#lucymalone

MOOP 4/2/20 Lucy Malone

I was made aware of MOOP (Museum of Ordinary People) by Suzie @studiojohanson and fired off an email explaining my MA project. Lucy was keen to meet and so I hooked up with her in the Joker Pub, Preston Park where they have offices above. 

MOOP background:  It was on a walking tour that Jolie met Lucy Malone, a curator who had been creating an archive, text and exhibition about her late mother’s artwork. After her mother passed away Lucy became the guardian of all her belongings: letters, sketchbooks and more, and Lucy had been working through them, both as a personal journey and as a practice-based research project. There began the makings of the pop-up Museum of Ordinary People (MOOP), which debuted last year and won the Brighton Fringe Visual Arts award.

Empathy fuels what MOOP does, and Jolie believes that first person narratives are a challenge to the existing historical constructions of the traditional museum world.

“Museums are quite immovable beasts, and they can’t respond to what’s happening culturally in real time – it takes a long time for them to change anything.

“We are coming from a completely different perspective – we’re acknowledging the power of seemingly mundane objects and valuing the emotive stories and memories they hold, to communicate and represent more ‘real’ lives.”

http://brightontheinside.co.uk/btners/lucy-malone-the-museum-of-ordinary-people/

It was great to meet Lucy who was so engaging, knowledgeable, informed and interesting on the whole MOOP topic. We had no shortage of conversation on our meeting as it was a meeting of interest and common angles on a subject. After swapping book titles (and finding we’d read the same things too) Lucy invited me to take an aspect of John’s life such as his Chrysanthemum Diaries and make a separate curation for the next pop up show at the Brighton Fringe. This would involve me also attending  7 workshops.

Two days later and my heart still wants this but my head says with both ‘mock’ show presentation in May, and the Brighton Fringe in May it would risk that one or the other  of the projects would suffer from lack of full on focus, be that my MA or the MOOP side project which would be rushed or compromised by simply taking on too much. A three hour round trip to Brighton means there’s effective 21 hours just of travel time to do the work shops, and I only want to do something if I can do it to the best of my ability.

But I have expressed an interest to be in touch with MOOP and take something forward at some stage. Hats off to them, I have the impression they work tirelessly for this and devote much of their free time to this project which deserves a proper home, much like Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence... More power to them.