Imagine having your bed sheets on display in a museum: how would you feel?
Personal Belongings: On Display is a new online exhibition which reflects on the ways personal items in museums have shed light on the soft boundary between the private and the public.
Curated by a group of postgraduate students from the University of Leeds, the exhibition explores historical personal belongings with a connection to Yorkshire from the Roman to the Victorian period.
All the objects are part of the York Museums Trust Collection, a collective of museum sites in York. It mirrors these items with contemporary objects submitted by the curators. Each offer a glimpse into the innermost world of a person's life.
Museum collections are full of objects which illustrate the value of personal belongings to remembering the past. Some of these items belonged to famous historical figures and tell stories of well-known historical events.
However, many objects in museum collections belong to everyday individuals. They are often items which were never supposed to be available to the outside world. This exhibition considers whether it is an invasion of privacy to display people’s private objects in ways they did not consent to.
Tea Towel Bunny. Handmade in 2013 by Marie Taylor. Owned and submitted by Krista Jarman.
Part of the exhibition finds links between the display of such objects and a sense in 2021 of our homes being open to the world, via social media and video calls. The inclusion of contemporary objects submitted by the curators suggest how hazy the line is between the privacy of our homes and the public gaze.
Personal Belongings: On Display is the result of a project undertaken by a group of five MA students from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, as part of a core course module. For many, it was their first experience of curating an exhibition for public display.
MA Arts Management and Heritage Studies student, Holly Lown, said:
“From March 2020 to July 2021, I worked from home and spent much of my time sitting on video calls. I found it strange when people commented on my living space. It felt uncomfortable to have been forced to show my personal belongings to people who would not normally get to see them.
“I found myself really connecting to some of the objects in the collection as they were also items which were never intended to be seen by so many people.’
Krista Jarman, MA Arts Management and Heritage Studies, also commented on the exhibition:
“To escape from the confinement of the pandemic, Instagram gave me a way to interact and share myself with others. As a form of self-expression, I found myself placing everyday objects within my photographs, to give an insight into my personality.
“Similarly, the objects chosen in our exhibition express the personalities of their historical owners, capturing a moment in time. Researching the collection objects helped to piece together hidden stories which resulted in a thought-provoking experience.”
Personal Belongings: On Display opens on 6 December and runs until 3 March 2022.
Feature image
Sampler, Elizabeth Groves, 1822. Copyright York Museums Trust Collection