The Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre and partners have received £25,500 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to run an exciting new project combining heritage with creative and digital skills to enhance employability. The project is now open to participants and starts on Tuesday 22nd November. The deadline for admissions is 11th November. Click here…… Continue reading DigiCreative Heritage
The Covid pandemic has affected us all. Last year the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre, Chippenham put out a call to arms, asking for contributions to a new collection that we are building; ‘Living in Lockdown: A Creative Response to Challenging Times’. We had an amazing response! A big thank you to everyone who contacted…… Continue reading The ‘Living in Lockdown’ Creative Collection
Julian Bream 15 July 1933 – 14 August 2020 Julian Bream, who lived in Wiltshire until his death last year at the age of 87, was part of a tradition that recognised both the past and the future of the guitar. He commissioned and played first performances by composers such as William Walton, Michael Tippett and…… Continue reading Remembering Julian Bream and his Wiltshire connection
Back in 2014 we were fortunate in securing a National Heritage Lottery Fund award as part of their Collecting Cultures project. This gave us funding to connect and support museum collections throughout the county of Wiltshire in a variety of ways. We could add to collections, perhaps filling gaps where creativity was unrepresented, provide…… Continue reading The Creative Wiltshire Journey
Creative Wiltshire made a decision early in the project to add Ken White material to the collection at Swindon Museum and Art Gallery and we were lucky enough to visit Ken in his studio with Sophie Cummings, Curator at SMAG. Under Sophie’s excellent guidance some pieces were chosen; two oil paintings, prints and linocuts, postcards,…… Continue reading Ken White: Railways and Landscapes
Caroline was born and raised in Swindon and has always had a connection with the Wiltshire landscape. Her father was interested in ley lines and she remembers her first visit to Avebury as a child where they dowsed at the historic site, plotted lines on a map and considered the spirituality and sense of place…… Continue reading Caroline Day – Spirituality in the Landscape
Museum and archive collections are, in their very nature, eclectic. They often have roots in one person’s fascination with the past and they develop and grow much like a tree putting out roots. They are often dependent on donations, and collecting policies within museums are developed to provide some structure to this form of collecting,…… Continue reading Celebrating Creative Wiltshire
A wonderful opportunity has presented itself whereby through acquisition and the building of a unique collection we can appreciate the influence and inspiration the county has instilled in creative people across the centuries. This has been made possible as part of the HLF “Collecting Cultures” Creative Wiltshire & Swindon project. Creative Wiltshire aims to…… Continue reading ARTeology – ART inspired through ART re-discovered
ARTeology is a project in which artists will respond to the Creative Wiltshire Collection, beginning with visits, research and discussion, and culminating in a curated exhibition. Uncover : Discover : Create This sums up the approach and we hope that by focusing on these new acquisitions for some of our Wiltshire Museums, our selected…… Continue reading ARTeology
Last month Joy, Julie and I had the pleasure of visiting Nick Leigh, the son of the sculptor Roger Leigh (1925-1997), to see some of Roger Leigh’s sculptures as well as a huge variety of archival material. We brought the archive back to the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre as a new deposit under the…… Continue reading Creative Resources in Archives
Creative Wiltshire 