At a time when local museums are under threat, students at Batley School of Art are celebrating the importance of locally-held cultural collections in their end-of-year exhibition.
Entitled The Repository (Work in Progress) the show features images, objects and artefacts presented as a temporary archive at Dewsbury Museum in Crow Nest Park.
As much a cache of ideas as physical objects, the exhibition is the students’ acknowledgement of the importance of collecting, displaying and studying artefacts from the past and present.
Course leader Eve Gray says: “We wanted to provide the museum with a contemporary exhibition that reflected the visual concerns of a group of undergraduate students at the School of Art, studying on a degree programme that encourages challenge, question and individuality.
“We were aware that the future of our local museum was fragile and began to discuss the importance of museums and collections as part of cultural heritage.”
The students considered everything from natural history and religious iconography to the organic and artificial to produce an inventory of ideas and ultimately works that could be deposited in the temporary archive.
All the work on show in the exhibition, which opened yesterday and can be seen until June 30, is by students on the BA (Hons) Fine Art for Design course.
