Images of Nature: exploration of nature through art. Treasures: displays items of scientific, historical and cultural importance.
The Images of Nature gallery at the Natural History Museum encourages visitors to explore nature through the extensive art collection at the Museum. Visual contrast between finishes makes the gallery easy to navigate; there is also a choice of ways to engage with the collection.
Inclusive provision includes: easy to approach plinths, displays and screens; clear print display panels; handling objects; large print text options and image magnification on interactive screens; an informative and evocative audio description for blind and partially sighted visitors; British Sign Language delivered by a deaf art historian on video interactive screens; a quality Easy Read guide for people with learning disabilities but used by lots more people!
To achieve this inclusive gallery experience, the scope of work undertaken collaboratively with Disability Consultant Alex Cowan covered facilitation of inclusive design workshops, involvement of deaf and disabled people as professional advisors, consultation with deaf and disabled people for a visitor view point, design appraisal and on-going inclusive design advice.
Treasures in the Cadogan Gallery builds on this experience of Images of Nature and includes raised text labels with Braille for the handling objects; a physical indicator as a link between each object position and audio description downloadable in-gallery.