A few weeks ago a large group of schoolchildren began asking some probing questions: ‘What do you do in the Museum?’, ‘Did you always want to work in a museum?’, ‘Do you need to be a scientist to work here?’ and, perhaps most urgent of all, ‘How far can you see through this telescope?’.
The pupils were from St Mary & St John CE Primary School in Oxford and they weren’t merely excessively nosey, but were in fact conducting important research for a joint project run between the Museum and the school’s Art Club. The project was for Arts Award, an initiative supported by Arts Council England to promote young people’s engagement with the arts.
Work in progress…
The children’s questions were part of interviews with different members of staff, designed to give them a better idea of what working in a museum is all about.
But that was just the start. As well as talking to staff, the pupils also explored the collections, making notes and taking photos during a tour of some of our highlight objects. These images, sketches and notes were later used as inspiration for their own artworks, created at the after-school Art Club during the autumn term.
Part of this process involved online research about their chosen object, as well as an investigation into how other artists have responded to similar subjects in the past.
A prosthetic hand and the Museum object which inspired it
Next, children began to construct 2D or 3D pieces using a variety of media, including chicken wire, modelling clay, wood, metal wire, and papier-mâché. There was a wide range of responses to the Museum’s objects, with some very impressive artistic techniques being displayed.
Finished pieces include a wooden model of a dissection theatre, inspired by stories of the anatomical demonstrations which once took place in the Museum’s lower floor; a prosthetic hand inspired by armour and the brass prosthetic hand on display here; and a fully functioning camera obscura!
In December, the artworks were all presented, along with labels written by the children, to school staff, family members, and the Museum’s director. We were amazed by the student’s responses and the standard of work proved just how inspired they were by the Museum’s collections, whose objects can sometimes be puzzling and complex. Yet the students explained their ideas coherently and enthusiastically, in language often beyond their years: literacy was an unexpected but welcome outcome of the project.
As a project it has been quite challenging, very in depth – in particular the research […] My son said it’s one of the best projects he has done this school year. […] I also like the vocabulary the children have used to talk about their work, the literacy and language development aspect is so important. It was so good to see the focus of each child on their work each week when I came to collect them – a nice intensity. – Parent
Every child in the project received a Discover-level Arts Award. You can read more about the project on our main website, and if you’d like to see the artworks themselves they will be on display throughout the Museum from 13 January – 1 March 2015.