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Studio art professor Sarah Buie is a designer whose primary interest is in museum exhibition design. She creates three-dimensional spaces that help visitors experience a given topic in the most complete way possible. |
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Meet the artists:
Sensing what's needed
Interview with Professor Sarah Buie
In a recent interview, Professor Sarah Buie
discussed the challenges of museum exhibition design.
Tell me about your focus as a designer.
I was trained as a graphic designer, but I have always been interested in the design of three-dimensional space, especially spaces that involve working in relationship with the natural environment. I specialize in museum exhibition design, a kind of design that involves many layers of interpretation and communication within a spatial framework.
Exhibit design depends on the language and energies of space. It allows me to work with light, the rhythms of space, the unfolding of an experience during which the visitor moves through space over time. It also allows me to work on how space shapes consciousness, and that has become my real focus. Over the past few years I've come to spend a lot of my time thinking, writing and teaching about how the language of space, and spatial archetypes in particular, can serve to deepen our relationship with the natural world or any environment we create.
I developed a course for the Environmental School here at Clark called Sacred Space (Studio Art 204) that was inspired and nourished by both my exhibition design work and travels and work throughout India and the Himalayan region (Nepal, Ladakh, Bhutan, Tibet). In my design work, I've come to know pretty intimately what threshold is, what path is -- as well as sacred geometries, labyrinths and mandalas. I understand how a whole variety of archetypal spaces like cave, mountain, river, and tree help us, in a variety of ways, to understand our relationship to the natural world. The continuum of spatial archetypes in our lives, in the natural world, in our psyches, and in the forms that we create in art and architecture, is at the heart of what I've been doing in the last several years of teaching and it's where I've started going with exhibitions, especially new ones that I'd like to develop myself.
As a layperson, I think of graphic design as two-dimensional and static--designing things on flat paper like advertisements, posters and books.
Well, it is, and it isn't. Actually, books can be thought of as spaces that unfold over time. Creating that unfolding experience is one of the great opportunities in designing books. Graphic designers also work designing signage, maps --these are all different kinds of problem solving that involves communicating information using visual images.
It's true that the most common focus of graphic design is printed materials, and I start there with my students--the language of form as it occurs two-dimensionally. I, personally, usually work across two and three dimensions in a variety of ways, so as to have that 2-D/3-D interface.
You mentioned incorporating a time element--paging through a book, walking through an exhibition.
Yes, and as I design I think of the body as a sensing organ. An exhibition has the potential of being a total sensory experience -- I love that aspect of it.
Tell me about your involvement in the EcoTarium exhibit.
(The EcoTarium is an environmental science museum two miles from downtown Worcester, Massachusetts.)
Over the past few years the EcoTarium has been going through a complete redefinition of its identity and mission, and redoing their building and grounds. Initially I worked on designing their outdoor signing, both for labeling and way-finding. Then I worked to develop a small, discrete orientation exhibition that would be the first thing that visitors saw upon entering the museum, something that would set the tone for their experiences there. The real opportunity for me was that the staff hadn't yet settled on a direction for the exhibit and I worked with them on that. We had their entire permanent collection to work with. (The Ecotarium was founded in 1825 as the Worcester Lyceum of Natural History and the collection is a real mélange of things.)
We chose to use the idea of tree as the theme of the orientation exhibition. I've worked a lot with the archetype of tree. From my travels in Nepal and the Himalayas, I found that tree served as an architecture and focus for devotion that embodied a lot of meanings on many levels in both Hindu and Buddhist cultures, and I became very interested in looking at how tree has been understood as an archetypal space in cultures all over the world. Tree is also obviously a very contemporary way of understanding our relationship to the natural world, particularly as a model for the interdependence of all life.
When you first see it the EcoTarium exhibit it looks very unprepossessing--just like a large cabinet. But then you become aware of all the different components: things you can open and shut, drawers and doors, sliding panels. It just sucks you right in! As a visitor you want to say, 'what's behind this, what's in this drawer?'
Yes, it is a little 'cabinet of discovery,' compact but hopefully working on many levels. We wanted people to experience and think about a whole medley of things through the medium of the tree and its community. In addition to tree- and forest-related objects from the EcoTarium's collection, we included a whole drawer of stories and myths relating to 'tree' in different cultures. We also assembled a slide exhibition that shows the way 'tree' functions both as meaning and metaphor, how we make and build things out of trees, and the kinds of environment that trees help create.
Many people contributed to the exhibit. Six Clark faculty provided original artwork related to tree, including Sarah Walker (painting), Steve DiRado (photography), and Ron Rosenstock (photography). I also hired a wonderful illustrator to do the drawings for an interactive section on cycles of the natural world.
The exhibit's small size was an unusual scale for me to work with. Usually I'm working with a large area in which people move through the space. Here the space is compressed, but I enjoyed that density and the fact that you could make a lot happen in a cabinet or a drawer. We tried to make each part of it full of layers so you could discover, repeatedly! And that's the idea of EcoTarium--that process of discovery.
