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“Not Made In Great Yarmouth” Exhibition
Time & Tide Museum, Great Yarmouth
Digital Artist in Residence
June - September 2024
As Digital Artist in Residence, I collaborated with Creative Enterprise Professional Diploma students at East Norfolk Sixth Form College to create an experimental digital response to the migratory and colonial journeys of museum artefacts. Through self-taught mastery of Unreal Engine, I designed and built an immersive virtual environment that integrated student contributions with my own creative elements.
The exhibition design featured multiple viewing experiences: a custom-spray painted arcade cabinet reflecting the town's iconic beachfront gaming culture, alongside a large projection screen allowing audiences to view the virtual journey while others explore through VR headset. Within this immersive installation, museum artefacts were held in cargo crates on a reimagined Great Yarmouth shore. Opening these virtual crates symbolised unlocking the secrets of the past, revealing the narratives, cultures, and lives preserved within. I developed the environment design, animations, and illustrations, weaving these together with student-created game sprites, soundscapes, illustrations and 3D scans of artefacts. For each of their chosen artefacts, I created responsive poems, adding layers of interpretation to the digital landscape.
Our collective goal was to explore objects through a decolonial lens, creating a virtual Great Yarmouth dreamscape. Through walking tour workshops, we photographed the town to situate our multidisciplinary responses to the journeys and heritage of museum artefacts. Working remotely between Sheffield and Great Yarmouth pushed us to experiment with new methods of digital collaboration, culminating in my integration of all elements into a cohesive virtual experience.
I delivered a series of workshops for the students:
Walking Tour: Documenting Great Yarmouth's heritage and landscape
Decolonial Lens Seminars: Critical discussions about examining museum collections and artefact heritage
3D Scanning Workshops: Technical training to digitally document museum artefacts
Exhibition Development: Collaborative brainstorming and concept development
College Testimonial
"We are very proud to have been involved in the Not Made in Great Yarmouth project. Under the tuition of Sheffield artist, Grace Lee, our students have really explored the artefacts in one of Norfolk's leading museums. They've learnt the stories, histories and heritages of a variety of exhibits and have relished responding creatively to this research. This has been an excellent way to invest in the concept of home and belonging, and to bring items and their journeys back to life."
Louise Gooch, Teacher
Level 4 Creative Enterprise Professional Diploma
East Norfolk Sixth Form College
PROCESS & DEVELOPMENT
Journey through the technical creation: 3D artifact scanning, poetry animations, environment building in Unreal Engine, and the integration of collaborative elements into the final VR experience.
Exhibition Documentation
