A Community of Coal

The Museum Marras are a group of dedicated volunteers who support collection management, exhibition development, and community outreach at Woodhorn Museum. Current members have been volunteering for between two and five years and over that time have developed a deep understanding of the collection. All members either live locally to Woodhorn or have a strong connection to the area and volunteer their time every week to work in the museum stores, cataloguing and rehousing objects.

Alongside this regular hands-on support, the Marras also develop small-scale exhibitions both at the museum and out inthe community in non-museum spaces such as libraries, hospitals and community centres. These external exhibitions allow us to take collection objects to people who may not otherwise have access to them and to share our stories with a wider audience.

For this project, each of the Museum Marras was invited to choose one object from the Woodhorn collection and to interpret it with a new piece of writing. Rather than a simple narrative that you might normally read on an object label, they were asked to consider the object in other ways: 

What is its past? 

What are the materials it’s made from and where were they sourced? 

Who made it and why? 

What can it tell us about who we are and where we are headed? 

Each volunteer interpreted this brief in their own way, and the result is a collection of diverse voices that open up new ways of thinking about the objects and stories in our care.

Lizzie Lovejoy is an award-winning poet, performer and picturemaker. Working across the North, from the Scottish Borders to North Yorkshire, Lizzie's home is their inspiration because the North is a tale worth telling and contains so many stories worth hearing. You can find out more about Lizzie’s work on their website, lizzielovejoy.com.

This project was inspired and supported by Justine Boussard, founder of The Amateur Ancestor Project, who believes the key to flourishing futures is hiding in our common heritage.