our selections. Specifically, we were worried about selecting political and activist works. This was for two reasons:

1. We feared using them in this setting would de-contextualise them; disrespecting both the message and the artwork itself.
2. We wanted to play it safe and avoid potential triggers for our co-curators.

Having had a much deeper discussion with our panellists, we learned enough to feel comfortable including such artworks in our final shortlist. While not necessarily misplaced, our concerns were not insurmountable as long as we approached it in the right way. Moreover, in many cases, such works may allow a more intimate and personal connection for our viewers and co-curators who may have lived experience of the issues addressed in these works. As such, this was a really positive lesson, freeing us up to showcase a number of works that focus on important issues, including many new acquisitions at the CRC.

Feb 11, 2022

From the moment we decided to focus on mental health, all of us were keen to step beyond the digital platform to consider how we might use the artworks in the collections in activities to support mental health. This Monday we were lucky enough to have a very productive meeting with Ruthanne Baxter from Prescribe Culture. This initiative organises mental health and wellbeing programmes and is run by the University of Edinburgh Museums Services.

Our project will include a number of outreach activities which closely align with the objectives of Prescribe Culture, and as such this meeting was very useful from a practical perspective. But what was perhaps even more useful was the opportunity to discuss the theme and focus of the project overall with someone who has had a significant amount of experience working in the field.

Up to this point our theme looked at mental health through quite a narrow lens. Our first thoughts were of depression, anxiety, stress, and conditions like schizophrenia. We were interested in the patient-practitioner dichotomy. In brief, we were fixating on the clinical side of mental health, and much of our attention was on mental ill-health, not mental health as a whole.

This meeting really helped to highlight this fact, and to notice a dichotomy between our outreach programming (where things like the Wellbeing Pods focused on health generally) and the digital exhibition (where we were narrowly focusing on mental ill-health). Having spent the past week reflecting on this new perspective, we have now revised our plans somewhat to have a more balanced picture of mental health. While some of the themes addressed in the digital exhibition may still concern ill-health and the clinical side of mental health, our starting point will be from the perspective of promoting wellbeing, and this will guide our approach moving forward. This will allow us to create much more coherent and balanced project in the long term.

 

Further Information

Example of Mindfulness in Museums & Galleries

• The Ashmolean Museum with the Oxford Mindfulness Centre:
  https://www.ashmolean.org/mindfulness
• National Gallery of Ireland
  https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-and-artists/highlights-collection/mindfulness-and-art
• Manchester Art Gallery
  https://manchesterartgallery.org/learn/mindful-museum/

Prescribe Culture

Details of the Prescribe Culture initiative, and the impact it has had can be found here:
https://www.museumsgalleriesscotland.org.uk/prescribe-culture-university-of-edinburgh-museums/

Nov 11, 2021

An important part of our brief asked us to consider the ways in which we might step beyond the digital platform and encourage a wider community involvement with the collections. Ultimately, our work would explore ways of raising the profile of the collections and encourage their use in exhibition, teaching and research.

We are therefore keen to treat the digital platform as just one part of the exhibition, with a variety of outreach activities taking a prominent place alongside the digital exhibits. Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t help but be very ambitious – with activities ranging from satellite “wellbeing pods” displaying artwork and promoting mindfulness, through to scheduled programming like self-guided walks, art workshops, and even puppy therapy sessions.

We soon narrowed these ideas down (sadly dropping the puppy therapy), and broke them into three branches: the digital exhibition, outreach programming, and the wellbeing pods.  But we have become aware that even if we reduce the quantity of the individual initiatives, when combined with all of the other factors (such as social media, exhibition work, and co-curatorial practices which we are keen to engage with) the project could rapidly become unfeasible.

We have therefore started to think about project management strategies, utilising tools like Gantt Charts (as advised by members of the CRC), flow diagrams, and online workspaces  in which to share our progress. We decided to split the management of the project into five areas: exhibition development, outreach & programming, social media, the wellbeing pods, and logistics. We recognise that we will likely have to frequently revisit our strategy to ensure it parallels our actual working plans, and we hope this approach will help to split the workload while also keeping us on track.

 

Nov 8, 2021

Our brief is to curate an online exhibition on Health and Healthcare using artworks found in the Centre for Research Collections. By the time of our first ideas-sharing session, we had already settled upon a narrower focal point: mental health. Thematically, we felt that this focus was pertinent given the events surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, we felt that there were numerous supplemental resources outside the art collections that might be used to provide a solid foundation for the exhibition, such as those found in the NHS Lothian Archives.

Identifying a target audience, exhibition structure, ethics, and collections focus were all discussed during our meeting, but one issue that arose really struck me as an important one, and one that would be all too easy to neglect. We were asked to consider the ways in which our work on the project might come with risks not just to the visitors and the collaborators, but also to us. We are, after all, going to be interacting with objects and themes that can have a powerful impact on us and research into these collections may at times be difficult. Mental health has (statistically at least) likely impacted all of us directly or indirectly one time or another.

Taking the time at the early stages of the project to develop plans to support the mental health of all persons working on the exhibition will be an essential early step in the process. As part of the university, we are already well provisioned with resources (such as the Wellbeing Centre and Student Counselling), and we can also draw upon external resources (such as advice pages from reliable sources such as Mind).

As part of developing these plans we will need to reflect on how we can ensure that these resources are readily available to all of us, what we can do as part of our working practices, and how we can manage our team’s emotional workload alongside other aspects of project development.

Quick Resources

University of Edinburgh Student Counselling

Self-Help Resources

Mind

Citizens Advice Scotland: Mental Health Pages

Oct 9, 2021