The project was part of museumaker, a national partnership between makers, museums and visitors involving 16 museums across the country.

One of the aims of the project was to utilise the collections and expertise available across three Middlesbrough museums: mima, The Dorman Museum and the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum. Together with local Middlesbrough residents, we used the museum collections as a means to explore issues around commissioning contemporary craft. Essentially we were commissioned by the museum, to produce commissions for local residents, with the resulting objects being made twice: one piece was for the resident to keep, and one was to be housed within mima’s contemporary jewellery collection.

There were a number of stages to our project, which we called Pas de deux. First we delivered participatory workshops at mima, where local residents were asked to draw, describe and model an object from memory. We then made castings from these sketches using cuttlefish moulds and pewter. After the workshops Lin and I selected two people to work with, and these became our local commissioners. The third piece was made for all of the workshop participants rather than for an individual. We interviewed our commissioners about a range of subjects, including their own lives and likes, and used the extensive jewellery collection at mima as the basis for discussions around contemporary wearable objects. Our commissioners also investigated The Dorman and Cook Museums, and highlighted objects within the collections that intrigued or engaged them. Following on from the interviews and museum visits, we developed a series of ideas for each person using a variety of research and ideational methods, and presented these as concepts for pieces. The final commissions were selected from amongst these proposals.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/9451