Derby Museums are currently re-hanging Pickford’s House, the Georgian home of the Enlightenment architect Joseph Pickford. In this article, their Senior Curator of Art and their Head of Interpretation and Display, discuss how a previous co-production project at the Joseph Wright of Derby Gallery, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, has shaped their work on Pickford’s House and their approach to co-production in general.
Laura Phillips, Head of Interpretation and Display
Lucy Bamford, Senior Curator of Art
Keywords: Collaboration, Neuro-diversity, Young People, Curation
Q:Can you introduce us to Pickford’s House?
Laura Phillips [LP]: Pickford’s House was set up as a heritage site in the late 1980s, and the bulk of the interpretation and layout of the property hasn’t changed since then. So, it's a site that definitely needs time spent on it in order to improve the visitor experience and introduce different narratives into the property that are relevant for visitors today.[1] At the moment, we tend to think of most of the house as a beautifully displayed Georgian property filled with eighteenth-century interiors that are set up as if somebody’s just left them [fig.1]. But actually, none of the original interiors exist, and everything inside has been put together more recently. We’ve thought a lot about this: how to approach previous curators’ interpretations of what those interiors might have been like. In addition to the permanent displays, we also have a temporary exhibition on the first floor, and a marvellous display of toy theatres on the top floor – both of which disrupt the ‘Georgian House’ narrative.
Lucy Bamford [LB]: When describing the art on the walls, the words mis-matched and eclectic come to mind. The art has largely been used as set dressing, so when you look at the current interpretation panels, there is often very little information about the art that's on display (and that goes for the furniture as well). You might get a little bit of information about the maker— as in who made it or when — but it's all very basic, and it doesn’t really tell you about the story of the house or how those objects fit into that narrative – often because they don’t. Due to pressures in our stores, the house has become a kind of useful, visible storage space for the art that we've got in our collection. The approach has been: is it an eighteenth-century painting? Might it fit in a space on a wall in Pickford’s House? The result is that you've got a lot of pictures in those spaces that are inappropriate for a house of that size and status.
Fig.1 Interior of Dining Room installation at Pickford’s House, 2023 © Sophie Hatchwell
Q:How is co-production being used in the current re-hang of Pickford’s house?
LP: We didn’t just want to make the property look better; we also wanted to improve accessibility and the visitor experience. The property is not a very accessible space – it is split over multiple floors with no lift access. We wanted to find a new way of providing a complete visiting experience for those who can't access the stairs. We also wanted to focus on developing different narratives for the property, as up until now, the focus has been on the importance of Joseph Pickford as a preeminent architect.
Before the project we ran a series of sessions in the house to explore people’s experiences as visitors, to help us understand what they wanted from a visit to the property, what narratives they wanted to learn about, and how they wanted to consume those narratives. We also wanted to know what their responses to the house were, both positive and negative, so that we knew what to keep and what to change. One group we ran sessions with was a housing organisation; we wanted to think about what makes a home, to try and interpret this grand house in ways that all visitors could connect to. We also worked with local school children, the charity Sight Support Derbyshire who helped us think about visitors with visual impairments, and a group of local creatives who are all women of colour who have worked with us before. We got a really good range of responses, some chiming with the views of our own staff and volunteers. Overall, it emphasised how important it was to work with a range of different people who all have different lived experiences.
LB: For this project, we made sure we asked ourselves: how do we make sure that when we’re co-producing, we are drawing in individuals who can speak across a range of perspectives and experiences? There were definitely recurring themes that came out of our discussion sessions.
LP: There was an interest in the house’s global connections, such as the Irish workers who may have come over and worked in Pickford’s workshop as part of the building trade. As well as questions around the colonial legacies and trade routes of particular objects: like porcelain sugar bowls, mahogany furniture, and silk textiles.
