This has been an amazingly productive three days!
I have been at the Great North Museum: Hancock with Creative Assistant Clare and working with volunteers and staff from the Museum. We worked with hundreds of members of the public of all ages who ‘dropped-in’ (they were queuing before we started in the morning and stayed until the end of each workshop day). Working with us, they explored their own identities and expressed them, embossing names and designs onto metal foil identity tags. The metal was embossed using a wooden stylus just like the Romans would have used on waxed writing tablets (the iPad of Roman times!). People came from all over the world - cosmopolitan Roman times along Hadrian’s Wall! We had visitors who could not speak English, but sign language and Alex, one of the volunteers, worked wonders here as a talented linguist. Iran, Spain, India, China, Scotland, Japan, and the list goes on. Feedback has been amazing as to how therapeutic, calming, thought-provoking, inspiring and cool the activity was, appealing to everyone from the very young to elderly visitors. The tags were then hung onto long red lines, which in turn became the lines on columns as they were hung in a site-specific installation ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ in the Roman Gallery alongside evidence of the Roman people who populated this frontier 1900 years ago. Unfortunately due to the numbers of visitors towards the end of the day we couldn’t complete the installation and I had to return the following week to complete the work. Installation looks just like my original design sketches.Super public engagement - activity appealed to all age groups including teenagers.3275 engaged at some level with 1290 identity tags made.The work will now be shared with the public until 31st December 2022.
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