1 OBJECT, 31 DAYS, AND A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES

One Grain
Publication Launch
Distributed Saturday 3rd-Sunday 4th June 2017
Celebration Sunday 4th 2pm-4pm
Bewdley Museum, Load Street, Bewdley DY12 2AE

One Grain was a participative research project at the old Brass Foundry in Bewdley Museum involving members of the public. One object from the museum collections was investigated everyday during July 2016 by a team of volunteers, visitors, staff, and invited experts.

Starting with a tiny apothecaries weight, 1 a ‘one grain’ measure cut from a sheet of brass forged in the Exley foundry that now forms part of the museum, we worked together to build a giant biography of a single object.

Just like humans, an object has a biography. It is a point of contact for an interconnected network of people and other objects, which are themselves part of a further network (and so on). We wanted to try and tell the story of this network.

What is the material composition of the brass weight? What is its history? What was its social importance? Who are the people who have held it? What is the story of the things it has weighed? How far have they travelled? Of course the network is potentially endless and mapping it is an impossible task, but what
might it mean to try?

This free publication is a snapshot of the research. In fact, it is a very small proportion of the things we discovered. You can see where we followed leads and pursued hunches. We started with the ‘one grain’ weight but very quickly found ourselves researching all kinds of other things, from ancient histories to zoological classifications. Some of the links are obvious, others less so. The project showed that every person, and every thing, on our planet is connected.