In April the Curator and Heritage Access Assistant dismantled the Special Exhibition ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’, which had been on display since 2016. As the Museum was closed to the public under Covid-19 restrictions, this meant that the galleries could be used as a packing and holding area for all of the historic objects.
The exhibition contained a whopping 500 objects, which all had to be condition checked, carefully packed and transported to the off-site collections store. Unfortunately because of Covid-19 restrictions we had to do this without the support of our fantastic team of Collections Volunteers, who would usually help with exhibition changeovers. The objects in the exhibition covered all areas of the collections including fine art, social history, natural history, arts and crafts, archaeology and also illustrated what some of our earlier Curators collected and how they displayed the collections.
When the Museum reopened in May our wonderful Collections Volunteers returned and they have since been busy at out off-site stores checking the objects, repacking them for long-term storage and recording the up to date locations on the collections management database. The volunteers are only about half way through this process to date, but it important these procedures are carried out so that the objects can be found and accessed again for future research and exhibitions.
Scroll through the photographs to see the wide variety of objects that were on display from the collections as part of this exhibition…
