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By Mark Green on

The making of ‘Drawings That Move’

If you've ever wanted to sneak into our offices and spy on how we plan, develop and build one of our exhibitions, it's your lucky day...

In this post I’ll be taking you behind the scenes of the making of Drawings That Move: The Art of Joanna Quinn, one of two new exhibitions opening in October 2009.

Here are some photos from the grand unboxing and unpacking procedure—where the actual objects we’ll be using in the gallery are ceremonially lifted from the boxes they arrived in.

Actually, I’m cheating a bit.

First, because as I write, the objects are still actually tucked away in their packaging. The pictures here are from a cursory initial check, prior to the actual full-on unboxing taking place later this month.

Second, because finding out what’s in the boxes isn’t that surprising—after all, it was museum staff (specifically Curator of Cinematography Michael Harvey and Content Developer Dan Jackson) who travelled to Joanna’s house in August to choose the objects and parcel them all up.

But we still got excited cutting open the boxes and unravelling the bubble wrap all the same.

Exhibition Organiser Martyn Lenton with one of Joanna’s sketchbooks. We’ll be exhibiting several of these in October.

Original sketches from Joanna’s 1993 film Britannia, a BAFTA-nominated satire of the British Empire.

Exhibitions Organiser Lucy Davison performs the unwrapping of the BAFTA… Joanna won this award for her short film The Wife of Bath.

And if that wasn’t exciting enough, there’s also an actual real-life Emmy Award. The woman’s wings represent art; the atom she’s holding represents science; and it’s a very heavy award (but not quite as heavy as the BAFTA, Lucy tells me). This is one of two Emmys that Joanna won for The Wife of Bath.

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