‘Re-Dressed’: Using an artistic response to study historic collections in the Foundling Museum, London

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The Foundling Hospital in London has long fostered associations with artists, including Handel and Dickens, as interpreters of child abandonment. The Foundling Museum continues this association today with programs for both practising artists and children who are invited to interrogate their collections. The resultant artistic responses help to build a greater understanding and awareness of children’s needs. In this paper, we look at how artists have responded to the Foundling Museum’s collections, what they have chosen to focus on and how they have used their art to create an ongoing affective engagement.

Moreover, we have also employed an arts-based research practice to respond to the affective experience of engaging specifically with the token collection of the Foundling Museum. The tokens are items of identity left with surrendered children, that have become the residual material fragments of past lives and memories. They include pieces of jewellery, coins, trinkets and fabric swatches.
We use paper, pens, paint, fabric, and thread to create a meaning-making process out of our encounter with the token collection. An encounter is relational and unexpected, it forces a new understanding, from which there is no backward turn. In the Foundling Museum we found interconnectedness across museology, history and practice-based research. This fusion of the theoretical and practical resulted in our (re)-dressing the foundlings of the past by constructing a piece of clothing that is not an imagined historical reconstruction, rather it is an arts-based response to the collection and our research. We created what Jackson and Mazzei (2023, p. 2) call an ‘assemblage in formation’. In this presentation we share how art has long been used for social change at the Foundling Hospital and Museum, and how our baby gown joins this tradition.