Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery: Multistory, Raf Turki

 This exhibition runs until the 31st January 2026.

The heart of this exhibition, is tucked away in a corner, behind a screen so it does not immediately reveal itself.  Twelve residents of Cornwall who originally come from a different country were invited to produce a diorama of their story.  Each of these people were paired with a local artist to make the diorama.

As you walk in to the gallery, you are met with many photographs of the people who took part.  Faces of concentration, happiness, friendship and collaboration.  Looking at the photo's it's not easy to tell who is who.  It does not matter though.  Emotions do the talking here.

I adored the dioramas.  Little tiny windows in to people's lives.  Underneath each was a bit about the person whose story they told.  People from different parts of the world with very different experiences.  Amongst the beauty of the art, there are stories of hardship and loss.  These are not people who had easy lives.  Some people chose to focus on their hope for the future and enjoyment of their life now.  Others remembered happier times in a home now lost to them.

The artists making the dioramas had very different skills and the results are diverse.  I would like to have understood a bit more of the process of making the dioramas, but that's me.  I like the craft of things.  I struggle a little with facial recognition and don't always find emotion easy to read, so the photography part of the exhibition was a little impenetrable without annotations.  I understood the point though, to convey that we are all human, our differences matter less than our similarities.  I could also appreciate the skill of the photography.  I would like for someone to capture such good images of me.

It's a beautiful project.

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