Our BRAND NEW Storylab Gallery: Behind the Scenes

Seven Stories, as we all know, has seven floors! The sixth floor has been undergoing refurbishment for the past three weeks, and has now opened its doors to the public.

The floor now boasts a small dedicated gallery space - designed to host small scale exhibitions for 3-4 months - as well as the 'Storylab Studio', which is a new room to accommodate larger groups for all different kinds of booked workshops and training sessions. 

Here are a few images of the transformation of the room to the calming gallery space we now have. This new gallery will allow us to display our Collection - especially newly acquired archives - much more quickly, and also allow for external exhibitions to be brought in.

During the transformation the lighting tracks were altered to gallery style lighting, and the windows were blocked to protect the delicate artworks from harmful light levels. We also removed the original graphics, and added two new walls. We kept the two display cases that have been in here for some time, to continue to display 3D items.

Storylab BEFORE 

Storylab BEFORE

Storylab mid-transformation 

Storylab mid-transformation

Storylab mid-transformation

Storylab mid-transformation

Storylab mid-transformation

Gallery FINISHED

Gallery FINISHED

Gallery FINISHED

Gallery FINISHED

Gallery FINISHED 

Gallery FINISHED

The current display is 'Picturebooks in Progress', which uses our Collection to show how a picturebook is created - from early ideas to final artwork.

This exhibition is one of the outcomes of a large scale learning project, funded by the Arts Council. For the past year, members of our Learning Team have been working with higher education and further education students around the country, using the Seven Stories Collection as inspiration for their illustration work. The material that was used to inspire them is now on display, alongside a film of the project. Find out more about the project in an upcoming blog post!

Find out more about the gallery here.

Alison (the Curator)