UCL Museums & Collections Blog

Researchers at UCL working on the ‘Heritage in Hospitals’ project are beginning a new programme of research funded by a Heritage Lottery award. The research, called ‘Touching Heritage’, aims to widen participation by taking museum objects out to healthcare communities that would otherwise be excluded from museum activities (e.g. neurological rehabilitation and psychiatric wards, residential care homes). One-to-one and group sessions led by facilitators will focus on the cultural, social and natural diversity of the objects in relation to participants’ own health and wellbeing. The experience will be enhanced by touching and handling objects traditionally associated with health and wellbeing, and by discussing how the objects feel, what they are made of or whether they resonate in other ways with participants.

An important aspect of this project is to train volunteers (including existing museum and hospital volunteers) to facilitate object handling sessions that maximize the potential to learn about health and wellbeing and widen participation in cultural and heritage activities. If you are keen to volunteer to work on this project and are happy to undergo training, or have any thoughts or comments, please get in touch with the project team – we’d really like to hear from you.

For more information about the ‘Heritage in Hospitals’ research go to:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/research/touch/heritageinhospitals

Or email:
Dr Helen Chatterjee, Project Leader: h.chatterjee@ucl.ac.uk
Dr Linda Thomson, Lead Researcher: linda.thomson@ucl.ac.uk

Marking objects with accession numbers

There is a legend that when every object in a collection has been given a unique accession number, its curators will be freed of the shackles of performance indicators and documentation plans and finally achieve a state of nirvana. There’s lots of self-help guidance out there, of course (deep breathing exercises optional) to help us achieve this goal, including information on how and when to number objects. The sensible way, according to the Collections Link’s subject factsheet, is to give objects a running number, or, if you must, a number representing the accession year and then a running number. So surely that’s what everybody does, right? Wrong! (more…)

What is a fit body? What do we mean by ‘fit’? Athletic? Attractive? Slim? Medical?

Copy of Greek Athlete on UCL Front Potico steps

UCL Museums are running a student competition. We would like to see some alternate views of physical fitness. The idea of what is an athletic body has changed over time; for example, compare photographs of athletes in 1900 to those of today. The role of fitness has also changed in society; the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs had to prove their physical fitness every 30 years in Sed festival and, though today such physical prowess is not expected from our political leaders, arguably we prefer tall and slim Prime Ministers / Presidents in the Anglo world. This competition is looking for fun, thought-provoking and critical responses to this theme.

Up to 10 photographs or graphic works will be chosen by a panel of judges. They will be printed, mounted and framed and the winning students will receive them after the duration of the exhibition in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. The winner will receive £100 in Amazon Vouchers.

The exhibition will be accompanied by panels in the museum exploring ‘fit bodies’ and athletics ancient to modern. In addition poster panels may be put up in the North Cloisters display space. Duration of exhibition: Friday 1 June – Saturday 15 September 2012.

So don’t delay – enter the race!

It’s a Monday, which is always a tough day, as the emails have had all weekend to pile up and all the things you didn’t manage to do last week now need to be done even more urgently this week. So maybe this is a good day to share some of my personal candidates for a museums’ version of Room 101. (more…)

The publication, ‘Heritage in Health: A guide to using museum collections in hospitals and other healthcare settings’, has just been launched online by UCL Museums & Collections.  This illustrated 24-page guide offers thoughtful and practical solutions for taking museum objects out to adult audiences within healthcare settings and draws upon findings from the UCL and UCLH three year, ground-breaking research project, ‘Heritage in Hospitals’.

The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) was carried out in conjunction with University College London Hospitals Arts programme. In facilitated sessions lasting about 40 minutes, 250 patients in chronic and acute care wards were invited to handle and discuss a selection of museum objects with a view to assessing the impact of this activity on health and wellbeing. (more…)

This great photo of our outreach pod has just won Runner Up in the UCL Graduate School ‘Research Images as Art / Art Images as Research’ competition.

Every year the Graduate School asks students to submit images associated with their research that have aesthetic appeal and an exhibition is held in UCL in January. This photo was taken by Chee-Kit Lai of Mobile Studio, the designers of the outreach pod, who are also tutors at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

In case you haven’t read about it before, this special space for hosting conversations about a single object is called “The Thing Is…” and was launched at the end of October. We have used it with general public audiences and in UCL and have had many great conversations so far.

In this photo, you can see a remarkably happy group of people considering it was the end of a 10 hour day at the Bloomsbury Festival in Russell Square. The museum staff offered everyone a playing card with a question on it and we were discussing “What does the word ‘Philistine’ mean to you?” in connection with a Bronze Age necklace from UCL’s Archaeology Collections.

After months of design meetings, discussions about materials, worries about portability, and hiccups during fabrication, our new outreach “pod” is finished. The designers call it a portable gallery, and that’s probably the best description. As you can see from the photos here, it has a mirrored interior, creating the feel of an infinite space. It’s 2.2mx2.2m inside but does feel much bigger. At the same time, it does what we wanted and creates an intimate and immersive environment, where people come in and immediately forget what’s going on outside.

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Any researcher will tell you that for every ‘Eureka!’ moment, there is a seemingly impossible amount of long, hard, tedious and unrewarding slog.

Monkey business. Were these animals drawn from life?

We at UCL Art Museum are no strangers to the joys of the research process, so when Pippa Connolly – a postgraduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art – dropped by the other week on a mission, we were excited, but pragmatic in our approach.

Pippa is researching a particular period in the history of the Slade when, for a select few years between the wars, students were able to observe and draw animals at London Zoo from a viewing studio, specially built for the purpose.
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A team of researchers from UCL Museums & Collections has just been awarded a Certificate of Commendation by the Royal Society for Public Health Arts and Health Awards Committee for their ‘Heritage in Hospitals’ project. The award was made in recognition of the excellent and ground-breaking character of the research, and the valuable outcomes for participants. The Committee was particularly impressed by the range and quality of publications arising from this work.

This innovative programme was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and carried out in conjunction with University College London Hospitals (UCLH) Arts programme. In facilitated sessions lasting around 40 minutes, patients were invited to handle and discuss a selection of museum objects with a view to assessing the impact of this activity on health and wellbeing. If you have any comments or thoughts about this research please get in touch with the project team – we’d love to hear from you.

For more information about the ‘Heritage in Hospitals’ project go to: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/research/touch/wellbeing

Or email:

Dr Helen Chatterjee, Project Leader: h.chatterjee@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Linda Thomson, Lead Researcher: linda.thomson@ucl.ac.uk

My father-in-law recently died, and as the funeral approaches I find myself looking at archaeology’s preoccupation with death and burial with somewhat different eyes.

Roman Inscription 2010/207

I’ve faced the remnants of death before, while excavating ancient Near Eastern tombs, but its been an old, dusty, archaeological sort of death where the individual is reduced to a collection of different bones, carefully labelled and bagged. Their humanity is long gone, and any traces of personality linger only around the objects found in their grave.

The fact that this was someone else’s ancestor, somebody’s mother, father, sister, brother, daughter or son doesn’t really register, because after all, it’s nobody you know. It’s easy to retain a sense of scientific detachment when the past is far distant and geographically removed from your own personal sense of ancestry.

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