for this workshop led by Abbie, we planned a visit to BT archives in Holborn, where we were given a tour of BT’s history through images, leaflets, advertisements, letters, and objects. This was an interesting tour as we got to see original copies of designs for the telephone boxes and telecommunication poles, as well as detailed explanations of the evolution of BT in the UK.
The task
When we had our second workshop in January 2025, we were put into groups of 3-4 and discussed our experiences at the archives, as well as showed each other photos we had taken at the archives. Our task was to create an index that surpassed the conventional methods of indexing. Interestingly, I had mainly taken photos of advertisements and images of women working at BT. Thus, our group decided to make an index of the images we took at the archive and categorise them in “women” – more specifically feminism and the evolution of roles women had at BT.
We arranged the index in a collage style, where more ‘feminine’ jobs like modeling for advertisements and working as receptionists evolved into more ‘masculine’ jobs like engineers, and finally managers from left to right. We also then sewed into key images from our index using different thread colours to depict the negative connotations of working women in the past and how it has gotten less and less controversial in modern times (from solid thread to transparent thread), while also noting the ‘feminine’ craft of quilting.
Other group’s work
Leave a Reply