As part the residency, Rachel Emily Taylor had been searching for the historical child’s ‘voice’, which is absent in the hospital records. Alongside her research in the archive, Rachel led art workshops to explore how contemporary children engaged with narratives of the historical children from the museum’s history.
During the closing event at the museum, Rachel Emily Taylor’s artworks were exhibited in the museum foyer, the Picture Gallery and alongside the Gerald Coke Handel Collection.
In the Picture Gallery, the installation Kept Within The Bounds mirrored the plans of the Foundling Hospital: the girls’ and boys’ wings, the chapel and the entrance gate. It created a juxtaposition between the contemporary and historical children, whilst revealing the hierarchy between the museum’s paintings of esteemed gentlemen and the foundling children below.
The paintings included in Kept Within The Bounds were made by children in workshop sessions led by the artist that included role-play and performance methods to construct a foundling ‘character’. The paintings are a portrait of two people; the child artist and the imagined foundling child.
In the entrance foyer stood an Interruption. In this work, children’s voices chimed in time with the museum clocks recalling the foundling’s names; a reminder that children were “seen and not heard”.
At the base of the stairwell, images of children’s paintings appeared in the moving image piece, the March, and you could hear the children faintly singing the Foundling Hospital Anthem in the Gerald Coke Handel Collection on the top floor of the museum.
The event also included talks from: the Foundling Museum director, Caro Howell; the Collections Manager, Alison Duke; Dr. Helen Wickstead, an archaeologist and Senior Lecturer at Kingston University; and Dr. Becky Shaw, Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.
Finding Foundlings was supported by Sheffield Hallam University, the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Heritage Consortium.
