Our day started back at King's Manor, the base for the Archaeology Department for the University of York. Here we refined the pitches for our films after a thorough storyboarding session yesterday. After an official pitch of our ideas to the Curator of Archaeology at the Yorkshire Museum, Natalie McCaul, we were given some very helpful feedback and she brought some new ideas to the table. We are now confident that we can progess with the filming towards the end of the week.
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| Me and my partner Olivia hard at work |
At the Yorkshire Museum we had previously been set the task to put together an exhibition cabinet in pairs, to be displayed in the learning zone. My group was given a mysterious brown box to open, the contents of which were unknown. We quickly tore open the box, eager to unveil what we had to work with. Within the box, rested four brown Bronze Age pots, with which we had create an engaging and informative display. In the beginning of this process we felt nervous about the forthcoming goal but we were also determined and enthused by the possibilities presented to us by the other exhibitions at the Yorkshire Museum. At first we did not know what to do with the artefacts or what exactly they were. This helped us with our creative process as we could approach the curating experience with the same perspective as a member of the public might view the display. With help from Natalie, we were given some context surrounding the artefacts and we learnt that they were found on the Yorkshire Moors. Through the further use of an early Twentieth Century book by the archaeologist Frank Elgee entitled; 'Early Man in North East Yorkshire' we were able to identify the different stylistic groups that the pots belonged to. The two larger artefacts, we identified as Beakers, while the other two rather smaller pots we discovered were called 'pygmy cups'.
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| How we displayed the 'pygmy cups' and Frank Elgee's book |
Today we finished arranging our artefacts and wrote labels. We started by playing around with the layout and location of the artefacts within the cabinet. We have aimed to achieve an aesthetically pleasing display which involved a multi-layered effect to emphasise the variation in the artefacts. We also included the afore mentioned book by Frank Elgee in order to contextualise the artefacts, spread open at a page which has a description and illustrations of 'Beakers'. We set this to the side of the cabinet so that a viewer could relate the artefact to the information in the book. We found it quite difficult to write the labels for the display due to a limiting word count of 40 words. We felt we needed to make the labels engaging to visitors without scaring them away with jargon. We were pleased with the overall vibe that we achieved with the display. After a peer assessment of each other's displays we gathered some constructive criticism such as how the pygmy cups, being at the back of the display behind the book could be lost as the visitors eye could be drawn by the bigger, more decorated beakers at the forefront of the display. We found our first curatorial experience extremely satisfying as it is the first time we have been able to creatively engage with artefacts.
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| Our end result |
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