Kill your darlings: Making museums public [Practice Research]

Abstract

This creative practice research explored ways to challenge the habitus of Museum Management in order to encourage and expand public engagement with the museum collection at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery. The project followed two strands: Internal and External. The Internal facing project situated myself as an “organisational misfit” (Lam, 2021) within the management structures within the Culture Perth and Kinross cultural organisation, attending meetings, working within the office and providing critical moments of reflection. The External facing project consisted of Events, Publications and Exhibitions that invited the public to vote for the “most valuable” item out of a representative display. The notion of ‘value’ was intentionally left ambiguous, and the provocation was made that the ‘least valuable’ object would be symbolically destroyed at the end of the exhibition.