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Zen and the art of crochet

If I had to rate my artistic ability on a scale of 1 to 10 (and I’ll extend this rating to my craft skills), I’d give myself a 4. On a day I was feeling particularly generous.

I never advanced much past stick men in the drawing stakes, and I’ve always lacked the manual precision (or patience, or both) to excel at anything that involves making something: school woodwork and sewing projects were equally disastrous.

Given this track record, my involvement with the Adelaide Reef project was a radical departure from the script. This is a satellite of the worldwide Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef and links art, science and environmentalism. In a nutshell, the project has brought hundreds of people together to crochet a coral reef to display at the Royal Institution of Australia (RiAus) as part of the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) festival.

The reef is on display at RiAus Future Space Gallery until 7th September.

Some examples of the Adelaide Reef corals (from the RiAus website)

It is very unlikely I would have even considered getting involved were it not for the fact that I know some of the staff at RiAus who have been responsible for bringing the Adelaide Reef into being.

So about three months ago – having never crocheted before in my life – I turned up to one of the RiAus’ crochet workshops. At first it was just as I expected – I was pretty useless. I just couldn’t co-ordinate my fingers, hook and yarn in any way even vaguely resembling the effortless work of the experienced crocheters. But I wasn’t the only beginner and I pressed on, gradually gaining confidence, dexterity and an understanding of what I was supposed to be doing.

I continued to practice and soon I was experimenting with different techniques to create different kinds of shapes. In the end I made about eight pieces, with the biggest (not shown here) about the size of a lettuce (albeit floppier).

Some of my earlier coral crochet efforts

 

As my confidence and skills improved, I found crochet very satisfying and I could happily dedicate whole evenings to working on my pieces. I think it was a good example of a ‘flow experience‘ as described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, tasks where you are able to get completely absorbed in the moment. Such levels of engagement are considered to be optimal for psychological health and wellbeing. It’s very meditative (hence the Zen reference in the title).

My supervisor, Jan Packer, has written about ‘flow’ in museum visits, which is how I first came to be aware of the concept. Flow experiences are those that a offer challenge that stretches your ability without over-stretching it, as this diagram illustrates:

A diagram showing the 'flow' state (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/courses/spring03/G22.2280-001/csikszentmihalyi.htm)

Other hallmarks of the flow experience which I think my crochet experience had:

  1. Clear goals – the task had a defined scope and end point
  2. It required a level of concentration, but not taxingly so
  3. Direct and immediate feedback (once you got going, the corals started to take shape fairly quickly)
  4. A sense of control, but at the same time losing yourself in the activity

I’m glad that such an event gave me an opportunity to try something that I wouldn’t otherwise have tried, and I plan to continue crocheting and expanding upon my (admittedly basic) skills.

Now that my services are no longer required for making coral, I’ll need to find other things to learn how to make!

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The company we keep: audience engagement

Earlier this week I spoke at the National Craft and Design Directors and Curators Conference, held in Melbourne as part of the State of Design Festival. I met lots of interesting and passionate people and I was delighted to be able to be part of their conversations and workshop sessions.

I had been invited to address the group on this year’s theme: The company we keep: audience engagement. My talk: Who, How and How Many?, was intended to give an overview of issues surrounding audience development: the difference between audiences, visitors and participants (at least how I see it), audience profiles, visitor identities, models of participation, barriers to engagement, and how social media can fit into an audience development strategy.

For those that are interested, a PDF version of my presentation has been uploaded to Slideshare:

Forrest state of design 2011

View more presentations from ReganForrest.

The presentation was intended to be a bit of a toolkit, identifying resources that might be useful. It was also a way of introducing some common vocabulary that we could all use during the Workshop sessions during the conference.

As always, I am indebted to Nina Simon and her excellent Museum 2.0 blog. It has so many great ideas I was able to include in my presentation and I just hope my own particular take and spin on things was able to add some value.  (I always put a plug in for Nina’s book, the Participatory Museum, so maybe I repay the favour by promoting a sale or two . . .).

Another resource I drew upon in this presentation was Morris Hargreaves McIntyre’s Culture Segments audience model. But more on that in a future post.

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The Garden of Health

It’s always nice to see a project you’ve worked on come to fruition.

Yesterday I went to the opening of the Garden of Health at the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide. This new garden is designed to show how plants have been used for healing and wellbeing since ancient times. It features medicinal plants from around the world, including plants which have only recently caught the attention of modern pharmacology.

