The youth vote – Sheffield
Museums Journal asked a group of young journalists from Children's Express to tell us what they thought of Museums and Galleries Month exhibitions around the country.
| Young kids are immediately drawn by the response to pressed buttons, older ones to the sculpture’s fascinating, texture. |
The Millennium Galleries, Sheffield
The Sheffield Millennium Galleries, described as 'the cultural flagship of a £120m project to regenerate Sheffield as a centre for modern living', opened on April 5 this year.
Designed to be welcoming, the Galleries gives a feeling of space and light. The three galleries are linked by an internal avenue. Instead of an endless walk through the windowless rooms of a traditional museum, the Millennium Galleries keeps you in touch with the outside world, yet offers privacy and seclusion in each gallery. Our first impression of it as a long greenhouse proved to be unfair.
The feature we really liked in the Avenue was Johnny White's Barking up the Right Tree steel sculpture, made of Sheffield cutlery. Solid at the base, it spreads out into three branch-like necks with a head on each one. Press a button and the tree barks and talks. Press another and the heads and upper necks move. Young kids are immediately drawn by the magic response to pressed buttons, older ones to the sculpture's fascinating, shiny, scale-like texture.
The first gallery was occupied by the Victoria and Albert's travelling exhibition, Precious, the only part of the building that the public have to pay to enter. It's worth it. The exhibition draws together images and objects that are precious to people of all ages from all over the world.
The walls are decorated with sentences designed to appeal to kids, or nostalgic parents. One reads: 'My tree house is most precious to me because it is somewhere to go when I am sad or upset.'
Look up and you see childhood objects invisibly suspended from the ceiling - a small tricycle, a child's chair, dresses, an old phone - all draped in a ghostly blue light.
There aren't many exhibits, but you are drawn to them. Two of the best are here.
The first is a wall-mounted grass 'tapestry' of a mother and child. The image will change as the green grass dies and the chlorophyll fades.
The accompanying text is: 'Time precious. This tender image will gently fade.'
The second eye-catching exhibit is The Three Graces, a 3-D computer graphic image projected onto the far wall like a swirling ghost.
Most of the rest of the exhibition is more hit-and-miss for young people. We felt there were too many religious objects, but that's only our opinion. (Katie did admit she liked the 'recreation' of Verrocchio's The Virgin adoring the Infant Child in the neighbouring Ruskin Gallery.)
One exception is the My Favourite Things wall, featuring row on row of large photos of people pictured with the things that are important to them. To the right is a series of wire 'washing lines' where visitors young and old have hung their own postcards to show what is precious to them.
The two other galleries house fixed exhibitions with a real local flavour: the Metalwork gallery, and the Ruskin gallery. The Metalwork exhibition focuses on Sheffield steel, using telephone lines and interactive displays to attract research and participation. Museums and galleries still need more of these. Young people in schools are always using interactive software across the curriculum, and we are still not certain that museums and galleries have embraced young people's preferred way of learning.
The Sheffield public should enjoy the galleries, particularly the design, and the imaginative way the local content is presented. Museums and galleries must still find ways to draw young people in, but at least venues like this suggest such places can be interesting and relevant.
About the team
This article was produced by editors David Burnham, 15, Laura Brunt, 16, and reporter Bradley Turton, age 13, from the Sheffield bureau of Children's Express. None of them is used to visiting either museums or galleries.
It was published in Museums Journal. For more reviews in the series, see column above left.
