End of an era

The Max Gill exhibition at the University Gallery has now finished. It is a somewhat sad feeling seeing all the artworks wrapped up and the walls of the gallery empty (if only for a few moments). From reading the comments book in the Gallery, it appears that the public very much enjoyed the experience of the exhibition too. Here’s hoping the works will get a new lease of life at another venue as soon as possible! The MacDonald Gill digital resource created to compliment the exhibition has now been officially published. As an extra part of the resource, I have created a section within it inviting you, the ‘general public’, to share your stories and experiences with the works of Max Gill and becoming a ‘living’ part of the resource. Should you wish to contribute, there is a simple form for you to fill within the resource.

University of Brighton Design Archives, Sirpa Kutilainen
The rolling shelving being disassembled in the ‘old’ storage area

The building works here at the Design Archives are moving swiftly on despite a few hiccups along the way. We are now at day 20 of the move and during this time the collections within our ‘old’ storage area have been carefully packed by the movers and are stored temporarily elsewhere in the building. We are currently at a stage where almost all of the major building works have been finished and the removal and reassembling of the rolling shelves is taking place. The builders have done a great job in re-inventing our new storage area and the Link51 archival shelving team have, for the past two days, been busy taking down the rolling shelving from the old storage area and moving it to the new space, bit by bit. Once this has been completed, all of the shelving surfaces will need to be thoroughly cleaned before the collections get put back in. We are hopeful that the move will be finished on schedule before the new term starts.

University of Brighton Design Archives, Sirpa Kutilainen
The new storage area before rolling shelves are installed

While all of this has been going on, myself and Suzy Horada have been making the most of the students’ summer holidays and have spent considerable time in the photographic studio continuing the digitisation of the ICOGRADA poster collection as mentioned in my last blog post. To date, we have managed to digitise around 200 posters in total. This is a great asset added to our internal database and eventually another great addition for our area on the Archives Hub. We are going to continue this major digitisation effort at least well into next week, which also sees colleagues returning from maternity leave and longer holidays – The Design Archives will be operating a full house again.

Icograda poster (detail), University of Brighton Design Archives, Sirpa Kutilainen
Poster for the Jolie Madame Boutique (Swiss), from the ICOGRADA collection. (Detail). Catalogue number GB-1837-DES-ICO-3-30-68.

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