Interpreting Eric Gill symposium considers how museums might work with challenging collections.

How do museums and galleries deal with their most morally challenging collections?

Brighton’s Centre for Design History recently added to their longstanding work in partnership with the museums, collections and heritage sector, organising an event together with the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft to better understand the problems associated with the care and display of collections that carry problematic histories and legacies.

One instalment in the CDH’s seminar series ‘Image Object Text Analysis’ (IOTA2) for 2025-2026, the focus for this event was on Ditchling’s exhibition ‘It Takes a Village’ (July 2025-March 2026), which invited visitors to rediscover familiar works, uncover hidden treasures and also play a role in shaping the museum’s future. The exhibition emphasised partnership, participation and representation, and an understanding of the value of Ditchling Museum’s collection to the lives of the community. A series of events also brought craft in action – from interventions by local craftspeople and museum conservators to live residencies and displays created with disabled and neurodivergent co-curators. Ditchling as a village had once been home to a thriving community, one which included successful artists and craftspeople, notably in the early years of the twentieth century. The exhibition included a wealth of works by, for example, Louis Ginnett, Ethel Mairet, Joseph Cribb, David Jones and Amy Sawyer.

The symposium however had a focus on one room of the exhibition. A room set apart for visitors to choose whether they wished to include it in their visit or not.

 

Our edited film of the symposium includes footage of the collections.

'Annunciation', Eric Gill c. 1912. Collection of the Methodist Modern Art Collection

How might curators sensitively display the works of Eric Gill?

This room displayed Ditchling’s collection of works of the world-renowned artist Eric Gill, along with photographic and drawn representations of his family. Gill was a man whose self-documented abuse of his daughters shocked the world when the facts were brought to public attention in the 1990s. At the same time, the news divided the gallery and museum sector. How do we approach these works of art when they are tainted by their creator’s life? What choices are there for collection, display and study? What voices need to be heard when discussing those choices?

The speakers for the symposium ‘Curating Challenging Collections: Interpreting Eric Gill’, underlined the importance of co-curation, recognising the responsibilities of public collections to invite challenge, work with the public in their display and programming, and to demonstrate due respect towards diverse life experiences and a range of views. In the case of Gill there was a need to reflect and represent the thoughts and feelings of those who had themselves survived abuse. How and why an exhibition might achieve this was at the heart of the symposium.

Speakers at the Interpreting Eric Gill symposium

The afternoon was introduced by Dr Claire Wintle, Director of the Centre for Design History, who outlined the importance of co-creation but also the commitment and resource that this can take, not only in individual exhibitions but in the way the whole sector learns and develops its practice and the ways it can be held to account and adapt. Steph Fuller, Director/CEO of Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft explained the collaborative process and the view that the earlier Eric Gill: The body exhibition (2017) had given inadequate representation of Gill’s abused daughters, with nothing about their later life or agency. Steph explained the process by which the current exhibition collaborated with and supported those who found a range of personal and shared meanings in the display of this challenging material. She also explained the importance of strong policy and a recognition that, between the extremes of cancelling Gill or allowing all things in art, there are ways of taking responsibility for balancing how artists’ works and lives are collected, displayed and studied.

Dr Ann Sumner, Former Chair of the Management Committee of the Methodist Modern Art Collection, spoke online about the polarisation they faced when considering their own works by Gill, particularly the ‘Annunciation’ of 1912. Fiona, a survivor, or veteran, as she preferred to identify, asked questions of biographies and obituaries that significantly failed to give justice to the female influences on the Gill family and often failed to recognise the consequences of abuse, relying on the fame and talents of artists to justify all their actions as nobly intended. The University of Brighton’s Professor Lesley Murray concluded by sharing an understanding of the role of art in the engagement with and representation of real life, drawing on her own recent project on the immobilites of gender violence, which drew on accounts from minoritized groups created in the UK and Mexico during the Covid pandemic.

Collections and the ways galleries and museums display them, particularly with public funds and for public audiences, have a powerful potential to interact with that public, to share what’s challenging but also to welcome new voices into the dialogues and become a present in the realities many people face.

 

 

Dr Claire Wintle, researcher and lecturer in design history, museum and heritage studies, introduced the symposium.

Ditchling Museum exhibits including works by Eric Gill, memorabilia from the Gill family and photographs of Betty and Petra Gill. July 3rd 2025.

The Centre for Design History

The Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton is playing a key role in thinking about how collections are brought together, viewed and treated. As one of the university’s Centres of Research and Knowledge Exchange Excellence (COREs) it is reframing research into the relationship between museums, exhibitions, archives and design, centring on the display and interpretation of designed objects in museums and collections, and the social, economic and political agency of museums, exhibitions and archives as designed objects.

Links

A video recording of the symposium is available on YouTube.

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