Workshops funded by the National Lottery have inspired the museum to look at objects from a new perspective
The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Dynamic Collections campaign was set up to support collecting organisations across the UK to become more resilient and open up their collections.
RAMM was awarded a NLHF Dynamic Collections grant last summer. Since then, staff at the museum have been working on a variety of projects to reorganise and streamline how it catalogues its collections. These include the creation of a new digital asset system (which allows more accessible storage of photos, videos, sound files etc linked to objects) and the planned introduction of digital labels into one of the gallery spaces (allowing a variety of viewpoints on the same object to be displayed). To create content to trial these new systems, staff have been working with local communities to explore objects from the Making History Gallery to collect their views and artistic interpretations of objects from the collection.
Since September 2024, one of the community projects has seen RAMM partner with Hikmat. Hikmat is a local organisation who work across Devon to support families and individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds, including refugees and new arrivals to the city. The project has included people who speak a variety of languages and who are from multiple backgrounds including China, South East Asia, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan. Hikmat service users have attended six pottery making workshops in which they created their own ceramic vessels inspired by RAMM’s collections.
The workshops explored the links between pottery vessels, food and place. In the workshops participants shared their own experiences and personal connections with pottery vessels and food. Through the process, together, we were interested to discover the many similarities between ceramic vessels from around the world and across time periods. Workshop participants were very generous in sharing their personal stories with the museum.
“Especially in the pottery, when you look at it, it gives you the feeling that there is lots of similarity all over the world. When you think that, oh, it’s just only us that make it, but when you see it in the museum you think, oh, lots of people, they have the same ideas. You see how similar everyone is, just in different places. We have similarities more than differences.”
– Hikmat participant
The workshops were run by artist Simon Lee Dicker, who taught the participants a variety of techniques for hand building and decorating ceramic vessels. This included pinch pots, coil building, painting on porcelain, sgrafitto, burnished black ware- all techniques inspired by food-related pottery vessels and sherds from RAMM’s extensive ceramics collection.
Artist Simon Lee Dicker will include a series of pieces, inspired by the artwork, stories and connections shared by participants, in RAMM’s next temporary exhibition FOOD: Beyond the Plate in spring 2025. The participants’ work will be documented and added to RAMM’s permanent digital collection before it is returned to the people who made it. A project page with more information about the process, images of the work and comments from participants will be created to share the project more widely. Participant stories and comments will also be added to new digital labels in RAMM’s Making History gallery.
Additional community engagement workshops with other partners and groups in Exeter will continue to take place, to gather a wide range of perspectives from across the city.
This project is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund; thank you to National Lottery players for their support. RAMM is also grateful to Hikmat for their partnership.
Photos: Jim Wileman/ Ellie Coleman
