Last month we heard from Bath Preservation Trust about a recent pilot project at Beckford’s Tower, outside Bath. Dr Amy Frost (Senior Curator), Iona Keen (Heritage Interpretation Consultant), and Jacqueline Braithwaite (artist) presented their approach and shared their learning from the project.
The team presented a pilot ‘Object-in-focus’ project, which is part of a wider National Lottery-funded capital project to restore Beckford’s Tower and Museum. Object-in-focus is one of many interpretation methods devised as part of the interpretation strategy for the new visitor experience inside the Tower and also in the surrounding Lansdown Cemetery and paddocks, which are part of the site.
The concept of the object-in-focus project was to work with a different community group each year to explore one object from the museum’s collection through the lens of one of the five interpretive themes which underpin the interpretation strategy. The team approached the Bath Black Families in Education supplementary school, who meet at the Percy Centre in Bath every Saturday. The young people who attend the group are aged between 7 and 16 and are all from local families of colour. The team started by going to the Percy Centre to talk to the group about William Beckford and the Tower, with a particular focus on the interpretation theme that explores the Beckford family’s ownership of sugar plantations and hundreds of enslaved people on the island of Jamaica. This was where the Beckfords’ wealth came from – wealth which enabled William Beckford’s father to become a powerful politician and for his son to build Beckford’s Tower and spend his fortune collecting rare and exquisite works of art to display there.
The young people in the group were all of Afro-Caribbean or African heritage, with some of Jamaican heritage, as are the group leader Rob Mitchell, artist Jacqueline Braithwaite and consultant Iona Keen. So many people involved in the project have a personal connection to the particular history of Beckford’s Tower. The group visited the Tower and were interested in not just one object from the collection but all of decorative features of the building, the collection as a whole and William Beckford’s story.
Artist and textile designer, Jacqueline Braithwaite, who had attended a community focus group at the Tower a few months earlier, was brought on board to guide the young people towards creating an artistic response to what they had seen and learned about the Tower’s history. Over two Saturdays, Jacqueline worked with the group at the Percy Centre and together they created a large-scale banner featuring each young person’s artwork on an A3-sized rectangle of canvas. Jacqueline talked about this being a very democratic process – each artist had the same surface to work on and access to the same materials. However, the group were clear from the beginning that they wanted to create a collaborative piece. The large textile was the perfect medium to bring all the individual artworks together. Jacqueline said that last year was the 60th anniversary of Jamaican Independence and so it felt even more appropriate to create an artwork that could celebrate and embody the national motto of Jamaica: ‘Out of many, one people’. Last summer, the banner was displayed in the Tower’s grand spiral staircase and is the first object visitors see as they enter the building. It was accompanied by audio interviews with the young people talking about their response to the Tower and their artwork.
Amy Frost talked through the main learning points from the project, which will feed into future Object-in-focus projects. The main learning point was – Don’t be too prescriptive when working with community groups. In this case, the group turned the project on its head – the object in focus was not an object from the museum’s collection but the new artwork created by the young people. The banner is now part of the Bath Preservation Trust’s collection and has been given equal status to the pieces collected by William Beckford in the 18th and 19th centuries.