The Project
Montserrat is a nation of makers. Our island’s remote Caribbean location, slow economy, and lack of manufacturing have long inspired locals to find clever ways to craft, rather than buy, material objects, ranging from tools and furniture to costumes and musical instruments. However, the end of the twentieth century brought disaster and displacement. In 1989, Hugo, a Category 5 hurricane, damaged more than 90% of the island’s buildings. In 1995, the Soufrière Hills Volcano suddenly began erupting. The capital city of Plymouth and the surrounding villages were devastated. Two-thirds of the island was designated an ‘Exclusion Zone’, and approximately 8,000 people emigrated. This population loss, combined with the global rise of mass manufacturing, led to a rapid decline in handcrafted work. The EMKP’s first Legacy Digitisation Grant is enabling us to photograph our remaining locally made objects and providing a secure, publicly accessible space to store this data. These digital images will help preserve the legacy of this once-rich ‘maker culture’ for future generations.
By the late 1990s, much of Montserrat’s historic material culture had vanished. Pyroclastic materials and lahars buried entire villages, and the original museum’s location within the exclusion zone left it inoperable. Community members and Montserrat National Trust (MNT) staff salvaged as many portable objects and documents as possible. These items were moved between homes and offices over several years until the government built a new museum in Little Bay in 2012. Multiple relocations with minimal record-keeping led to the loss of much of the collection’s documentation. Without adequate funding for research and preservation, the objects languished in dusty disorganisation. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Museum storage before starting project. Courtesy of Samantha Lauren.
Faced with a collection in serious disarray, the Arcadia Fund’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme Legacy Digitisation Grant has proven to be a valuable opportunity. Addressing the entire collection, which includes several hundred boxes of archaeological artefacts, would be overwhelming. The EMKP Legacy Digitisation Grant’s focus on material knowledge at risk allowed us to narrow our efforts: we specifically chose only handcrafted items, such as musical instruments, costumes, utensils, and so on. This approach enabled us to document and digitise a significant part of the collection, highlighting Montserrat’s once-rich ‘maker culture’.
Organising and Exhibiting the Collection
Our first task was cleaning the large, dusty basement. We sorted the props from the collection artefacts, storing each separately, and identified locally made objects. We used these items to create a historical, crafts-focused exhibit titled: ‘Made in Montserrat’. The exhibit has delighted visitors by showcasing tangible evidence of local craftsmanship and creativity. Functionally, displaying these objects helped us gather information about them from visitors. When provenance is scarce, our object labels include a short closing line asking viewers, “Do you remember this object or know more about its past? Please tell a staff member — we’d love to learn more!” These requests opened the door to conversations that helped us uncover hidden histories and learn surprising uses for objects.
Objects we continue to wonder about include a pair of spent-shell casings turned vases, or perhaps umbrella stands. These shell casings exemplify the kinds of objects we often find in this collection: items people creatively reused and adapted to meet basic needs or aesthetic desires. Who was “Day,” whose name appears on a sticker on one of the shells, and why did he, or someone else, bring these WWII-era Pickford’s naval-class shell casings to Montserrat, then decorate the neck with neatly braided twine?
Equally mysterious is a raffia-stitched burlap piece. We initially thought the object might be a cloche (a food cover used to repel insects). However, it could also be a hat for a Festival character. Our almost complete lack of knowledge about its purpose made it difficult to display and accession. While it is currently displayed with household objects and classified under an “H” (for household objects) category, if we discover it is a festival hat, we will need to reclassify it under “C” for costumes. This kind of inconsistency underscores the challenges of organising legacy collections with limited or no surviving documentation.
Accessioning and Photographing the Collection
Once exhibit preparations were underway, we shifted to the twin challenges of accessioning and photography: tasks we carried out enthusiastically and without formal training. While we have made significant progress in labelling and digitising the collection, our efforts are sprinkled with novice errors that future curators will likely find amusing and alarming in equal measure. We thoroughly reviewed the advice on the Collections Trust site about Spectrum (the UK collection management standard) and devised a simple numeric accessioning system. Although the EMKP metadata sheet has presented its own challenges, it has dramatically improved our accession register: transferring the accession and image data has helped us identify our inconsistencies. Our photography was similarly challenging, requiring multiple angles to achieve three-dimensional clarity. Although our new system is still imperfect, it is far better than the near-total disarray that previously existed.
Engaging the Community
Our favourite project activity was collaborating with the government’s summer camp programme to create children’s crafting workshops focused on traditional festival costumes. We are sincerely grateful to the Montserrat Police Force for generously seconding Officer Kirk Brade, a talented local artisan and costume maker, to help with the project. Our grant enabled us to cover a small honorarium and materials for three workshops. Officer Brade conducted eight-week programmes for primary and secondary students. His workshops produced many masquerade masks and hats, two John Bull headpieces (Figure 2), and two Miss Goosie costumes (Figure 3). These are notable because Montserrat’s traditional festival characters have gradually fallen out of favour since at least the late 20th century. The Christmas Festival’s historical range of island-specific characters, courtiers, bulls, Mountain Men, Guppies, Pitchy-Patchies, and others, is now reduced to a single Masqueraders band and a few troupes featuring feathered, bedazzled, ‘Fancy Indian’ style costumes typical of Brazilian and Trinidadian carnivals.
Figure 2. Digitised John Bull shoulder piece made in primary school costume workshop. Courtesy of Samantha Lauren.
Figure 3. Digitised image of one of two project workshop Miss Goosie costumes. Courtesy of Samantha Lauren.
Conclusion
Thanks to the EMKP programme’s generous grant, we have digitised a vulnerable collection of objects and begun developing effective documentation systems. With clearer records, an accession register, improved storage (Figure 4), and hundreds of newly digitised objects, we now have a much better understanding of our collection and how to care for it. Our improved documentation and organisation will enable us to create more informed exhibitions and move to the next phase of cataloguing with greater confidence. Most importantly, by digitising this collection, Arcadia, the British Museum, and the EMKP team have helped ensure that Montserrat’s physical culture will be accessible far beyond our small island’s borders.
Figure 4. Reorganised museum storage – imperfect, but improved! Courtesy of Samantha Lauren.