With a background in professional archaeology and academia, the CEI training
scheme has offered me the opportunity to explore a career transition into the
museum sector. Having previously worked within the framework of university
museums, my placement is providing invaluable experience of the prospects and
challenges posed by working in a local authority museum service.
Mid-Antrim Museum Service staff Left to Right: Maria Cagney, Keith Beattie, John Hamilton,
CEI Trainee Nic Wright, Sarah Carson, Jamie Austin.
Like my fellow CEI trainees, I began a placement at my host museum – Causeway
Museum Service: Coleraine Museum – in April. Six months into the placement I can
happily say that I have been involved in a wide array of engagement, outreach and
exhibition projects. I joined the Causeway Museum Service’s Outreach Officer with
his on-going outreach sessions with local community groups. These sessions
produced a major part of the content for the major HLF funded programme, On the
Brink 1914-1916, being delivered by a partnership of Mid-Antrim Museum Service
and Causeway Museum Service. I was part of the team brought together to edit and
finalise the exhibition content for the first exhibition of that programme and am
pleased to have been part of its setup and launch in Ballymoney, Limavady and
Coleraine.
In, June I worked alongside Coleraine Museum’s Collections Officer to create and
facilitate a cross-community project mapping the historic graveyard at St Patrick’s
Church, Coleraine, with students from four local primary schools. In August, I joined
with three of our museum volunteers to create and install Exploring Irish History
Starts Here… a temporary exhibition in the Coleraine Town Hall which showcased
some of the highlights of Coleraine Museum’s collection, ranging from Mesolithic
Mountsandel to the local WWII anti-aircraft battery. In October, I entertained local
P2 students in the Coleraine Borough Council Chamber with stories of Mesolithic
hunter-gatherers and Plantation-era poo.
The focus of my placement, however, has been to engage with visually impaired
audiences, traditionally a hard to reach visitor group with whom Coleraine Museum
had little or no prior experience. I set out to design a programme of outings, sessions
and workshops which would allow my newly formed visually impaired stakeholder
group to experience their own heritage using senses other than sight.
So far, our programme – appropriately named Sensing the Past – has involved visits
to Limavady to see a travelling RNIB exhibition focusing on the social history of
blindness, a prehistoric object handling session which allowed the group to
experience Stone Age and Bronze Age artefacts first hand, and a ceramics workshop
where we experimented with making new pots by the ancient methods. Future
sessions will involve handling more objects from the Coleraine Museum collection, a
wicker weaving workshop, a musical exploration of some of our region’s most
famous bards, and a cookery session to allow us to digest our way through history
from the earliest times to the nineteenth century.
Nic Wright with participants on the Sensing the Past: Irish History Starts here’ programme
Experiences and feedback gained from all of our Sensing the Past sessions will inform
an exhibition to be presented in Coleraine Town Hall next summer, and will feed into
a sustainable policy to make all of Causeway Museum Service’s future exhibitions
accessible to visitors with visual impairment.
It has been a steep learning curve for me and I gratefully acknowledge the
opportunities and support offered by the staff at NIMC and my host museum.