The main real-world element of our exhibition is audience engagement. We created didactics to encourage the audience to interact with our objects, and engage with the story of the Arbors and Codans. I worry people will be apprehensive to interact with our work because they are trying to be polite. Our group cannot gauge whether the audience will understand Codae or be able to form their own opinions on the story we present because we are too close to the story. I don’t want to hover around making sure people consume our work ‘correctly’ so the didactics and flow of the exhibition will be hugely important. Narrative is a “human meaning-making tool in mediating the mutual relationship of spatial form, museological content and meaning” (Schorch, 2013). Our narrative and its ease of understanding is the most important part of our work. Inversely, I wonder if we have spelled too much of the story out for the audience. They are intelligent enough to form their own opinion and narrative on our work—overly-specific didactics will inhibit their ability to interpret our work naturally. We have been working on a brochure that mirrors the information on didactics and invites people to look for the hidden objects in the sandbox. This is another element that may change the way the audience interprets our work.

I left the French-beaded mushrooms to the last minute because I had to create my own pattern. They were easy enough to make in the end but had I done more testing they would have been more refined and exactly how I wanted.

Schorch, P. (2013) ‘The experience of a museum space’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 28(2). doi:10.1080/09647775.2013.776797.