Last week we had the pleasure of installing our Pop-up Leitrim Women’s Museum to begin a new month-long residency in the wonderful Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim. The Pop-up Museum is part of “Leitrim Women Through Time” – a wider collaborative project with the North Leitrim Women’s Centre, and this initiative tries to address the issue of the lack of a county museum to display rural women’s history. We’re delighted to have the chance to display this free temporary museum of women’s history for February. All are very welcome to visit – the Sculpture Centre is open from Wednesday to Sunday, 11am – 4pm!
Huge thanks to Val Robus from the Magnumlady blog (www.magnumlady.com) who interviewed the LWTT team about the project, and who wrote a lovely review of the Museum – you can see the review and listen to the podcast at the following link:
Thanks to the support of Creative Ireland, we are working with the North Leitrim Women’s Centre to create Leitrim’s first Pop-up Women’s Museum in four public locations across the county in May and June! We have been working with the brilliant Women’s Centre since 2022, when we first established our community heritage project, Leitrim Women Through Time. Leitrim Women Through Time (LWTT) is a collaborative local history initiative run by the North Leitrim Women’s Centre and Scéal Heritage Consultancy, which celebrates and records the stories of everyday rural women neglected by history.
The Pop-up Leitrim Women’s Museum includes the display of the “Leitrim Women Through Time 1850 – 1950” travelling museum exhibition, created for the first phase of the project from recorded community stories. This is accompanied by a display of objects from rural women’s history, with examples of items from women’s work inside and outside the home, women’s craft, and women’s personal lives; all which tell stories of women’s lives in the near and distant past. These include a wide variety of objects from rural women’s lives including a spinning wheel, an antique Singer sewing machine, a butter churn, a washboard, Clones lace, Irish linen and knitting, and vintage household books and women’s magazines.
We are encouraging people to bring along their own photographs, documents, and objects linked to local women’s history to these events to be recorded by our overall project, and we will scan, copy, and photograph all shared information and objects to add to the project archive for preservation for the future. We also want this project to give people the opportunity to temporarily display their own objects linked to rural women in the Museum, and we currently have a public callout for local contributions for exhibition. The first date of this exciting new initiative took place on Wednesday 24th May in Leitrim County Library, and the Pop-up Museum will be in three more locations across the county over the next month!
Scéal Heritage Consultancy 