Ceredigion Museum receives Art Fund grant for Welsh quilts exhibition

A ‘Respond and Reimagine’ grant from the Art Fund will help create a state-of-the-art digital quilt for a show-stopping exhibition to welcome visitors back to Ceredigion Museum in Aberystwyth when it reopens.
 
The quilt will be the first exhibit to be available digitally for visitors unable to visit the museum in person.

Carrie Canham, Ceredigion Museum curator, said: “The museum is delighted to receive the grant. The digital quilt will record the experiences of the people of Ceredigion during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
“The project will also give us an opportunity to consult with communities about how we can best serve them going forward, as we learn to live with measures to control the infection rate.”
 
The museum will be creating two quilts for the ‘Human Threads: Welsh quilts’ exhibition, one physical and one digital. Contributors to the digital quilt have been asked to send in photos, sound pieces, films, poems or drawings, with an explanation of why they sent their contribution, what it means to them and the story it tells.
 
An artist will work with communities currently under-represented in the museum to make sure their voices are heard.
 
Rose Thorn sent photos of a quilt to go within the digital quilt. “This design has layers of personal meaning for me: The central triangle marks the colonial slave trade which is part of my ancestral heritage,” she said.
 
“The Black Lives Matter movement stirred up many black people’s experiences of racism here in the UK.  I went on the march in Cardigan with my partner, Marie Lewis and 150 people attended, which was heartening but a lot has to change.
“The period of lockdown has put me deeply in touch with living in the present, my past and thinking about how I want to live in the future.”
 
Considering the values people feel they may want to leave in the past and those they want to take into our new future will be part of the exhibition process by asking questions of participants and visitors and facilitating discussions between different communities
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The museum is still collecting contributions to both quilts. The deadlines for the physical quilt patches and digital quilt are October 2 and November 27 respectively.
 
The museum wants the quilt to reflect a broad range of experiences, positive and challenging, across Ceredigion - from those working on the front line and those working at home to those embracing new skills, from parents turned home-school teachers to the older generations adopting online get-togethers and young people partying online.
 
Contributors can send their voices, videos, photographs, poetry, drawings, soundscapes and songs to carrie.canham@ceredigion.gov.uk
 
Art Fund’s Respond and Reimagine grants offer flexible and responsive funding designed to meet immediate challenges connected to the Covid-19 crisis and reimagine future ways of working.
 
In the first round, 18 grants were given from a total of 114 applications. Developed in consultation with museums and galleries, the grants meet needs in four priority areas of collections, audiences, digital and workforce. They may also cover costs to support reopening, as well as encouraging creative and innovative projects as organisations look to reopen with fundamentally different operating models.
 
Respond and Reimagine Grants will provide £1.5m in 2020 to support museums, galleries, historic houses, libraries and archives and non-venue-based visual arts organisations. They are part of Art Fund’s £2m package of funding to support museums through crisis.
 
The deadline for the latest round of Respond and Reimagine grants was August 17 and a final round will be in the autumn.

Image: Detail from Rose Thorn’s quilt which symbolises the colonial slave trade.