As you may already know (we have mentioned it once or twice), the SELCIE team is currently in the final stages of planning for an exhibition. Growing Up With Books, which will open at Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood on International Children’s Day 2018 (June 1st), aims to tell the story of children’s literature in Scotland.
Beginning in October 2015, the road to this exhibition has been long and winding. The SELCIE team has spent around two years sorting and cataloging books in the Museum of Childhood’s archives. For the last year or so, this task has been done with the exhibition in mind. To organise the exhibition, each member of the team has taken responsibility for an exhibition case. We all decided on the themes of the exhibition, and of our specific cases, and chose which books to feature.
Trial run of setting up one of the cases
Now we are in the final stages of preparing for the opening. The walls of the exhibition space have been painted. The final case layouts have been decided. The exhibition catalogue is in the final stages of production. It seems unreal that the exhibition will be open to the public in less than a month, but the whole team is ready and excited.
The exhibition space, freshly painted for Growing Up With Books
Today we wanted to share some details of events that will be happening alongside the exhibition. We want everyone to get the very most out of Growing Up With Books, so we have organised a series of storytelling, creative writing, and book illustration workshops:
- Storytelling: Enchanting Tales 10 June, Puppets and Prose 19 August, Magical Victorian Fairy Tales 8 September, Musical Stories 2 December
- Children’s book illustration workshops: Rubber-Stamped Mini Books 9 June, Magical Story Books 23 June, Bookmark Beasts 7 July, Marvellous Puppets 22 September, The Spooky Enchanted Forest 13 October, The Biggest Explosion 3 November
- Creative writing workshop for adults: Tunnel Books: Illusions and Stories 18 August
- Creative writing workshop as part of Luminate festival: Stitching Stories 1 September
More details about these events (and others) to come soon! However, the fun does not stop with these workshops! In conjunction with Growing Up With Books, we are also speaking at Lauriston Castle about the project (25 September) and we are in the process of organising a conference to bring to bring together academics and archivists working with children’s history and literature (23 November).
Myself and SELCIE artist-in-residence, Katie Forrester, at the last exhibition planning meeting
The team is very excited about all of these things, and we can’t believe that we are so close to being able to share more of the stories that we have found hidden in the Museum’s archives. We are always delighted with the responses we receive to these stories, and cannot wait for the doors to open. (In fact, in other exciting news, it was just announced that the doors of the Museum of Childhood will be open 7 days a week from now on!) We want to thank everyone for coming on this journey with us, and we hope that you are enjoying it as much as we are. The countdown has begun!
This post written by Danielle