Love Letters to Josephine forms part of The Bowes Museum’s multi-year

Reimagine Project, an ambitious programme that radically reinterprets the museum’s founding story through co-production with local communities. Supported by partners including UTASS and Weardale Together, the project invites participants to explore their own histories, interests, and creative identities while producing new work for three redeveloped gallery spaces opening in 2026. The wider initiative aims to bring community voices into the museum, deepen relevance, and create meaningful artistic interventions shaped collaboratively with curators, designers, and participants.

 

Building on themes developed by Weardale Together during phase 1,

including Josephine Bowes’ botanical studies, women and nature, landscape, and the museum as Josephine’s legacy, the Love Letters to Josephine commission centres on co-creating a cohesive artwork combining surface pattern design, mixed-media compositions, and contemporary artist books. Across seven participatory sessions, we developed visual studies, print and mark-making experiments, calligraphic text, and mixed-media pieces inspired by Josephine’s life, the museum building and grounds, and objects from the collection. These elements will be brought together into a series of artist books and mounted compositions that form a unified installation for the new galleries, being installed in spring 2026.