A view of one of the Garden of Health beds

I was appointed to write interpretive text for the signage. The Garden staff were very pleased with the result (as was I!), so bear with me if I show off some of my handiwork (and apologies that the contrasts of daylight have played havoc with the camera a bit):

Ancient plants, cutting edge medicine
Interpretive sign on plants and modern pharmacology

 

The potential hazards of herbal medicines
Healing plants of Africa

The intent with the interpretive text was to have a casual, conversational style that didn’t get too bogged down in detail but still offered enough interesting facts to make the signs informative and engaging. Signs cover historic periods, healing traditions and geogrpahic areas. (And thanks to Katrina Nitschke from the Garden for giving these signs a nudge in the right direction from time to time!)

The Garden of Health is located near a new Western Entrance to the Garden, made a landmark by this impressive Gingko Gate by artists Hossein and Angela Valamanesh:

The Gingko Gate

If you’re in Adelaide, I hope you have a chance to check it out.

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Exhibition Costs – constants and variables

US-based exhibition designer Mark Walhimer recently conducted a survey of exhibition costs – the results are here, based on 59 responses. For those of you interested in benchmarks of exhibition costs (i.e. quantifying the length of a piece of string!), this will be an interesting read.

Now while the responses may not be representative of the museum sector as a whole, there are some particularly noteworthy points:

  • There is more than an order of magnitude of difference between the lowest cost and most expensive exhibitions. Prices range from $25/sq.ft. to $600/sq.ft (roughly $270 – $6450 / sq.m).  Having costed up exhibitions myself, I wonder whether these prices all include the same thing. (I can’t imagine the lower price range includes the full interior fit-out of a space and can only guess that the flooring, lighting, etc doesn’t change or isn’t included in these budgets, only the specific displays)
  • Science centres are the most expensive exhibitions – there were no science centres below $100/sq.ft. and this category included the most expensive exhibits at $600/sq.ft. Most fell somewhere around the $300-$400 mark. This is no great surprise as science centres tend to have more interactive exhibits and immersive elements which are expensive to design and build.
  • Children’s museums were the cheapest, with all of the exhibitions being at or below $250/sq.ft. Children’s museums have a lot of interactives too, but maybe these fall more into the ‘cheap and cheerful’ category? Also children’s museums tend to have exhibits more spaced out (based on my anecdotal experience anyway), so this might reduce the cost on a per sq.ft. basis.
  • History museums fell somewhere in the middle, ranging from $50-$400 per sq.ft..

There are also figures for breakdowns of in-house versus contracted design and construction, and design costs as a proportion of the overall budget.

The survey results overall are distilled into a pithy snapshot:

The average 6000 square foot History Museum, Science Center, Children’s Museum and Traveling exhibitions are $204 per square foot with 17% spent on research, design and exhibit development.

That translates to around $2195 / sq.m. (I feel more at home in metric territory), or a ballpark of around $2000/sq.m. This seems to be an incredibly sticky ballpark figure, surprisingly resistant to time or units of currency. I remember GBP2000/ sq.m. being the ‘rule of thumb’ costing that was regularly used in the UK – over a decade ago! Then when I came back to Australia 4 years ago the same ballpark of $2000-$2500 / sqm still seemed to most people to feel about right as a costing guesstimate. Now it seems that it still holds true.

So why are exhibition design costs seemingly resistant to currency changes and inflation? Or are they? (Let’s face it, it’s a somewhat arbitrary midpoint in a VERY broad spectrum). Perhaps the costs of certain types of exhibits have gone down (software and IT hardware in particular). Maybe 10 years ago was a bit of an aberration (millennium fever and all), and things have calmed down a bit since. Or have exhibition developers got more savvy about extracting the most out of every dollar of the budget?

 

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The Ministry of Detail

A few weeks ago I was forwarded a link to this TED Talk by Rory Sutherland:

It’s called “Sweat the small stuff”, and describes how large corporations are often disconnected with what actually happens on the ground. Business leaders expect the world to behave like Newtonian physics: the level of effort should be in direct relation to the size of the outputs.

However, human behaviour doesn’t work like physics: what changes our attitudes and behaviour is not necessarily proportional to the level of complication, expense or force exerted. Small things can be surprisingly memorable. Simple changes can have remarkable impacts.

