Nick Gellatly
No Stone Left Unturned
Home | Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences
A Plan Meets the Museum
The visit began with a tour of the exhibits led by Dr Liz Hide – Museum Director – and I started the tour confident that I had a good idea for an immersive story telling project.
Before our visit to the Sedgwick Museum, I had already begun developing an idea for No Stone Left Unturned. The brief invites us to create an immersive experience around a museum object, theme or hidden story. My proposal, Complemental, grew from an interest in Darwin’s barnacle research and the questions it raises about how scientists describe and classify the natural world.
Ross Brooks’s Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life provided a direction for that research. I was interested in the relationship between scientific observation and the assumptions brought to it, particularly where nature complicates apparently straightforward categories. The museum’s involvement in the Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ tours also suggested a context in which overlooked histories and different interpretations could find an audience.
The concept centred on a contrast between Darwin’s published scientific writing and his private correspondence. I imagined visitors standing beside an object or display and hearing these two registers through headphones: the published voice in one ear and the private voice in the other. A turn-taking version and a written transcript would offer alternative ways to encounter the material.
I had put together a project plan and visual storyboards – as you will see above – showing how someone might discover the experience, choose a listening format, hear the contrasting voices and return their attention to the object. I had also begun considering practical questions: access through a QR code, the use of visitors’ own phones, headphone provision and how several people might engage without blocking a display.
There was, however, a significant assumption within that planning: that the Darwin material I hoped to work with would be available at the Sedgwick. As I looked at the display, a doubt set in.
The museum visit brought that assumption into focus. Seeing the galleries gave me a physical setting against which to consider the proposal. An imagined encounter beside a cabinet now had to fit an actual space, its displays and the way visitors move through it.
I was disappointed to discover that the Darwin items I had hoped to use were stored at another museum. I had developed the listening experience around the possibility of encountering the material directly. Its location therefore affected a central part of the proposal.
At this stage, I had an idea, research and a storyboard, but the visit had exposed a gap between the planned experience and the available collections. That was where this part of the process ended: with disappointment, and with a clearer understanding of why checking the location and availability of objects needs to happen early. And so I, quite literally, found myself on the horns of a dilemma …
On the bus home, I started this think about how my proposal would have to change. Join me in Part 3 of this post for a change of focus as I begin to reconsider the story I need to tell …
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