Mystery Objects at Cheney School

The Cabinet project was delighted to take part in Cheney School’s Iris Festival of Imagined Worlds, held on Friday 9th February. The Festival celebrated novels set in imaginary worlds, exploring how ancient myths and histories have often inspired these worlds, and showcased museum artefacts connected to imagined worlds and stories.  The Cabinet project has been developing interactive digital models of museum objects for use in university teaching and learning, and has produced a wide range of objects from different geographic locations, moments in history and ancient worlds.  For the Festival, we created a Cabinet of Mystery Objects and invited visitors to help us reconstruct their histories, uses, journeys and stories.

Objects included a Medieval marriage casket, a Mesopotamian cylinder seal, Ancient Egyptian pottery and an Elephant’s Tooth.  We were really impressed with the ways in which our visitors engaged with the objects and narrowed down details of their history and use.  We were so delighted with the ways in which our younger visitors engaged with Cabinet that we’re working with our museum colleagues to develop more initiatives of this kind. Watch this space!