The Museum of Dad

Bringing you a project update from Hilary Nicoll, 2025 Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal.

Taking part in the MICRO-MACRO group residency at The Museum of Loss and Renewal in Collemacchia in October 2024 was a pivotal experience for me. I wanted to find time and space to pick up where I had left off with my blog ‘The Museum of Dad’ , written between 2012 and 2015. In it I imagine familial objects and artifacts as the collection of a fictitious museum and explore their relationship to memory and identity as it is lost to dementia. The blog now acts as field notes for a project that has become central to my academic research and underpins a re-invigorated creative practice.
 
The idea of the museum and the relationship of the objects it holds to memory loss and retrieval connects personal artefacts to the wider worlds that made them. In the collection are plans and drawings from the utopian heyday of modernist architecture, materials that speak of the post-war consensus and national rebuilding programme, letters that bring the trauma and loss of the Second World War into sharp focus and music and artworks that tell of creativity as a driving force in lost lives. Through the collection, striking connections and uncanny coincidences are made, that include links to the works of writer W G Sebald, and become ways to think further on individual and collective memory and its obliteration, whether by accident or design.
 
Most recently I have become interested in presenting the project in public settings, focussing on creating narrative across images to build story and open up dialogue with others. In June I gave a talk entitled ’The Museum of Dad; An Architectural Guided Tour’ at Dundee Rep Theatre, Scotland as part of the Architecture Fringe Festival, which I will present again on 6th September at The Byre Theatre in St Andrews.
 
I have also explored the use of graphic elements from the collection in new artworks, pictured here. A series of architectural perspective drawings from the early 1960s visually encapsulate for me the future-facing optimism of the era while also poetically linking to ideas of the vanishing-point, a place beyond which things become lost from view. Transparent inks, layering and other visual reference points play to the strengths of the medium and build up the sense of things vanished, remembered and lost again.
 
Some of this work will be available in The Museum of Loss and Renewal online shop later this year.
 
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Hilary Nicoll (she/her)
@Hilary Nicoll
 
Hilary (GB-SCT) is an artist and curator who has worked in Higher Education, leadership and advisory roles in the contemporary visual arts in the UK for 30 years. 
 
Now a Senior Lecturer at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Scotland her creative practice and academic research focus on positioning the familial archive as a site of object-memory inter-relationship, with a focus on material collected by her late father, Andrew Nicoll, architect and jazz musician, before his death from Alzheimer’s in 2016.
 
Hilary’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal across 2025 includes co-devising practice and research events, exhibiting and publishing.
 
Keywords / Archive, Collection, Object-Memory