In 2020 I worked on a project with Hereford Museums Service and the staff at Hereford Garden Centre called ‘Inside Out’, which aimed to get art about objects in the museum stores into unusual venues.
Originally my involvement with the project was to run from Jan-May but due to the pandemic it went on a lot longer, with the nature of the project changing considerably as we adapted to the situation. I was one of three artists chosen by the Museum Service, and we were all given different groups of people to work with, who picked different objects of interest. I worked with my group to develop three digital photo-collages of the object that could be projected onto/within the venue.
To begin with, I met two people from the garden centre at the museum stores where they picked out a shortlist of objects. Eventually they decided to go with the hopstilt, which was a piece of equipment used by seasonal farm workers around the beginning of the 20th century to stand on and pick hops. The agricultural nature of the object worked well with the venue (the garden centre) and our interests as a group.
As lockdown came and went and summer came along I had done some research. This archive of hop-picking images from Derek Evans was an incredibly helpful resource, and so much of my project built on other research previously done in the region.
After watching Stories from the Hopyard I realised I was particularly excited by how the seasonal workers would travel in by train to Ledbury for the season. A lot of these workers were from Gloucester, the black country (a region of towns/cities near Birmingham) and/or travellers.
To get some source images to create the digital collage I went to Ledbury. I took photos from the disused trainline that is now a public footpath, the seasonal flora/fauna which would be relevant to the time of year the farm workers were in the town, some of the local masonary on the older structures. Finally, on my train journey home, I took some photos of the hop-fields as they currently were. I used these images to digitally construct the hop-stilt collages.
We installed the artwork on the run up to the Christmas period. After its initial placement the garden centre group moved it to a different location in the building. It was really interesting to see it in a completely different context. After over 6 months in the garden centre it has returned to storage in the museum stores until it moves to its next location.