How Portsmouth Museum Took Art to the Parks, Cemeteries and Communities That Needed It Most

What does meaningful community engagement look like when you strip away the grand budgets and the elaborate programming? For Portsmouth Museum & Art Gallery, it looked like a tuk-tuk, a backpack full of pencils, and a willingness to meet people exactly where they were.

Between August 2024 and September 2025, the museum ran Unlocking the Quietness of Feeling — a community programme built around a permanent collection of landscape paintings by Benjamin Horton, whose daughter donated around 300 works to the museum in 1973. Over the course of the project, the team engaged 2,500 residents across the city through 75 nature-based and art activities. Not in the gallery. Out in parks, gardens, cemeteries and community centres. With toddlers, young carers, people with dementia, refugees, adults with SEND needs, and families eligible for free school meals.

At a recent MuseumNext session, Grace Scott and Mathilde Chanvin from Portsmouth Museum Service presented the project as a case study in practical, transferable community engagement. Here’s what they shared.

Start with one simple, universal theme

The first decision — and arguably the most important — was to anchor everything to something accessible. For Portsmouth, that was trees. Horton’s paintings are full of them: loose, expressive, light-dappled. A tree is something anyone can respond to regardless of age, background or experience of art.

“One simple thing can open the door to so many activities,” said Chanvin. “The light, the pattern, what you can see from a painting — it becomes a gateway to all kinds of conversation.”

The lesson for other museums is straightforward: look at your collection and find the thread that doesn’t require prior knowledge to pull on. It might be identity, or water, or the human face. Keep it simple, and let it do the work.

Make it low barrier — and mean it

Free entry is one way to lower the barrier. Bringing the activity to where people already are is another. But the team at Portsmouth went further, building programmes specifically for groups who often fall outside mainstream museum outreach: refugees and asylum seekers through Portsmouth City of Sanctuary, families from deprived backgrounds, young carers, adults living with dementia, and people with no prior experience of making art whatsoever.

One participant, Connie, described attending her first charcoal workshop with no background in art at all. The artist showed the group how to cover a page in black and then use their fingers to form shapes. “I told myself: this is incredible, easy, and simple,” she said. “From that point, it changed everything. Now I know colour. I know light and shadow. And nature connects to me.”

The practical principles the team developed: no pressure around artistic skill or experience; flexibility about how long someone stays (five minutes counts); inexpensive or free materials; and artists who were community-minded enough to adapt their session in the moment to the group’s energy and needs.

Use guided looking as a bridge into making

Before any activity, the team would spend time in front of the paintings — not lecturing, but looking together. Participants were encouraged to notice details: the loose brushwork suggesting a distant sheep, the way a few strokes of colour become a leaf, the hidden animals tucked into pastoral scenes. The aim was to make looking feel personal rather than academic.

“It’s not so much about art history,” Chanvin explained. “It’s about personal experience and how you respond to the paintings.”

A participant from Portsmouth City of Sanctuary described how the approach affected them: “It made me feel relaxed and calm. In some of the scenes I could really imagine myself sat amongst huge trees. It felt good to be discussing art and has ignited some creativity in me.”

This slow, mindful introduction does something useful: it hands ownership of the experience to the participant before they’ve picked up a pencil. The art becomes a starting point for their own stories, not a test they might fail.

Collaborate with artists who can flex

The programme involved a range of art forms — charcoal drawing, ceramic tile painting, macramé, clay work, watercolour — each connected back to the Horton collection. But the success of the workshops depended less on the specific medium and more on the artists involved.

“The idea is not to have a structure that knew exactly what to do,” said Chanvin. “The artists need to connect with the community and adapt to the needs and emotions of the group.”

When participants worked with clay, some shaped leaves and wrote messages about nature in their own languages, connecting the activity to their own culture and experience. When they worked with charcoal, one participant described the pleasure of “experimenting with different shades and etching out light areas by scratching the tile” — trying something ambitious, being happy with the result, and finding the challenge itself worthwhile.

The key, the team argued, is recruiting artists who treat community sessions as genuine creative encounters rather than delivery slots.

Take your collection outside

This may be the most transferable lesson of all. Portsmouth used the library service’s tuk-tuk to bring art materials to parks across the city. In its absence, a backpack works just as well: a clipboard, paper, pencils, a catalogue of the collection, and a couple of large printed images of key works.

The activity itself — sitting quietly and drawing a tree — was simple enough that no one needed to feel daunted. Stickers helped too, particularly with children, as a low-key signal that the session was informal and unjudged.

One memorable moment Chanvin described: an elderly woman who lived across the road from a small park noticed the tuk-tuk, came over out of curiosity, and spent ten minutes drawing a tree. She then went home, retrieved a book of art she loved, and came back to look through it with Chanvin together.

Not every engagement needs to be a programme. Sometimes it’s just a moment of connection sparked by bringing something unexpected into an ordinary afternoon.

Think beyond the obvious venue

Cemeteries might not seem like natural partners for a museum art programme. Portsmouth’s team found them to be some of the most quietly powerful spaces in the city.

Working with the local cemetery service, they ran six sessions in Portsmouth’s historic burial grounds and memorial gardens — on Saturday mornings, across the warmer months, open to families. Participants sketched specific trees, flowers and features within the grounds, connecting through art to local history and heritage they may never have explored before.

“Some participants discovered places that were really close to their home that they had never visited,” Chanvin noted. “It was something unusual that related to the exhibition and connected people with their local space.”

The quietness of those settings turned out to be part of the point — a natural extension of an exhibition whose very title invited stillness and feeling.

Celebrate the people, not just the work

At the end of the project, the team had accumulated a remarkable body of work: macramé trees, charcoal sketches, watercolours, ceramic tiles, poetry written by young carers. Rather than archive it, they made it the centrepiece of a proper exhibition — with professional frames, labels and a closing celebration complete with a cake decorated with edible paints.

“It was their ownership,” said Chanvin. “Participants brought family and friends. We had a speech and a poetry performance.”

For many participants, it was the first time their work had been displayed in a museum. The celebration wasn’t an add-on — it was the culmination of a year in which the museum had consistently said: your experience of art is valid, your creativity is real, and you belong here.

The bigger picture

Unlocking the Quietness of Feeling is a useful reminder that the most meaningful museum work often doesn’t happen inside museum walls. It happens when an institution is willing to leave the building, lower every possible barrier, and trust that a tree, a pencil and a little time can open something up in people that nothing else reaches.

The budget was modest. The materials were basic. The theme was a single word. The impact, for 2,500 people across Portsmouth, was anything but.

Grace Scott and Mathilde Chanvin presented this case study at MuseumNext. For more information about the programme, contact Portsmouth Museum Service.