Creating the National Museum of Country Life at Turlough Park 

By Pól Ó Conghaile
Phat Traffic Productions

Sitting in her offices on Dublin's Thomas Street, Ann Scroope can hardly believe the finishing line is in sight. Almost two years since her company, Scroope Design, was commissioned to design the exhibits for the Irish folklife museum in Turlough Park, Co. Mayo, her work is as good as done.

She is happy, exhilarated. "It was huge, but what kept us going were the reactions from people closest to it. I mean these are people like the curators, who will tell you the finest detail about a jumper knitted in Donegal, and we're putting this whole new look on their work. When they got enthusiastic or bought into it, well then we really felt like we'd done something worthwhile," she said.

Worthwhile is a word that fits this enterprise snugly. A £15 million EU and state-funded project to move the National Museum's folklife collection west of the Shannon, the Irish Museum of Country Life -- as the project is officially known -- contains the very nooks and crannies of our folk history.

"What we have to remember is that many of the trades and practices which will be represented in exhibitions here still thrive to a large degree within living memory,"according to Síle de Valera, minister for the Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. "For the next generation, they will be consigned to history. It is therefore essential that we secure this vital element of our heritage for future generations."

Award-winning restoration
Having lain dormant for nearly 30 years in the old reformatory building in Daingean, Co. Offaly, the collection will now form the nucleus of an award-winning restoration and building program at Turlough Park. Chaperoned by Mayo County Council, the museum itself was designed by an OPW architectural team led by Des Byrne, and sits prettily by Turlough House and a natural arena replete with heritage. The first custom-built branch of the National Museum to open since the late 1800s, the museum hopes to attract 250,000 visitors a year.

Significantly for Scroope Design, the project also marks the first time the National Museum has commissioned a dedicated museum and exhibition design firm to lay out its galleries. A physical record of many extraordinary skills "lost in the mists of history," as Minister de Valera has described it, the exhibition space clocks in at 1,775 square meters, and is manned by an in-house curatorial and conservation staff.

Together with her colleagues, Eimear Nolan and Caroline O'Connor; Scroope's job was "to take this storyline, of which the museum's collection is the essence, and locate it physically."  All of which, it must be said, was easier said than done. In presenting 1,500 artifacts to the public, ranging from fishhooks to baking stones, curators were anxious to scupper the notion that folklife was an idealistic affair, a la John Hinde's postcards. The reality was far more complex, of course, and an accurate and entertaining representation of that fact was a priority. Working with a budget of £1.5 million, Scroope said, "We spent about 3,000 hours discussing the project before we got down to the actual design."

In fact, even prior to her appointment, interpretative planners had been assisting the curators in structuring their collection for display. After Scroope came on board, content was further studied and reassembled into themes, which were in turn refined and analyzed in terms of budget, available space and how they would interrelate.

Landscape explored
Landscape, environment, domesticity and community were all explored. Contexts were paramount. No character, be they blacksmith, tinker or woman of the house, could be misrepresented. From the concept of a christening to the smallest farming tool, text was built, the story was broken down, and the museum began to take shape.

"I would compare it to writing a film," Scroope said of her company's role. "We generate the script, we identify the best people to act it out, we find what props are going to be needed and we co-ordinate that. We have the final vision in mind all the time, whereas everybody who comes in on it is only working within his or her very specific role."

Once a foundation structure was up and running, sculptors, artists, muralists and a host of other specialities were recruited, with a composer even commissioned "to write a soundscape for the whole building."  Ideas were sewn together using different media, as it were - "so when you as a visitor walk into that space you are hit immediately with certain messages."

Patently, the fields of museum and exhibition design have come a long way. There is a distinction, Scroope said, between using artifacts as "the grounding and the focus" of an exhibition, and "letting the artifact speak for itself."  The latter gave rise over time to the popular stereotype of stuffy environments plump with glass cabinets, obscure labels and bookish curators, but it is no longer the norm. For her own part, Scroope realized the change in Australia, moving there after a degree in Craft and Industrial Design from NCAD.

"The remit of the museum," she found, "had moved from the preservation of artifacts to their preservation for the education and entertainment of the public."

Working at the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, she  became involved in an exhibition entitled simply "Communication."

"The museum had a collection, and our job was to contextualize it. From hand signals to facial expressions, fiber optics to satellite dishes, our displays had to reinforce the story of communication through the language, colors and lighting we used," she explained.

No homogeneous audience
Nor is there a single, homogeneous audience in the modern museum-going public, it transpires. "That was very evident in Australia because of the multicultural society that was there. In communicating with people, you had to acknowledge their age group, their cultural background, their different interests," Scroope pointed out.

