Buxton Art Archive Gets Breath of Fresh Air
7 September 2010
One of the framed images hanging in Dovedale
The museum wanted to place these images back in the exact locations they captured to give people a window into the area's past
”A collaboration between a student at the University of Derby Buxton and Derbyshire County Council's Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, resulted in a unique tourism project which was enjoyed by thousands of visitors to Dovedale during the summer.
As part of his Masters degree in Tourism Management at the University of Derby Buxton, Ed Woods assisted museum staff working on a project to reconnect the museum's archive of paintings and pictures with the natural environment that inspired them.
Ed explains: "Buxton Museum has a fantastic archive of paintings, photographs, etchings and postcards of the Derbyshire landscape, and particularly of Dovedale, dating from around 1740 to the 1960s.
"The museum wanted to place these images back in the exact locations they captured to give people a window into the area's past. My project involved photographing each of the items and reprinting them in a suitable way for an outdoor exhibition. I also did research and found poems and quotations written by historic visitors to the Derbyshire Dales, which included Happy is England by John Keats (1817), and used them in the exhibition."
Because the original items are too fragile to be put outdoors, reproductions were made from Ed's scans which were mounted in frames that would withstand the elements. The framed images and poems were hung in the locations that they depict, including the Stepping Stones and Lovers Leap, in Dovedale.
Ros Westwood, Derbyshire Museums Manager, said: "Over 20,000 people walked past the 'Pictures in the Landscape' outdoor exhibition during ten days in June. Visitors to the National Trust's Dovedale were amazed to find pictures and poems as they walked. Many visitors were intrigued and interested to see such interesting historical items out of the museum and placed in their original setting.
"Working with Ed and the University has been incredibly valuable to the Museum. It resulted in this fantastic exhibition which proved so popular that we hope the National Trust will agree to exhibit it again, perhaps when the leaves are off the trees."
As part of his work with the Museum, Ed also completed projects investigating the signage and prominence of the Museum in Buxton and surrounds, and scanned a postcard collection of Monsal Dale for another of the museum's outreach programmes.
For more information please contact Press & PR Officer Joanna Colburn on 01332 593004 or 07775 036988, or email j.colburn@derby.ac.uk
