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While thousands of items are on display at Jersey Heritage’s sites all year round, many more are safely kept away. Each month, a selection of their 250,000 objects are showcased at the Sir Francis Cook Gallery...
Each with a different theme, ‘Meet the Collections’ events allow islanders to discover objects, artworks, archives, textiles and archaeological material and meet the staff who look after them.
Registrar Helena Kergozou shared more about what to expect in the coming months…
Pictured: A selection of the 25,000 items at Jersey Heritage are put on display every month. (Jersey Heritage)
"The idea is to allow people to see more of our collections than they can see at our sites, where we can only show a limited amount.
"We have 250,000 objects, which is far more than we could have on display and a lot of it lives in storage.
"We use the hall at the front of the Gallery, we bring out some items and set out a display. We also do behind the scenes tours of the storage where people can see thousands of objects in one go!"
"For the programme this year, we asked people to suggest themes – ‘military’, which we have on 2 November, was a popular one.
"We will have uniforms, medals, service records, swords and lots of personal items of people who were in the military.
Pictured: Military items such as medals will showcased on Saturday 2 November. (Jersey Heritage)
People also requested “quirky Victorian household items”, which we will display on 7 September as part of ‘Domestic life’.
"We will have 'Weird and Wonderful’ on 5 October, which is items that don’t really fit in one category or that people would not expect to find in a collection. My favourite one is a radio set built in a nutshell, which dates from the Occupation when radio sets were not allowed.
We will finish with ‘Hobbies and Pastimes’ on 14 December, with items relating to how people occupied their time, from home crafts to board games.
Pictured: Items fitting the theme 'Hobbies and Pastimes' will be on show on Saturday 14 December.
"We are always open to suggestions – whatever people want to see, we want to try and facilitate."
"The collections we look after belong to the island, and we want people to engage with them, see them and appreciate them.
"When you think of an exhibition, they can take months and months of planning, but this is quite simple to set up and it gives people a great opportunity to see what we have.
"We always have staff on-hand to speak to people about how we look after the collections and how they can preserve their own items.
"We get a really positive response and good engagement. People are really interested!"
All events listed above will take place on Saturdays from 09:30 to 13:00.
This article first appeared in Connect Magazine which you can read in full below.
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