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The new museum sits side by side with the Usher Gallery in the centre of the city close to Steep Hill. As well as a wealth of artifacts from the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, Roman, Saxon, Viking and Medieval eras as well as fine, decorative and contemporary visual arts - The Collection boasts many temporary exhibitions.

A new design

The incorporation of artwork into the fabric of the building was considered from the outset. After a period of research and development three artists, Richard Wilson, Stephen Gill and Adinda van't Kloster, were commissioned to produce new artworks for the building. Funding for the artwork came from Arts Council East Midlands, The Heslam Trust and the Howard Trust with the project being managed by The City of Lincoln Council.

The Collection.

The first of these artworks to be successfully installed and celebrated is the sound piece created by Adinda. Adinda created the 16-channel sound installation situated in the orientation hall.

As one enters, a blend of voices and abstract soundscapes emanates from speakers enclosed within the facing wall. Walking, with ones ear close to the wall, individual stories and sounds can be deciphered. 

The artwork closely reflects the nature of archaeology with its many layers of time and strata that gradually become uncovered and reformed.

The Collection

What makes this particular artwork especially relevant and important is that all of the storytellers involved in the recordings were local people who volunteered their stories to Adinda.

After an initial period of research into the area of Lincolnshire, the artist chose 15 stories and texts related to the area's history in different ways and invited local people to come and read them out. Some of the stories are local legends or myths related to Lincolnshire or the origins of Britain, others are texts or poems by people who were born in Lincoln, like Isaac Newton and Alfred Lord Tennysson of whom an original wax recording was included.

The soundwall also includes a recording from the oral history archive and is four people's different versions of the real event of a bomb dropping in Stamford during the Second World War.

The Collection

What may at first seem an eclectic mix is brought together by the way the artist has worked with the recordings. Taking dating graphs from the archaeology department, the artist paired each story or text with a dating graph from an object the same age as the story. Consequently, the graph was used to affect the recording over and over again in the end leaving nothing but abstract rhythm and noise.

As the recordings vary in length and texture, they take different amounts of time to disintegrate. Once fully disintegrated, the sound slowly repairs itself, eventually morphing back into the initial clean recording. At no point during the day is the installation the same and over 100 hours of sound footage were created for this installation.

This installation is best experienced by returning to it at different points throughout the day. In the morning all the texts are all audible, after which they slowly deteriorate into loops of varying lengths between half an hour and 7 hours.