Was the cabinet was custom-designed?
Yes. The cabinet had to fit along one exterior wall of the museum shop. That was the given. I had to make whatever I did consistent what the architect for the building project had already done. But within that constraint I could create any kind of format.
In any exhibition project you're always working with some kind of requirement or constraint. Then you improvise and expand and bring new ideas to bear within it. Usually in design we are working with certain factors that are given. We're in dialogue with a client's needs, an existing condition or structure or landscape. In contrast, fine artists ask: 'what can I create, what direction do I want to go given certain tools?' For a designer the constraint fuels and charges the whole process in a particular direction that he or she then moves out from.
I think creativity can be seen as first an opening and a listening. Knowing when and how much to open and expand, and when to start making choices and narrowing, is part of it. A designer is usually asked to get involved with a project because there's an understood need. You hope that in the process of working with a client that there's room for exploration, for 'not knowing,' for spending time with things in an open way when we don't know what the answer is. Then we let things arise, we listen and sense what is needed.
Each designer brings experience and certain kinds of training to the design process, as well as his or her own voice and aesthetic. But each design situation is new, an unfolding in a unique moment.
There's a particular balance in exhibition design that I've had to become sensitive to. Some exhibitions require knowing when to get out of the way so that the materials in the exhibit can shine and speak for themselves. There's a degree of control and attention that goes into "getting out of the way". You have to make sure that the theater of it doesn't eclipse the integrity of what's being displayed. The other extreme is one in which the designer creates a whole experience that is much more than the materials themselves. The experience is the exhibit. Most projects are combinations.
Since the EcoTarium project, you've worked on a spring 2001 exhibit for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence.
The RISD exhibit focused on a Providence dressmaker's shop in the twenties and thirties, run by two Italian sisters, the Tirocchis. Their shop was left virtually intact until recently, when it was donated to RISD. For this project, I had a large space to work with and a very large body of material--including sewing equipment, dresses, textiles, letters, photographs, correspondence, and business records--that I helped to cull and select. The installation, involving fragile textiles and costumes, was complex and challenging, especially given the conservation issues involved. I worked closely with the curator, who had a strong sense of the history of the shop and how that resonated with the art and fashion of the times (1915 through 1943), and how Providence and its elite participated in the trends of the time. So I developed a form for a rich story that was fairly well developed by the scholars involved.
Tell me a little about the project you've just finished at Yale University Art Gallery.
The Art Gallery wanted to celebrate Yale's tercentennial and its role in that. The resulting exhibit, 'Art for Yale: Defining Moments,' focuses on the story of the arts at Yale since 1701, and draws on objects from the gallery's permanent collection, which we selected in collaboration with the museum's curators. The purpose of the exhibit is to showcase the events, people, places, and collections that helped shape and make the Yale Art Gallery what it is today. The curator and I wanted to develop an exhibit that would be meaningful and exciting in a historical context, as well as very human in its voice, its texture.
I've had a strong connection with the arts at Yale for many years, having done my MFA degree there; I also worked on the Gallery staff as a lecturer for several years before graduate school, and I've consulted with them on the design of many exhibitions since then. So I have a real appreciation for the uniqueness of the place, its extraordinary collection, the excellence of the building, the intimate teaching and learning experiences that are possible there. I wanted to make sure that the exhibit represented the aspect of the Gallery that has to do with students of all ages, and the New Haven community. So we developed a very layered project, representing voices of the people over the last 300 years that have cared about the place. There are stories, images, photographs, and videos, as well as 125 of the greatest works of art in the collection. It was a complex mix, and I'm excited about what I did architecturally with it, and with the graphics as well -- I used several new technologies for wall graphics, and for a huge (25' in diameter) spiral on the floor, listing all the exhibitions ever done there!
There were particular challenges involved in putting together this exhibit.... bringing the human voice into this project.... making the exhibit 'read' three-dimensionally. So much material was textual in nature. Maybe it would have made a better book! That's always a crucial question in graphic design--what form should something take.
I worked it out with a basic architecture of thirteen large frosted plexi panels that provide a linear, historical "spine" through the show, surrounded by the collections. The floor spiral is the counterbalance, a moment when the three hundred years of events and people becomes a circle, when time is non-linear, and the gifts of all who have made this place can be experienced as if they continue to be present. A group of sheer panels line all the windows, and include the names of all the donors to the collections (over 3000). A patchwork wall of 11-inch squares includes quotes from many different people who have loved the Gallery, and used it well. Interspersed throughout the exhibition are quotations by, for example, a donor in 1870 juxtaposed with the words of a local 6th grade child, addressing similar feelings and thoughts. I feel good about how human the project feels. And I'm happy with the way the exhibition design makes it possible to tell a story that probably couldn't be told as well in any other form.
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Additional Resources
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Sarah Buie
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On the creative process