In our work we bring arts-based research and post qualitative history pedagogies to the museum space. In this presentation we will discuss the generative affective entanglements and the encounters of learning about and researching the vital matter of foundling home collections. We consider the ethico-onto-epistemological challenges (Barad, 2003, Geertz & Carsten, 2019) and the contestations of memory, positionality, responsibility, affect, and representation. Such contestations and entanglements offer an entry point into historical thinking, how historical knowledge can be constructed and can evolve, and how such engagement with material culture in a museum at the embodied level can produce a powerful educative experience for the museum visitor.  

In particular, we work at two museums, the London Foundling Hospital Museum and the Museo Degli Innocenti in Florence. We look closely at their token and fabric swatch collections. We consider how connection over time casts a legacy of affective entanglements for researchers and visitors (Clark & Nye, 2023). We have developed a visitor/researcher/maker practice whereby we draw on the practices and methods of traditional histories, museology, and arts-based research to engage creatively with the archive.  

This work relies on an openness to plugging in as a ‘production of the new: the assemblage in formation’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, 2). Through art-based research and thinking with theoretical ideas we reconfigure the traces of the past, the stories, the colours, and material remains. The legacies of the foundling hospital have been visited and revisited in multiple disciplinary contexts by numerous scholars and artists. We have seen sculpture, paintings, videos, stories, and images produced through museum fellowships and curations. Our own visitations come through (and with) theory, textiles, and talk. This engagement allows us to navigate creative and experimental pathways to delve into the world of the surrendered child and we also, as Carol Taylor suggests, afford different approaches to knowledge-making which is open, affirmative, political and joyous (2021, 39)

In this paper we bring together an interdisciplinary story of love and loss that is revitalised and reanimated through creative responses (Taylor, 2003; Phillips-Hutton, 2018). We ask: how might we re-imagine child surrender using pencil, cloth and thread that takes our level of awareness and affective engagement with the archive to a new level? How might our initial encounters with foundling tokens be explored, understood and reconstituted through the experience of visitor/researcher/maker to take the story of child surrender to a new place of contemporary significance and consideration? Ultimately, how might our making of children’s garments that resonate with the material residue of the foundlings allow us to generate new knowledge and reveal the educative value of encounter and entanglement in museums?  In this (re)-dressing of the children, how do we educate ourselves and others about the past in new ways?

In this paper we present an affective journey as experienced by the museum researcher/visitor/maker on encountering the token collections of two foundling museums, and then, referencing Phillips-Hutton and Pérez-Bustos, create a textile ‘repertoire’ in response to the archive that not only represents our processing of, and engagement with,  that archive, but also, in the act of creation, produces new knowledge that can be shared with others.  

In this work we consider how the materiality of museums and the discipline of History develop when applying relational ontologically informed process methodologies (Mazzei, 2021). This generative, and often serendipitous, approach can produce rich outcomes and ideas for new directions. As Mazzei states ‘It is not a method with a script, but is that which emerges as a process methodology’ (2021, p. 198). Drawing on new materialism (Fox & Alldred, 2017) and post qualitative approaches (St Pierre, 2019) we previously explored the affective entanglements of the researcher /visitor museum experience. It seemed a natural progression, given our interest in drawing, textiles and sewing, to develop another extension to this research practice by infusing arts-based research (Mreiwed, 2023, Ingham, 2022, Pillay et al, 2017). The researcher/visitor/maker practice is an assemblage that evolved through collaborative talk, imagining, and close noticing and walking with methodologies (Springgay &Truman, 2019). It is an embodied endeavour where we work with pencils, paint, digital images, printing, textiles and stitching. We create reconfigurations of our academic work with fabrics and art which speaks to the multiple ways of doing and thinking about matter and history. We engage in an intentional ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2003) dialogue to tease apart the temporal and affective layers of this work. We talk about colour casting a vitality across time, symbolic shapes and messages as signifiers of connection to kin. As a process methodology, of being and becoming through careful noticing and art(ful) practices we are energised as researchers. We recognise the value in exploring the ways in which we, our writing and thinking are changed by these encounters. In this context such thresholding produces new and generative opportunities for extending historical thinking and practice. Because we are specifically working with museum archives, collections and exhibitions, we have found resonance in the work of Phillips-Hutton and Diane Taylor particularly useful. Both explore the relationship between archive and creative practice, or ‘repertoire’, as ‘an embodied way of knowing that is enacted through performance’ (Phillips-Hutton, 2018, 189). The impermanence and performative nature of ‘repertoire’ becomes a key concept for our performative making, our interpretative artistic sewing, our ‘(re)dressing’ of surrendered children.

The intention of this paper is to promote an imaginative conversation about arts-based work, history and post-qualitative research methods. It builds on our earlier work of using these approaches as provocations for thinking about history education in universities (Nye & Clark, 2021), this time with fabrics, thread, inks and pencils. The researcher/visitor/maker assemblage infuses new possibilities for arts based, historical and archival research. Arts-based research offers an alternative form of access to the social and cultural memory of museums. The reconfigurations of the token images through a mixed arts-based practice allow us to think differently about the museum experience and represent our embodied knowledge in a highly visual and tactile way. It highlights temporality, vital matter, and representations of corporeality of the foundlings, and their mothers who relinquished the babies but left a chosen token as an identity document. This process represents a story of becoming for us as researchers. Choosing to embrace ‘withness’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023); to listen, walk with, think, write and make differently has facilitated our sharing in an affective encounter amid the archives of the foundling homes. As an emergent research assemblage, (Re)dressing speaks to our own ongoing process of relational becoming as researchers who are perpetually transformed, as much as it speaks to the vitality of the matter of the tokens.

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