Conversely, in large projects everyone can get so wrapped up in the big picture, the strategy, that they fail to get the details right.  So ‘big stuff’ (e.g. new buildings) can be done spectacularly well, while the ‘small stuff’ (e.g. signage) is the poor cousin that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. But – it’s the the small stuff that can very easily get in the way of the big thing’s success.

Because of this, Sutherland calls for all organisations to have a Chief Detail Officer, as well as a Government Ministry of Detail. Rather than people in charge of the purse strings (who are instinctively drawn to big and complicated solutions), such Details people would be charged with keeping a look out for the deceptively simple – in some cases this might just be seeing what’s fallen through the cracks between one big initiative and the next.

Details are the foundations. Get them wrong and that’s what people will notice first.

 

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The Big Three

On my daily commute (OK, a rather pleasant walk across Adelaide’s parklands – I’m one of the lucky ones!) I’ve taken to listening to audiobooks. I find it’s a good way to broaden my reading repertoire when there are precious few hours in the day for non PhD-related reading.  Even though it’s notionally ‘downtime’, I still have a preference for listening to non-fiction and every so often there is a relationship between what I’m listening to and what I’m studying.

I recently finished the audiobook version of “Why we buy: the science of shopping” by Paco Underhill. Underhill and his company Envirosell have spent thousands of hours watching how people behave in retail environments, giving fascinating insights into how store layout, design and staffing can influence shopper behaviour and purchasing patterns. 

A lot of it is applicable to studying visitor behaviour in museums, but by way of example I’ll pick Underhill’s description of something he calls The Big Three:

  • Design (the store layout and design)
  • Merchandising (what’s put in the store)
  • Operations (what staff do)

Underhill describes how these three aspects are completely interlinked, and that a decision about one will inevitably affect the other two. He cites an example where a drugstore chain’s store designers decided to change the shelving to a wireframe style, which was much cheaper than the more traditional display shelves. Money saved, right? Well, no. It turns out that bottles kept on slipping in the gaps in the sheving, making the displays look untidy and causing staff to spend a considerable portion of the day straightening shelves – somthing they hadn’t previously needed to do. The savings on design were soon wiped out through increased staff costs.

Underhill goes on to describe client meetings where the heads of design, operations and merchandising might all be present. He says that it’s clear that these three are normally ensconced in their own respective silos; they barely know each other; and may regard each other with suspicion – if not outright hostility. Their areas all impact each other, but decisions are not being taken in a joined-up way – leading to missed opportunities and unintended consequences.

Throughout the book, Underhill is somewhat critical of both designers and store management for not spending enough time on the shop floor, seeing how their plans work in practice – and not just and 10am on a Tuesday, but during the 4.45pm rush on the day before an important holiday. It’s this culture that allows the silos to flourish as the knock-on effects of decisions are never seen by the people who make them.

It struck me listening to this that museums have their own (very similar) version of the Big Three:

  • Design (of exhibitions, circulation spaces, etc.)
  • Collections (both exhibits on display and objects in storage)
  • Operations (how many staff, what kind of staff, what kinds of facilities are offered, etc.)

As with the retail example, a decision about one will inevitably affect the other, for instance the following (semi) hypothetical scenarios:

  • An exhibition designed on the assumption that there will be a certain staff complement, only for the staff to be cut back later on in a cost-cutting exercise
  • A museum accepting a large collection from a benefactor, with an attached condition that the collection be displayed in its entirety
  • A museum developing a large new interactive exhibition gallery without taking on staff with the expertise to ensure the exhibits are well maintained and can be fixed when they break down

The lessons?

  1. Be mindful of organisational silos – the decisions you make will have wider ramifications than just your own department
  2. Take time to see the consequences of your decisions – it’s all too easy to be ‘too busy’ to spend time just watching how things are working out on the exhibition floor.
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Authority and Authorship

In my last post, I was musing about whether exhibitions can sometimes leave things too open to interpretation, in the process ending up just being confusing and coming across as elitist.

In the context of this, a recent article by Pete Brown in Museum Management and Curatorship* is very illuminating. His research:

“. .  . aimed to test whether [using exhibitions to provoke debate] is just an academic, post-modern indulgence that bewilders and alienates visitors, or whether it has real value for audiences.”

