Output details

Northern Spirit: 300 Years of Art on Tyneside

This output consists of a £1.1million public display in The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, contextualized in the portfolio by papers on the academic rationale and the exhibition process. The output constitutes an essential reference point for practitioners and academics concerned with: 1) exploring relationships between art, place and identity in museum settings; 2) community co-production of exhibitions; and 3) collaborative working between university and museums. Funded by the AHRC, We worked with sixty-seven members of the public from communities across Tyneside (including groups such as refugees and teenagers at risk of exclusion) as well as twenty-two high-profile artworld figures (e.g. Antony Gormley and Sir Nicolas Serota) and the Flickr community to develop new audio-visual material for the display. The display juxtaposes historical artworks connected to Tyneside with people’s personal testimonies about their experiences of living in the region and their visual (and for blind participants, non-visual) sense of place. These testimonies were co-produced with participants, who worked with us and with filmmakers, sound recordists, photographers and digital story makers, providing content for digital interactives which we designed. The interactives stand alongside artworks with the aims of: 1) constructively disturbing the cultural primacy of fine art as a form of expression; and 2) posing equivalences between past and present representations of and meditations on Tyneside; and 3) providing alternative and polyvocal interpretation which would provide access for visitors with a range of cultural capital. The project was underpinned by theoretical frameworks relating to new museology, aesthetics and place identity and by rigorous methods of sampling and giving voice to different communities. The significance and originality of the project lie in the attempt to bring art, place and community identities together and in incorporating people’s testimonies in digital form within a gallery context, thus refashioning the epistemological frame of the art museum.

The display was several years in the making, including two years (2008-2010) of AHRC-funded research. It involved the co-production of sixty-two professionally produced digital outputs for the gallery (including films, digital stories, photo essays and audio tracks), the design of c.350m2 of physical gallery space, the development of four interactive platforms (a touchscreen interface for showing films and digital stories, a sound bench and a multi-user touchtable map). The project also involved staging a Flickr competition to garner user-generated photographs for incorporation in a permanent slideshow in the gallery. The research informed the gallery interpretation materials (text panels, labels etc.).