Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Walls, walls, walls!

Redevelopment work at Pontefract Museum is cracking on and it's all about the walls!


All of the old exhibition structures have been removed, as has the glass partition, leaving the space looking huge...





There were blinds at the windows these have been taken down.  The windows will be decorated with vinyl designs by artist Fabric Lenny, his work can be seen on other windows at the museum.


The old blinds
The glass partition is being replaced with a stud wall. 





The new wall will give us lots of extra display space in both the main gallery and the special exhibition gallery.






The existing gallery walls are being boarded over to provide a solid and plain backing for the new displays.







The museum exhibition team is also working on the interpretation, providing  graphic designers InchPunch with content for the exhibition panels and preparing the objects for display.


Work left to do includes painting the ceiling and new walls, building new display structures and installing new museum cases.


Pontefract Museum will reopen in the spring.  Follow @WFMuseums for updates.







Thursday, January 4, 2018

Pontefract Museum Gallery Redevelopment

Pontefract Museum is currently closed to enable us to carry out some exciting new gallery redevelopment work.


The museum closed on 23 December and after the staff had had a nice Christmas break work has now started in preparing the spaces for building work.


The first stage of the process is to wrap and protect all of the elements of the display that are remaining in the gallery (about two thirds of the gallery was redeveloped in 2016)


Elements of the display are covered for protection



Cases and parts of displays have been moved




A quick sweep up




Bit by bit objects are carefully removed and packed.  Some of the larger objects need specialist removers who will use lifting equipment.






Objects are packed on to crates for removal to the museum store




The next stage will be the removal of the green display structures you can see in some of the above photographs and the remaining elements of the old displays.  The ceiling will be painted white (it is currently black) and the gallery walls will be boarded out. 


As Pontefract Museum is  listed  we have been granted listed building consent to do this work.  All work has to be carried out so as not to damage any of the remaining original features of the beautiful art nouveau building.


Check back soon for more updates and follow @WFMuseums on Twitter.