Collecting Innovation: Innovative Collecting, curated by Bethany Turner-Pemberton, Special Collections Museum, Manchester Metropolitan University, 14 November 2023–29 February 2024

Collecting Innovation: Innovative Collecting was a temporary exhibition at the Special Collections Museum, Manchester Metropolitan University, from 14 November 2023 to 29 February 2024. The exhibition featured objects from the museum’s pioneering Material and Process Innovation Collection, a collection of contemporary craft and design objects used in teaching, research and exhibitions across the university and beyond. The exhibition investigated what innovation means in the context of this collection and for wider museum practices.

Exhibited in Special Collection’s student-led space, the exhibition was an extension of a contemporary collecting workshop with staff and researchers from across the design, art and performance departments at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). The museum’s student-led space connects their collections to courses across MMU and provides a dedicated space in which undergraduate and postgraduate students can develop practice-based outcomes in course units or as part of placements during their time at the university.

The Collecting Innovation: Innovative Collecting exhibition was informed by my Ph.D. research in collaboration with the Science and Industry Museum (SIM), Manchester, and MMU’s Special Collections Museum (SCM) and was curated as part of my placement at SCM. My research seeks to identify a narrative of Greater Manchester’s contemporary textile industry and employs curatorial methods of interpreting these textile stories at SIM. One approach to this storytelling is using contemporary collecting to reflect the region’s contemporary textile manufacturing processes more accurately and to ensure the museum’s textile collection is sustainable for future permanent galleries at SIM. During my research, I have established a contemporary collecting framework which uses the participating organization’s existing policy documents within staff-focused workshops to craft or restructure contemporary collecting policies. This collecting framework considers the inherent risks of collecting new objects with untested legacies, questions the importance of place, and focuses on storytelling. SIM, as part of the Science Museum Group, takes a risk-averse approach to contemporary collecting. As such, the contemporary collecting policy I developed with their curatorial team reflects their desire to collect objects that represent inspiring local stories that further the museum’s existing narrative threads or for use in upcoming temporary exhibitions. In contrast, SCM has an existing contemporary craft and design collection and was keen to use my collecting framework to restructure and adjust their policy ten years after it was written. SCM provided a unique opportunity to test my collecting framework in partnership with an institution whose policies already include a pioneering approach to contemporary collecting. Through the exhibition and staff-focused workshop, my research with SCM sought to investigate the innovation at play within the collection objects themselves and also within the collecting policy and SCM’s approach to contemporary collecting.