In November 2015, Melanie Bowles and I returned to the Victoria and Albert Museum with The People’s Print to present a participatory design workshop for the museum’s Friday Late programme, alongside its major exhibition The Fabric of India.
Working with designs by our collaborator Nasima Rumi Begum, we invited visitors to create their own textile compositions using cut-out imagery and heat-transfer printing. Participants selected and arranged elements from Nasima’s collaged drawings before heat-pressing their designs onto tote bags, creating individual objects to take home.
It was an extraordinary evening. The museum was packed with visitors and our workshop attracted a continuous stream of enthusiastic participants. There was a wonderful energy in the room as people experimented with colour, composition and pattern, discovering how quickly a simple arrangement of shapes could become something personal.
This was precisely what Melanie and I had set out to achieve with The People’s Print: to make design accessible through participation, bringing together artistic expertise, digital and traditional processes, and the creative contributions of the public.
I have always felt that artists and designers play an important role in bringing museum collections and exhibitions to life. Through workshops like this, historical objects and curatorial ideas become starting points for new creative experiences. Visitors are no longer simply looking at an exhibition; they are responding to it, interpreting it and making something of their own.
The scale and enthusiasm of the evening demonstrated how powerful this kind of engagement could be. A museum exhibition could extend beyond its galleries into a lively, shared experience of making, conversation and discovery.
Looking back, I value these events as part of The People’s Print’s contribution to participatory design and museum education. They were joyful occasions, but they also demonstrated how artists can help institutions communicate their collections and ideas to new audiences.
The photographs on V&A Flickr (link below) are a lovely reminder of what we created together, and of the pleasure of seeing so many people become makers for an evening.
Event Details
Event: V&A Friday Late, November 2015
Exhibition context: The Fabric of India, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Workshop: Participatory textile design and heat-transfer printing onto tote bags
Presented by: The People’s Print — Emma Neuberg and Melanie Bowles
Collaborating designer: Nasima Rumi Begum
Further information and photographs: V&A Friday Late photographic archive on Flickr
Photo credit: C. Schek