Project summary

The Profiles of the Past initiative is focused on British portrait silhouette history, telling a story that has developed over the last 250 years and which is still a rich and intriguing part of life today. The project is being developed by The Brunswick Town Charitable Trust and The Regency Town House Heritage Centre, who are co-operating with members of the Silhouette Collectors Club.

Research

Our project begins with a period of intense research, involving silhouette experts, to arrive at a definitive list of objects and records that tell the story of the silhouette in Great Britain. We are also specifically exploring Brighton’s silhouette heritage; the trade catering to fashionable visitors and the growing number of silhouette booths that helped ordinary people to capture the memory of their day at the seaside.

Leading historians will contextualise silhouette history in relation to themes such as: costume, family and home, social history, colonialism, conflict and war; these last topics being designed to cater to blind veterans, as well as others interested in military history.

These themes will permeate this website, as it develops, and the exhibitions described below.

Website

As the Profiles of the Past project evolves, this website and online gallery will provide a permanent home for a definitive virtual silhouette collection and all the original research materials gathered in the course of developing the website and presenting the exhibitions associated with the project. It will include a powerful search engine and learning resources, as well as online games to attract younger visitors.

The website will include tools to enable members of the public to upload images and data about silhouettes they own, so as to expand the online collection and capture these most hidden of silhouette treasures.

Exhibitions

There will be a key exhibition at our heritage centre in Brighton, during 2014, and four travelling exhibitions at other locations with a strong silhouette heritage. The dates and locations for all of these will be announced, on this website, shortly.

During the exhibitions, we will bring together silhouettes of unparalleled quality and scope to tell the story of the silhouette, contextualized with a comprehensive guide containing information about the makers, the sitters and the techniques employed.

We will also show the silhouette as an object for the masses: a souvenir of a visit, a memento of a partner or a reminder of a parting.

In addition, our exhibitions will offer:

  • A silhouette-cutter demonstrating traditional techniques of the craft
  • Workshops to teach visitors how to make silhouettes
  • Seminars that explore the history of the silhouette
  • A digital silhouette machine to capture, process and project the profiles of exhibition visitors into the display space.
  • A traditional silhouette machine, comprising projection screen, drawing table and pantograph, for use by parties of school children and other visitors.

Access

We will work with RNIB and Blind Veterans UK to develop techniques for making the best tactile images of silhouettes, for exhibition and download from our website.

Blind and partially sighted visitors will be able to access the exhibitions using tactile images, Braille notes and large print text. We will adapt our digital silhouette machine to enable blind veterans to produce tactile images of themselves and their friends. Deaf and hearing-impaired visitors will be supported with transcripts and captioning of the exhibition video and online content.

This website is built to a minimum of the W3C ‘AA’ accessibility standard.

Promotion

The exhibitions, the website and the online games will be promoted through social media, building on the online communities we have built around our Town House and MyHouseMyStreet websites:  www.rth.org.uk    www.mhms.org.uk

Training

All of this activity will provide hundreds of volunteers with thousands of hours of training and participation in archival research, designing exhibitions, heritage project management and web design and production. If you would like to get involved, or if you would just like further information about the project, please contact Nick Tyson via: +44 (0) 1273 206306 / nick@rth.org.uk / www.rth.org.uk