Page 18 - BNVTA CAMPAIGN Summer 2020

16
campaign Summer 2020
The Over the Fence Exhibition and the BNTVA Collection
Unfortunately, with the 2020 BNTVA conference being cancelled I could not tell you in person how successful the show was. We had 561 visitors in total. Though the number might not seem high please bear in mind the museum only opens 3 days a week for 6 hours a day and is situated on the 2nd floor of a building with no lift! But bearing all that in mind, there were still about 19 people a day visiting it. I have had many enquiries on whether there was going to be another exhibition and
I was already looking at bringing the show to different venues but with the lockdown going on everything is put on hold.
I think that it is important to understand how this exhibition came about. In 2019, I completed a Masters in Curation Practice at Leeds Arts University. As part of my research I wrote about and exhibited
some items relating to my father’s time in Maralinga. My father was Jim Perriman; he was billeted as a cook (RAF element) at Maralinga in 1963. He died in 1989 from Cancer when I was 6.
After his death, I discovered various items relating to his time at Maralinga and spent years learning more about them and I have now shown his collection of objects and ephemera at various conferences and events. Through these events and via further explorations into existing museum collections, it has demonstrated the importance of preserving the social history of the tests.
Therefore, I offered my services to the BNTVA at the start of 2020 to help build the BNTVA collection which can be documented, preserved, and then loaned out
to museums in order to tell your
stories to the next generation, and raise awareness.
Over the next few editions of the campaign magazine I will share some of the items in the collection.
Hello, I am Wesley Perriman, I am the new BNTVA Curator. Last year I set up the "Over the Fence..." exhibition at the Peace Museum 10th October-20th December, which was co-curated with Dr Becky Alexis-Martin.