Museum Makers

Museum expert Rachel Morris had been ignoring the three boxes of family belongings beneath her bed for decades. When she opened them she began a journey into her family's dramatic story through the literary and bohemian circles of the nineteenth and twentieth century. It was a revelatory experience - one that was to take her back to her isolated upbringing, searching for her father in archives of the Tate, back to the museums that had once enriched her lonely childhood. By teasing out the stories of those early museum makers, and the unsung daughters and wives behind them, Morris digs deep into the human instinct for collection and curation. 'You can tell that I am a museum person because my first instinct - I can t help myself - is to believe that in the past lies both the secrets and the answers. Without even thinking I began to slide the contents of the brown boxes, hidden for so long under the bed, into groups on the carpet, in order to take a guess at what belonged to whom, to match up photographs and hand-writing, to memories and names - in other words, to sort and classify. And as I did so I had the revelation - simple and obvious when I write it down - that in what we do with our memories and belongings we are all museum makers, making meaningful patterns out of the muddle and confusion of the universe... Museums are where we go to make sense of the world and the pasts that have gone.'