People & Stuff: A Subversive Collaboration

A museum gallery with a rail running around the centre of the room which is open to the gallery below. High on the wall hangs a long canoe and the gallery walls are decorated with mural featuring graffiti images relating to the collections on display.

This large-scale painting by artist Alana Jelinek reminds us of the original locations and geographies of the collections by creating a series representing bird's eye views of different climates and places. On top of these landscapes, museum staff, academics, community groups, and visitors have been invited to contribute their understanding of the collections, how they got here, and what they mean to them. We hope the artwork will become a visualisation or 'map' of relationships between the past, ourselves, artefacts and places.

A plaster cast of a Maya carving depicting two figures. The wall around it is painted green onto which graffiti images have been added including a brightly coloured bird, a skeleton wearing a large hat and an owl with a red line over its eyes.

Images from the painting surrounding a Maya cast, 2024.

Contributors have added to the painting throughout 2024. It is facilitated by Alana Jelinek who is a painting tutor at the Royal College of Art. The site-specific large-scale collaborative painting is a research project and experiment for Jelinek as she attempts to find a visual language for the relationship between people and things over time and space, which have come together in the Andrews Gallery from many thousands of years ago and from many thousands of miles away.

An artist stands on a hydraulic platform as she adds to a graffiti mural above a pair of closed wooden doors.

Alana Jelinek adds to the large-scale painting in the Andrews Gallery, 2024.

The mural and graffiti wall are generously funded by  UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Impact Accelerator Award.