LB: There was also a desire for women’s stories to be told and for the female voices associated with the house, such as Mrs Pickford, to be much stronger. At the moment, Mrs Pickford is almost completely absent from the house, but there's been a lot of research into her recently that has shed light on what a successful businesswoman she was in her own right.[2] Mrs Pickford was widowed about twenty years after she married Joseph Pickford and went on to live another thirty years running local textile mills. So now we're thinking creatively about how we can use some of the objects in the house to tell her story. For example, we’re hoping to use a painting from the Derby Museums’ collection called The Widow's Tale by John Raphael Smith (c.1789) to explore what it was like to be a widow during this time.
Q:Have you used a co-production approach before?
LB: We’ve used similar methods across all Derby Museums’ sites. One example is the 2018-2019 rehang of the Joseph Wright of Derby collection at the Museum and Art Gallery. Here, we worked with a group of ten young people aged between sixteen and twenty-five for about five or six sessions. The main aim of this project was to improve the accessibility of the space. At the time, the interpretation was pretty dense, and there was a lot of information being presented that not everyone was engaging with or finding meaningful. In some cases, people were just bypassing the space entirely. We’d also had various responses from surveys and feedback cards that suggested it needed an overhaul. So, we worked with this co-production group to think about how we might tell the story of Joseph Wright differently.
There was a huge amount of information to wade through. We spent the first few sessions just chatting about the collection, about Wright, and about the co-production process. We reached some really interesting conclusions. One thing the group were interested in was the story of Wright’s mental health, and they thought that that should be presented in a more forceful way within the space. Quite a few of the co-production group members were neurodiverse, so they offered a different perspective on the space and interpretation. For some of them, long reams of text were just not working whatsoever. That was really helpful in allowing us to think about the accessibility of the space.
Based on our discussions the group came up with a kind of floor trail that picks up on different aspects of Wright’s life and specific junctures in his career [fig.2]. We also highlighted specific paintings that told an aspect of the story. We felt that this was an accessible way for everyone to understand Wright’s story without reading very lengthy explanations. We have still got those explanations, but now they're in a book that's available for people to look at if they want to.
Fig. 2 Installation view of the floor trail introduced to the Joseph Wright of Derby Gallery, 2024 © Sophie Hatchwell
Q:What does co-production look like to you?
LP: With co-production, much of it is about reaching across a wide range of opinions, trying to encourage people to share their thinking, and their needs, and then responding to this and pulling everything together. Co-production can vary a lot across projects, and if you're too strait-laced with it and give yourself too rigid a structure, those projects often can't develop organically. In some cases, it's about trying to get to grips with what people need and what they find valuable or relevant. And sometimes it's about saying, ‘we've got a gap, we're not doing that very well, or we don't know how to do this, and we need alternative knowledge and perspectives!’ So, for me, I always think of co-production as a spectrum of practise, where you have to find what feels right for everyone.
It has definitely created challenges. For example, at Pickford’s House, the people we collaborated with wanted fully fledged, rounded stories about the people who lived there, but they also wanted us to make the interpretation simpler, so we’ve had to find some creative ways to go about that. In addition to this, some of the narratives people were interested in we don't have any direct evidence for – we have no documentation about the servants in the house in the 1700s for example. We’ve needed to think creatively about ways of using objects to tell these stories while also ensuring that people understand that, in some cases, this is conjecture.
LB: Speaking from a personal point of view, co-production in practise has opened my eyes in terms of how you could rethink narratives around some of the objects in our collection and how you present them. And so, it's a good way of focusing ideas and bringing it all back down to a few key and simple ideas that would work well.
Overall, though, it is also about building trust and deep relationships – both with and between collaborators. As a museum we try hard to maintain connections with the people we have worked with in order to help them progress their own careers or artistic practise and we try hard to work with many of them again on future projects. It’s about working across that spectrum of co-production in a way that feels right for partners and is very mutual.
References
[1] The re-hang project is entitled ‘The Reimagined Home: Changing Views of Home, Work and Family for an Inclusive, Digital Age’ and is funded by the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund
[2] Peter Collinge, ‘Enterprise, activism and charity: Mary Pickford and the urban elite of Derby, 1780-1812', Midland History, 45:1, (2020), 36-54; Ruth Larsen, ‘Gender and the Home’ in C. Edwards (ed.) A Cultural History of Home: Enlightenment, (London, 2021), 131-154