Opening this week! This audio-described tour at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery explores the history of disability over time. Created and produced by In-sight, a group made up of D/deaf, Disabled, and neurodivergent individuals, the tour highlights eleven carefully selected stories from the collection, shedding light on often-overlooked disability histories.
Throughout the tour, you’ll hear directly from the In-sight group as they share the stories they have researched over the past year. The semi-permanent trail has also been designed to be multi-sensory, so you can touch, listen and smell the objects as you go along. The three aromas included in the tour were designed by AVM Curiosities in collaboration with the In-sight team, they include:
The Smell of Laudanum | Scent notes: saffron, castor, musk, ambergris, nutmeg, almond, vanilla
Laudanum, as listed in the London Pharmacopoeia (1618), was a pill made from opium, saffron, castor, ambergris, musk and nutmeg. The opium poppy is typically described as having a sweet, floral smell, which some people describe as similar to that of almonds or vanilla. In Laudanum, this aroma may have been enhanced by other fragrant ingredients to create the aromatic sensation of ‘a dangerous flower’.
The Smell of Dinosaurs | Scent notes: volcanic, swamp, damp, bodily, vegetal
From the leather binding to the aging pages that smell like an old library, this sketchbook is an aromatic object in its own right. But what if we delved further into Philip James Rufford’s sketch book and thought about what these dinosaurs might have smelt like when they were alive? Does the smell help you imagine being with them in their landscape and in their time?
The Smell of Posset Pots | Scent notes: port, sherry, wine, cinnamon, syrup, sweet
The posset pot was a type of lidded vessel used in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for posset, a drink made from a mixture of curdled milk, spices, and alcohol. While sadly you won’t be able to take a sip of posset in the museum, you can have a sniff of this fragrance, which replicates the aromas of the dish.
Disability History Audio Tour | Scent Design by AVM Curiosities | Hastings Museum & Art Gallery | Hastings | 7 October 2024 - 1 October 2027 | Click here for more infomation.