The article, “Us and them”, is a case study of Manchester Museum’s 2008 exhibition of the Lindow Man (a 2000 year old bog body discovered in the 1980s). The 2008 exhibition wasn’t the first time that Lindow Man had been displayed at Manchester Museum. However previous exhibitions had presented Lindow Man as an “archaeological treasure” (the ‘traditional’ interpretation) but did not explore the ethical issues surrounding the collection and display of human remains (issues which have come to the fore in more recent years). In constrast, the new exhibition sought to emphasise Lindow Man’s humanity, and speculate on his life and death rather than just treat him as purely an archaeological find:

“The key goal of the exhibition was to contextualise Lindow Man in a way that encouraged respectful reflection, inviting visitors to question the interpretation of archaeological evidence and the practice of displaying human remains in museums. The ‘post-modern’ concept sought to expose the process of development and construction, and to present various interpretations of what little evidence exists.”

Produced following extensive consultation with groups having a scientific, geographical or spiritual connection to Lindow Man, the exhibition was “poly vocal”, representing a range of viewpoints.

The exhibition design was intended to mirror the fact that that the story of the Lindow Man is incomplete and open to debate, by using finishes and materials which were deliberately left rough and unfinished.

This ‘polyvocal’ approach prompted considerable debate amongst the museum professionals involved: Was the museum abdicating its responsibility to educate the public or was it actually being more inclusive?

(This touches on similar issues to what happened when the Science Museum covered alternative medicine in one of its exhibitions – to the anger of those who expect the Museum to present only scientific authority).

The paper presents a good description of the issues museums face with respect to authority, the ownership of the ‘truth’, and the myth of ‘value-neutral’ displays. Exhibitions are products of their time and inevitably bear the fingerprints of the values and prejudices of the culture that produced them. But in this paper Brown goes a step further. Rather than just theorising about how visitors might respond to the museological shift in self awareness and self image, he presents some visitor research (something which is often sadly lacking in such debates).

Brown interviewed around 100 visitors, using a combination of Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) and post-visit Questionnaire. Personal Meaning Mapping is an open-ended mind-mapping exercise conducted before and after an exhibition visit. It is a way of comparing visitors’ knowledge, attitudes and thoughts about an exhibition’s key idea and to see how these are affected by the exhibition experience. The questionnare collected demographic information as well as asking about visitors’ motivations for visiting the exhibition and general museum-going habits.

In the post-visit PMM exercise, nearly three quarters of visitors mentioned something to do with the exhibition’s ‘design, construction and atmosphere’. Apparently most of these comments were unfavourable – visitors missed the interpretive point of the deliberately ‘unfinished’ design and instead just saw it as tacky, incompetent and unprofessional. (Design like this presumably flies in the face of social conventions where ‘professional’ is used synonymously with ‘polished’).

But besides this observation, the PMM showed that nearly all visitors gained new knowledge, despite the non-didactic approach of the exhibition. In addition, more than half of visitors demonstrated attitudinal shifts, exploring and questioning their own assumptions about the issues raised. Going even further, many of these visitors had been inspired to delve further and find out more. However, others were clearly incensed by the approach taken and frustrated by the lack of an authoritative voice:

‘ . . . the exhibition, depending on an individual’s perspective, was seen as groundbreaking, experimental and challenging, or shoddy, lazy and unprofessional.’

Clearly, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Brown then goes on to say “With hindsight, I think the Museum could have made the thinking behind its approach more overt. . . ”

This is the point I was getting to (admittedly a bit awkwardly) in my last post. We shouldn’t be afraid of being experimental in our approach to exhibitions, and we do need to test boundaries from time to time. But we need to also ensure we aren’t leaving our audiences behind in the process.

Alienated visitors just switch off – at which point it doesn’t matter what we say.

*Source:  Brown, Pete (2011). Us and Them: who benefits from experimental exhibition making? Museum Management and Curatorship Volume 26, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 129 – 148

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The Narrative Dilemma

In my last blog post, I talked about the beauty of simplicity in storytelling – being selective in what you say so that it comes through clearly and compellingly. This approach has its critics though, who argue that we are defined as much by what we don’t say as by what we do.

Postmodern critiques of museums have pointed out the shared history that museums have with the colonialism and imperialism of (particularly) the 18th and 19th centuries. Museums were repositories of colonial bounty, sometimes sourced via practices that would be considered highly unethical by today’s standards. Objects were classified and ordered according to systems that  mirrored the prevailing natural, social and cultural hierarchy. ‘Naturally’, the  white western European gentleman occupied the top tier as the pinnacle of civilisation and scholarly knowledge.