After a stint in London, she returned to Ireland to form Scroope Design in 1995, installing herself as principal designer and managing director. Word got around quickly: Why should museums and interpretative centers be staid when, just as commercial brands had been doing for years, they could articulate their vision through design?

"We are using words like interactive and accessibility at a very basic level, talking about how audiences interact with sound, space and light; how they interact with the museum as an institution. One may perceive an exhibition space it as being very severe and academic, for example, or as open and welcoming. But what we are trying to do is figure out what would interest you about a collection, and getting you in there to see it."

Her work since has been diverse, to say the least. Ireland's Historic Science Centre at Birr Castle, Dundalk County Museum and St. Audeon's Visitor Centre have all figured as clients. Last year, the company liaised with the Rosenbach Museum of Philadelphia for a temporary exhibition at the Chester Beatty Library featuring an original manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses.  Consulting with NASA on the temperature of the moon, traipsing down a 1000-year-old souterrain, holding the hand-written notes of Padraig Pearse and Michael CollinsŠnext up is a commission for the Highland Folk Museum of Scotland in Kingussie, but the latest in a long line of adventures.

"You get absolutely mad into it! I'm a culchie; I'm from Nenagh. My grandaunt drew water from a well, she dressed in black. She was your nightmare Irish widow woman. There were the music sessions at night, the folklore as much as the folklife," Scroope went on.

"Of the latter, the distinction is sometimes confusing, and one the National Museum is keen to make. A two-armed fire tongs on display, for example, illustrates the fact that a single artifact can have vastly different values within the two fields. "In folklore, the tongs was placed in the cradle to ward off evil spirits and protect newborn babies. In folklife, the tongs was used for tending the fire. Both stories belong to the one artifact, and both stories are valid."

Contextualization is key, the presentation of artifacts so as to maximize their impact and information. Thus you can turn a corner to find a mantrap symbolizing the feudal system of land ownership - it sits open and ready to snap.

Exhibit constructed
Elsewhere, in an award-winning exhibition Scroope constructed at Kilmainham Gaol, a 1918 ballot box was paired with Dan Breen's gun to highlight Ireland's deployment of both democratic and violent argument throughout the prison's history. Breen, of course, started to war on the same day as the first Dáil assembly. "Artifacts are proof and reality of the past,"  Scroope reckoned. "For that reason, they hold and must always hold the most important position in the experience. They should never be second to clever technologies."

Nevertheless, the notion of exhibition as experience is gaining pace, as an Aldous Huxley quote in the Scroope brochure confirms: "Experience is not what happens to you, it's what you do with what happens to you." Interestingly, Scroope-designed trade shows, promotional displays and product launches for corporate clients too - most notably, perhaps, with the Guinness Gallery of Advertising at the Hopstore. "We are in an 'experience' economy," as Scroppe put it - one in which we do not buy brand names, but rather a brand experience.  Nike, Intel and Sony are "no longer opening stores simply to sell, they are creating environments in which the customer takes part in a lifestyle experience associated and unique to that brand," she indicated.
 
Clearly, the approach works. The Guinness project, for example, realized its investment within six months of opening. At Kilmainham, visitor numbers trebled within the first year. Some may have difficulties with museums towing more and more of a corporate line in this sense - 'branding' our collective heritage, as it were - though the flipside lies in the numbers. In a media-savvy age, entertaining presentations grab bigger crowds. If that means a public more educated in their heritage, is it not a good thing?

"That argument exists everywhere," Scroope said, and in creating displays for the folklife museum the notion of how a visitor reacts, ""or is encouraged or invited to react" was at the forefront of her mind. Thus, in some exhibits, visitors are challenged to interact. Others are designed "keeping in mind the fact that some people will be in and out in an hour."  An audience is human after all, and for every short attention span there's surely an information junkie content to spend hours pondering the exact providence of a straw basket.

Versatility of Straw
In fact, there is an exhibit planned on the "versatility of straw."  It provides a good illustration of this point. Key, primary and secondary details are provided in terms of artifacts and accompanying texts and graphics, so any level of inquiry (other than the most academic) will be satisfied.

Elsewhere, visitors will be treated to archival film footage, written and aural quotations from primary sources, and as few glass cases and contrived barriers as security permits. The end result will be an encounter, an active process of interpretation, and if Scroope has done her job to the same standards as she has in the past, a communication of the message that life in rural Ireland during the period 1850-1950 was far from simple and idealistic. Rather, just as the qualities are to be found in its presentation, there was ingenuity on offer there, and an abiding sense of dignity.