seen and heard

For a few hours a day over the course of a month I sat in different rooms in the museum looking and listening. Some days I heard little other than the hum of the heating, creaking floors, muffled conversations in other rooms and the internal monologue occurring right inside my head. On others there were visitors, groups of children, students, people with complex needs and their carers, couples, families, mums and their babies, grandmas, fathers, friends. As well as listening in to their conversations I also spoke to all the lovely people who work here, asking them about the history, the collections, what they do, what they’re working on and interested in, and for their help with finding a table, or moving it so I could sit in a different place.

When I wasn’t writing or listening, I looked. I looked and I looked. At the rooms, the decoration, the ceilings, the pipes, the lights, the walls, the cases and for long periods of time and repeatedly what they contained and held. Museums are full. Unlike galleries where work comes and goes every few months, museums are bursting with objects, images, maps, the stuff and things of everyday life, what people deem important, what they’re interested in, what they decide to collect, keep, categorise, catalogue, organise, store and display.

This was the recuring theme of my daily writings, remembering to keep looking and listening, to write what is seen and heard and while doing so think about who gets to decide, how we choose, whose story is being told and what’s been left out, behind, forgotten or lost. Since I started my drawings, there’s been four different temporary exhibitions in the main galleries and a redisplay of one of the First Nations rooms. This is an excellent example of how museums change and even though this work is slow it makes a huge difference to the context in which these objects are seen, allowing the voices behind them be heard for the first time.