AMULETS CHARMS AND MUSEUMS
When I started out at the Horniman Museum and Gardens as an Assistant Curator I became fascinated by the vast and varied collection of amulets and charms. Barely any were on display, so in 2014 I held a workshop to tackle the question of how we might interpret them for our visitors. To get a broad array of perspectives I invited people who would come at the question from different angles. We had a great mix, including practitioner-historians from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, academics who had worked on UCL’s Heritage in Hospitals research project, and artists, including the Iraqi amulet-maker Rashad Selim. The video below covers the workshop.
This video contains footage of human remains.
At the workshop the ongoing potency of the amulets really came across. Over the next few months I built on this insight, inviting more people who used amulets to examine the collection and recording their impressions in our database.
The amulets were great creative catalysts and led to several collaborations. Within the Museum I teamed up with the Learning Department to create an amulet-making workshop that was designed to help local young people get through tough times. I also contacted two artists, Rachel Emily Taylor and Martha McGuinn, and helped them realise their own very interesting projects which were based on some of the amulets.
The workshop, collection visits, and collaborations led me to initiate two public-facing outputs. The first was the ‘Magic Late’, an evening event the Museum which sold out. There the programming included performances by Rachel and Martha, as well as new responses to the collection, specially commissioned for the night.
The other output was ‘England, Luck and Protection’, a permanent display of the amulets in the Museums’ World Gallery. Part of the display was a clootie tree interactive, drawing on the ancient folk tradition of tying things to trees which grow by sacred springs. Since the gallery opened in 2018, tens of thousands of wishes have been tied to the tree. Many are poignant, suggesting that for some visitors the processes is one of significant emotional investment. This shows that the tree has helped to break down the barrier between visitors and the world view represented by the amulets in the display case; by tying a wish to the tree, visitors are doing something not too dissimilar to investing hope in an amulet.
The amulets stayed with me after I left the Horniman. During the Covid lockdowns I started to make drawings about them. I found this cathartic at a stressful time, and slowly it dawned on me that vicariously, through the drawings, I was relating to the amulets in a similar way to the people who used them originally. After a hiatus of over one hundred years of being in a museum’s collection, the amulets were again playing a supportive role in someone’s life. I’ve explored this ‘reanimation’ of the amulets in seminars and conference papers.
The most recent manifestation of that first workshop at the Horniman is a research project which I was joint Principal Investigator on. The project acknowledged that there are barriers separating museum staff and people who are spiritually invested in amulets and folk magic collections more generally. The goal was to set a precedent for overcoming those barriers, and to show just how productive for everyone it can be to work together equitably. The video below covers the project and some of its outcomes.