Knowingly or otherwise, museum curators reinforced this sociocultural worldview. Museums placed ‘primitive’ Indigenous cultural artefacts alongside Natural History collections – thus positioning them as part of ‘nature’ and not ‘culture’ (and definitely not civilisation!). There was no space for other interpretations of the objects and their meanings besides that of Western scholarship – in the parlance of Postmodernism any alternative interpretations or voices were ‘silenced’.

19th century museum interior (Source http://www.flickr.com/photos/museemccordmuseum/2865472738/)

Museums of the time may have ostensibly had public education as part of their mission, but there was little concession made for the prior knowledge or interest of the visitor. The visitor had no choice but to engage with the displays on the curator’s terms, and if the minimal interpretation provided was insufficient for understanding it was a deficiency in the visitor not the curator. Commentators of the time lamented that increased public access was bringing the ‘wrong sort’ of visitor to the museum, who failed to appreciate the collections in a way that they deemed appropriate.

Constructivism emerged in the second half of the 20th century as part of a backlash against this ‘master narrative’ worldview, as the social and political role of the museum changed. This was done in a broader academic context where implicit power relationships in society were being deconstructed and questioned.

Consequently, the desire to allow for multiple interpretations has made the idea of a strong narrative or storyline an anathema for some. A storyline is considered an imposition, potentially ‘silencing’ other perspectives or interpretations that the visitor may make if allowed to engage with the objects more freely.

However, this brings us to a conundrum – exhibitions developed along postmodern or constructivist principles can be just as baffling to visitors as the minimally-interpreted elitist institutions of times past.

The freedom to have multiple points of entry and thus interpretation can just as easily manifest itself as a space which is confusing and disorientating. Juxtapositions of objects with no overlying message or storyline can be interpreted by visitors unversed in the constructivist viewpoint as being  ‘a mess’ or ‘all over the place’. Rather than liberated from an imposed institutional storyline, visitors can end up feeling confused and demoralised. A lack of storyline may even be interpreted as a lack of intellectual courage on the part of curators – an accusation levelled at museums by Amanda Lohrey and the subject of my first blog post nearly a year ago.

Postmodernists may argue that visitors need to be ‘educated’ into new interpretations and to be present with their discomfort at the lack of narrative, in order to give new meanings and interpretations space. But this point of view seems to be just another version of ‘the visitor is at fault’ arrogance of the Victorian-era curators.

I am not opposed to multiple interpretations and leaving things open to visitors making their own meanings. But sometimes (and apologies if this is  a bit ironic), the fact that this is the intent needs to be made clear somehow. Otherwise, if taken to extremes, the constructivist approach may well end up substituting one type of elitism for another.

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Less is everything

The latest issue of Interpreting Australia (Issue 44) has just come out. It features WA, in anticipation of the “At the Frontier” conference taking place in Perth in November. (This conference is being held jointly by Interpretation Australia and Museums Australia.)

In one article, Luke Donegan writes about his experiences in developing the Fremantle Prison’s Rockbreakers temporary exhibition. He describes familiar challenges:

  • How to choose what to emphasise in a complex storyline?
  • What objects (from a wealth of options) should be included in the displays, and in what context?
  • The research and context development process unearthed a wealth of fascinating facts. Do these add insight or just distract from the story.

Some hard choices had to be made. But, as Luke says, this was precisely the point:

We can’t say all we want to say and show everything there is to show. Our role as exhibition developers and heritage interpreters requires moderation rather than excess; focus rather than diffraction . . . rather than communicating all the facts, shaping a difficult story to reveal a heritage jewel.

Say it simply, say it clearly, say it well.

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Exhibition Review: ‘Not Just Ned’

I visited this temporary exhibition at the National Museum of Australia while visiting Canberra last week and with a free afternoon to kill:

I found the choice of title a little odd: for me at least, Ned Kelly isn’t high up on the list of things that sprint to mind when I think about the Irish in Australia. Perhaps it reflects the extent to which I paid attention (or not) in high school history, but to my mind the Kelly story is primarily an Australian one; the origins of the people involved is an incidental detail. (I wondered if it was a deliberate decision to link into (and then dissociate from) the Kelly story as a marketing ‘hook’, although from what I have since heard this wasn’t the case.)

