Exhibitions Soldiers On

Our Museum Exhibitions Department tends to be a hands-on, practical, deadline-driven operation.

So for our Department, working from home had a few challenges during the Covid Lockdown to say the least, given both our Museum galleries and Workshop facilities were off line. During this time our team was busy doing concept development and research and auditing tasks for our upcoming projects. These have paid dividends in project streamlining and cost savings, due to the time available to refine our thinking on processes about to be undertaken in constructing the new interactive area, which is only one of our upcoming projects at the National Army Museum Te Mata Toa in Waiouru.

Coming out of this world wide crisis many organisations will have to undertake a rebuild of their customer base in this new Covidly altered landscape. Our small contribution to this process is to develop new and fresh exhibitions for visitors to see as soon as the Museum can safely open its doors again post Lockdown.

To this end our department has been on the job for the last fortnight working towards this outcome as we are able, given the safety regulations put in place by the NZ Govt. and our management team. Access to the Museum space is limited but a gallery change is already underway and a new exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe is being installed and will be ready for our re-opening with fresh things to see.

We are fortunate our workshop studio space is quite separate from the Museum in another location; this enables us to press on safely, within given safety guidelines, to create the visual mock ups and design tools which will communicate the concept to the Museum staff and speed its production.

This effort by the exhibitions team will have an impact on the progress of the coming interactive area in a positive way prior to its construction and installation. Wherever possible, we are constructing components for the new design to be completed, painted and stored, to await completion of the larger components which have been material supply sensitive up until this point.

So heading out of the lockdown, exhibitions will hit the ground running and our Museum will have something new to offer our visitors straight off. This is immensely satisfying to my team and to myself - and hopefully to the first visitors through the door at NAM after the environment returns to normal when lockdown is over.