What Happens When You Set an Artwork Free? The Sainsbury Centre’s Day Release Project

What if a museum’s most powerful act wasn’t bringing people through its doors, but sending its artworks out into the world instead? At the Museum Digital Summit 2026, Beatrice Prutton, Digital Communications and Creative Curator at the Sainsbury Centre, presented Day Release — a film series that does exactly that.

Museums have been producing digital content about their collections for years. Explainer videos, curator interviews, virtual tours — the formats are familiar. Day Release is something else entirely. Rather than documenting art within the gallery, the Sainsbury Centre physically transports priceless works out of the museum and into the places that shaped them, then films what happens when they arrive.

The result is a series of scripted, dramatic short films in which artworks appear not as objects to be explained, but as living characters navigating the world — and the people in it.

A Museum Built on a Different Philosophy

To understand Day Release, it helps to understand the Sainsbury Centre. Founded in 1978 following a gift from Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, the museum was conceived as a deliberate rejection of the Victorian model — no hierarchies, no divisions between artworks and their makers, no glass cases keeping people at a respectful distance. Since a major relaunch in 2023, the museum has taken that philosophy a step further, formally recognising all artworks as alive.

This isn’t just branding. It shapes everything the museum does. “We don’t just host objects,” explained Prutton. “We house living presences. We aim to give agency to our artworks, empowering them to join conversations and form relationships with people.”

Day Release is the most literal expression of that idea yet.

Freeing the Works

The first two films in the series each centre on a work whose history is inseparable from a specific place and set of human experiences.

In the first, Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait of P.L., No. 2 — a portrait of Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy — is granted day release to the Colony Room Club in Soho, the legendary drinking den where Bacon spent much of his life.

The film unfolds as a conversation between the painting, a young gay barman struggling with internalized shame, and a knowing older regular. Through the artwork’s voice, Bacon’s own life story — his relationship with Lacy, his way of materialising pain and joy into paint — becomes a lens for examining what has and hasn’t changed for LGBTQIA+ people across the decades.

In the second film, Henry Moore’s Mother and Child returns to Castleford, the Yorkshire town where Moore was born, to explore questions of social mobility and the weight of caring responsibilities.

In both cases, the artwork doesn’t explain itself. It listens, provokes, and witnesses — acting as what Prutton described as “a priest at confession,” absorbing decades of people’s stories and reflecting them back.

The Case for Scripted Storytelling

The decision to make dramatic films rather than documentaries was central to the project’s ambition. Traditional museum digital content, however well-made, tends to speak to people who already feel confident in gallery spaces. It assumes a degree of prior knowledge, or at least prior curiosity. Day Release was designed to reach people who have neither.

“Rather than producing talking-head style explanations, we decided to create scripted, dramatic films where the artwork becomes a living presence and catalyst for human connection,” said Prutton. “This storytelling approach transforms how audiences connect with museum collections — not as objects requiring expertise, but as emotional companions with their own histories and perspectives.”

By weaving each artwork’s history with characters facing parallel contemporary struggles, the films make the connection between past and present feel instinctive rather than instructed. Viewers don’t need to know who Francis Bacon was to recognise the conversation happening in that Soho bar.

Doing It for Real

Crucially, the Sainsbury Centre didn’t create digital simulations of these journeys. The artworks actually went. This required detailed conservation assessments, specialist art handlers, comprehensive insurance preparations, and security planning — a level of logistical complexity that sat alongside the creative work throughout the project.

The productions were developed in collaboration with Meantime Studio, the Estate of Francis Bacon, the Daisy Green Collection, and scriptwriting consultants including James McDermott and the MA Creative Writing cohort at the University of East Anglia. Every internal department at the museum had a role to play — something Prutton described as one of the most rewarding aspects of the entire project.

“Day Release brought another joy to the Sainsbury Centre,” she said. “It enabled every team across the museum to work together.”

Reaching People Who Weren’t Coming

The films were conceived as digital-first, freely available content from the outset — no ticket price, no travel required, no gallery threshold to cross. They live on YouTube and social media, meeting audiences where they already are.

The impact data reflects that ambition. The films have accumulated over one million views globally. Ninety-eight percent of viewers were first-time engagers with the Sainsbury Centre. Coverage followed in The Guardian and Museums Journal, and the project was nominated for a Heritage in Motion Award by the European Museum Academy and selected for screenings at the London Independent Film Festival.

Comments from viewers captured something harder to quantify: that the films genuinely seemed to bring the artworks to life, rather than simply document them.

A Model Worth Replicating

Prutton was clear that Day Release isn’t a one-off. A third film is currently in development, with ambitions to expand partnerships with global writers, consultants, and venues — and to continue platforming voices represented across the Sainsbury Centre’s wider international collection. All films will remain permanently accessible without a paywall.

The broader lesson the project offers to other institutions is less about production values and more about a shift in orientation. Instead of asking how to bring new audiences to art, Day Release asks what it would look like to bring art to them — on their terms, in their spaces, speaking to their lives.

“By giving voice to artworks that witness and feel our shared struggles,” said Prutton, “the films create pathways for visitors who never saw themselves in museum spaces to finally feel seen, understood, and welcomed.”

Beatrice Prutton is Digital Communications and Creative Curator at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich. Day Release films are freely available to watch on the Sainsbury Centre’s YouTube channel.