Given my current research interests, my focus in visiting the exhibition was to think about the overall atmospherics and impressions that the space created rather than to concentrate too much on specifics or details. However, I got the distinct impression that the exhibition was designed with more of a Studier* type of visitor in mind. To be fair, these visitors were not in short supply – one older couple who entered about the same time I did stopped to carefully study every label and object; I tried to keep tabs on them during my visit but by the time I was done (some 20-25 minutes later) they were barely 1/4 of the way through the exhibition. Whether they continuted at this pace throughout the visit or run out of steam will have to remain a mystery. (In general, the exhibition did seem to be attracting an older demographic, although this could be just as much due to the fact it was a weekday afternoon.)

The exhibition’s layout was broadly thematic, with themes presented in a rough chronological order: arriving, settling in, etc., culminating in a display of more recent Irish migrants and the ongoing sense of shared identity with both the old country and the new. There were also displays dedicated to the Irish contributions to different facets of Australian life, such as politics, agriculture, sport, entertainment and so on. Another strong theme, obviously, was the role of Catholicism in shaping the outlooks of Irish migrants, the perception of Irish migrants by other Australians, and attitudes to political events unfolding back in the old country. Certain chapters in Australian history with strong Irish links, such as the Kelly Gang, Burke & Wills exhibition and the Eureka Stockade, had their own dedicated mini-exhibition areas.

The exhibition was very object-rich and while some of the objects were organised to illustrate specific stories or reflect the life of a certain key personality, there was no obvious logic to the juxtaposition of other displays. I gather this was a deliberate choice, but sometimes this approach a little unnerving as I’m not sure if there is meant to be some broader message that I’m somehow failing to ‘get’.

There was a seating area roughly in the middle of the exhibtion area with four comfy swivel chairs, each with an iPad (built into a rigid frame) allowing you to select different music, audio recordings, letters home and so forth (a good use of off-the-shelf technology). Speakers embedded into the chairs worked well, providing good sound but not interfering with other seated users. I liked that the swivel chairs meant you could choose which part of the gallery you wished to overlook while you listened. One downside was that the chairs were definitely a single-user experience – fine as a solo visitor like me, but I noticed couples having to either take turns or with one person standing leaning over the chair to be in aural range of the speakers. Maybe it would have been a good idea to make one of the chairs  double-width to allow shared listening.

As I mentioned before, I was primarily looking at the exhibition from an atmospheric perspective, and the thing that struck me was how dark the space was**. The ceiling and walls of the NMA’s temporary exhibition space are painted black, enveloping the space in a sense of gloom which is only penetrated by strategically placed track lighting (in a ceiling which is probably about 4-5 metres in height).

I find such spaces inherently fatiguing and a bit claustrophobic, making it difficult for me to focus on the displays and ensuring I’m ready to call it a day after about 20-30 minutes. (Other people I’ve spoken to are less bothered by low light levels- I’d be interested to find out whether I’m in the majority or minority on this one.) On a more practical level, the fact that the graphics are lit from a single source sometimes meant that you have to be careful not to cast a shadow on the bit you’re trying to read. This was a particular problem for graphics on any horizontal or near-horizontal surface.

Also, looking from an atmospheric perspective, there was (with some exceptions) little clear visual signposting of different thematic areas which you could determine at a glance if you were looking to dip in and out of content rather than go through the exhibition systematically. In some areas it wasn’t immediately apparent where one theme stopped and another started.  I would have preferred a bit more of a content hierarchy with a few more intermediate level take-home messages, and suspect that such an approach might even have encouraged me to look closer at the objects. In other words, a bit of  a top-down approach (i.e. higher level, big-picture messages to hook you in), to balance the object-led approach which is more bottom-up.

At the end of the exhibition was a large reading area and facility for tracing your Irish roots. Plus of course the obligatory gift shop. But by this stage, having no Irish ancestry that I know of, my visit was done and I made a welcome return to the Canberra afternoon sunshine.

*Studier in the sense of the ‘Streaker, Stroller and Studier’ characterisation of different kinds of visitors.

**Someone will probably point out that the low light levels are for conservation purposes. However, I wonder how many of the objects in this particular exhibition are really so light sensitive as to warrant this approach, particularly given it is a temporary exhibition. Conservators may be horrified at the thought, but I do think it is time to revisit the evidence concerning light levels and object care, to see if we’re getting the balance right in this regard.