Julie Howell’s proposed design PAST PRESENT FUTURE for the Ripon Workhouse Museum, has been selected for Arts & Heritage Blue Skies Museum Project.
Julie’s proposal, a ‘walking meditiation’ through the Ripon streetscape along the route that links three historic sites that comprise the Ripon Museum, explores how the histories that are presented in the Workhouse Museum resonate with and speak to the present day, and how they might potentially inform the future.
The Ripon Museums – and the stories they present – constitute poverty in the past. The pathway between the three sites forms a walking/reading meditation, revealing the presence of poverty in the present, through over-size text inscribed onto the streetscape. A new installation encountered as visitors exit the Workhouse considers how we might all seek to tackle poverty in the future.
Entitled PAST PRESENT FUTURE, the intervention in the town, designed to both disrupt the ‘traditional’ heritage experience and add a new layer of meaning, will seek to engage visitors with new ideas, open up new perspectives, prompt conversations that, in turn, will foster understanding, empathy and potentially action.