Embedded Files
What this project explored:
What this project explored:
What happens when heritage goes to people rather than asking people to come to heritage?
Can handling and making create a route into the past for people who feel museums are “not for me”?
How can women encounter representations of historical bodies through their own lived, sensing bodies?
Making Space to Feel
Making Space to Feel
Prehistoric figurines, material culture and women’s lived experience in a community treatment setting
Prehistoric figurines, material culture and women’s lived experience in a community treatment setting
This Kindred session, developed through Kin by Nettie, explored what happens when material culture is brought into an everyday community setting rather than asking people to cross the threshold into a heritage institution. Developed alongside my work in movement, education, and archaeology, it explores how people encounter the past through their own lived, sensing bodies rather than through interpretation alone. Kindred work takes place both within heritage institutions and in everyday community environments — from museums and heritage sites to support groups and informal spaces — creating opportunities to touch, make, move, and sit with material culture in ways that unsettle assumptions about who heritage is for and how women’s histories are encountered.One session took place not in a heritage space, but in the main foyer café of a community treatment centre, where the usual room was unavailable. We pulled tables together into a corner nook under slightly harsh lights, with mugs of tea and coffee, a plate of biscuits, and four clay replicas of prehistoric female figurines placed between us. Organic materials and tools sat alongside them. About eight women gathered — some sitting, some wandering in and out, the group familiar with one another to varying degrees. There was no requirement to stay.At first, there was hesitation. Hands reached toward the figurines, then withdrew. Side glances, small jokes: “Hope my body doesn’t look like that — oh, it does.” Laughter opened into conversation about what women “have to put up with.” Gradually, the tone shifted. Clay was taken up. Tools were tried without overthinking. Attention deepened; chatter softened. Women zoned into making, surprised at what they had crafted. Pride appeared, sometimes masked as nonchalance. “Wow, really prehistoric?” one said. “I’ve never really been interested. Museums are not for me. This has been lovely — making things.”This session grew out of conversation rather than institutional planning. I had shared my research interests informally with a friend involved in the centre and was invited by the group’s volunteer leader to facilitate. The group forms part of a women’s social and support programme within a treatment pathway; attendance is flexible and the group has a defined end point. The women already knew me through chair-based exercise sessions I had delivered there, so I entered not as a lecturer but as a familiar facilitator.Here, “embodied heritage” did not mean learning dates or historical facts. It meant creating space to look, touch, hold, and make. I modelled careful object handling and experimental engagement with materials, while avoiding closed questions or testing knowledge. The aim was not to produce accurate replicas, but to allow sensory engagement — with clay, weight, texture, form, and with one’s own bodily presence. The session held space for uncertainty, experimentation, and relation rather than correctness.Sessions like this respond to what might be described as an institutional hangover: a lingering sense that history, heritage, and museums are spaces for “other people.” Several participants expressed variations of “I’ve never really been interested” or “museums are not for me.” This was not indifference, but a relationship shaped by exclusion — by the feeling of not knowing enough, of being in the wrong place, or of getting things “wrong.”That sense of wrongness extended beyond knowledge. It touched the body. Jokes about the figurines opened into wider conversations about the pressures placed on women’s bodies. In many heritage contexts, women’s bodies appear as symbols — fertility, beauty, morality — rather than as lived, complex, ordinary realities. Contemporary body norms and hierarchies quietly shape how people feel they should look, move, and even think.As the session unfolded, the atmosphere in the nook began to change in small but noticeable ways. The initial social catch-up chatter softened and then thinned out. Voices lowered. There were moments of shared silence that did not feel awkward but settled. Attention moved between hands, objects, and the table surface rather than circulating anxiously around the group.Several women became absorbed in working with clay, experimenting without overthinking. Surprise surfaced at what they had made, often accompanied by understated pride. One participant, living with chronic pain, continued working steadily, adjusting her movements without drawing attention to discomfort. Another spoke very little but remained present, engaged through touch and making rather than conversation.Near the end, as time awareness returned — “Oh, we’d better get on and do X…” — the sense was of a brief hiatus from the pace of everyday life. The session did not remove difficulty, but offered a different rhythm: slower, more sensory, less evaluative. Within that shift, material culture was no longer distant symbol but part of a shared, lived present.Work like this matters because it shifts women’s history from representation to relationship. Rather than encountering historical women primarily as images, symbols, or case studies, participants engage through their own sensing, making bodies. This does not replace interpretation, but rebalances it. Historical figures — even prehistoric ones — become less like distant types and more like presences that invite comparison, curiosity, and recognition.In this space, women’s history moves away from being something done by experts in formal institutions and towards something that can be held, questioned, and felt in everyday settings. The session did not require prior knowledge, confidence, or the “right” kind of cultural capital. It created room for uncertainty, humour, discomfort, and pride. In doing so, it gently disrupted both the institutional hangover that tells people heritage is “not for me” and the bodily hierarchies that tell women their forms are wrong.Embodied heritage practice does not claim to solve these structures. But it offers moments where women can relate to the past — and to their own bodies — with less judgement and more possibility.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse