In this blog, Miranda Heggie updates us on the project she’s been leading on to diversify our collections and stories that relate to faith in Edinburgh. Lots has been happening, with new people getting involved and objects arriving at Museums & Galleries Edinburgh.
As Edinburgh celebrates its 900th birthday, we’ve been looking at what it means for the Capital’s past and present to be a city of faith. For the past few months I’ve been working on the Keep the Faith project which aims to grow our collection of items which tell stories of people of faith who live/ have lived in Edinburgh.
We’ve recruited a group of community curators from across faith backgrounds to inform an exhibition which will open later this year, and to work with their own, and other, faith communities to widen the history documented in our collections. Our curators come from Muslim, Jewish, Baha’i and Pagan backgrounds, and we have further links with Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Episcopalian and Catholic Christians who we’ll be working with too. Our first meeting at the Museum Collections Centre brought the community curators, museum staff and our existing faith collections together for lively discussions and planning. We came away energised by the possibilities of the project.
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on adding new objects to our faith collections. I’ve acquired a hand knitted woollen hat from the ecumenical Christian charity Mission to Seafarers and a cross made from corn which came from a recently closed Church of Scotland church. This not only represents Christian worship at harvest time, but the Harvest festival’s more Pagan roots. We’ve also been in conversation with people who are happy to donate tickets from Edinburgh which have been used for Muslim and Roman Catholic pilgrimages, hand-painted murals that depict the journeys of Bhat Sikhs to, and in, Edinburgh and recently-handcrafted items which are used in ancient Pagan rites. These additions are already making our faith collections more diverse and better representative of life in Edinburgh. So, watch this space – we can’t wait to share more about how this dynamic project develops to tell a wider story of Edinburgh’s faith communities.
You can read the first Keep the Faith project blog here