Developed over 12 months in collaboration with members of the Scone Museum and the local community, Time Portal transforms the historic Scone Lock-up jail cell into a multisensory experience of light, sound, and moving image. Drawing on the museum’s collection — from 16mm film reels to a Victorian wedding dress, a prickly pear mincer to a brass fire helmet — the installation weaves together the hidden stories of the Upper Hunter region.

Time Portal was created by Case Collective — immersive artist Anna Fraser and creative producer Suzannah Jones.

In this insights interview, Anna and Suzannah discuss the collaboration, community participation and the creative process behind this immersive installation inspired by the stories within a regional museum collection.

Time Portal transforms a historic jail cell into an immersive digital artwork. What inspired you to reinterpret this unique museum space, and how did the museum’s collection shape the final installation?

Suzannah Jones:
I first came across the historic cell three years ago while working on another project at Scone Museum and immediately saw its potential. It was being used as storage at the time, but the museum members had already been thinking about activating the space publicly.

When Anna Fraser approached me looking for a regional community project, I immediately thought of the cell. We drove to Scone together, she saw the potential instantly, and from there I researched and wrote the grant application – in consultation with Anna and the museum – and we were successful in securing funding through Create NSW’s Creative Steps New Work program. It was my first grant as an independent Creative Producer after many years working with organisations, which made it all the more meaningful.

Anna Fraser:
Suzannah and the Museum had been working together to find a way to bring the space to life. As the immersive artist/designer, I came on board only after they had seen the potential for the space, so the initial idea to reinterpret the space comes from them. I think it is quite brave and forward thinking of both the Museum and Suzannah to bring these two worlds of a very object and artefact driven collection into a more elusive digital experience. It was exciting to interpret and be a part of. From the moment I stepped into the museum, I was excited by these two worlds meeting.

As I come from a very hybrid background of art meets design meets film meets this world of immersive, I was very much invested in the audience and their experience. So throughout the process, this was always with me.  I don’t really call myself an artist, and an ‘artist’ of a more traditional nature probably would have been more inclined to make anything they felt like, but I feel like that was not my approach.

My inspiration really came from the people, volunteers and the contributors to the museum and their love of social history.  I see them as keepers of not only the space, but the memories, the oral histories, and the ordinary but everyday details of history.  I was also struck by the chaos of collecting itself, how to hold on to these artefacts, why do we hold on to them, and how in that chaos there are so many things missing and absent. I was really drawn to the photography collection, which held so many beautiful haunting photos. While I didn’t use them in the final piece, there was one box marked unidentified photos – filled with portraits of people in their best clothes, staged in studios across the Hunter and Sydney, their identities lost to time, yet the photos are still there, almost alive for us to see. I was also drawn to the dresses of the 1920s, the needlework, the embroidery and the ’samplers’ of women and girls –  the embroidery, just incredible.

The project involved close collaboration with Scone Museum volunteers, local residents and students. How did community participation influence the creative development of Time Portal, and what did you learn from working with the Upper Hunter community?

Suzannah Jones:
The community input shaped this project significantly. Museum member Margaret MacDougall’s extraordinary knowledge of the collection revealed stories –  like Granny Sutton’s – that became one of the themes of the installation. The students’ fresh eyes on familiar objects produced animations that engaged and surprised us.

We ran workshops with Scone Grammar School and school holiday workshops for the wider community, with student work now displayed in the museum. The volunteer contribution was extraordinary – when I calculated the total in-kind value, it was substantial. The Upper Hunter community taught me that the appetite for this kind of engagement is alive. People want to see their stories told and their history celebrated.

Anna Fraser:
I really enjoyed working with the volunteers in the Museum and hopefully made some life long friends. In fact I am a little sad to not be going for a regular visit. I learnt a great easy apple slice recipe from Carol –  I’ve tested out a couple of times and it’s been a great success! In terms of the community though, it’s been interesting to experience the tight weave of the fabric of the place, how many people have long deep roots to the area, the interconnection of families, but also how welcoming and trusting they have been.

I did quite a lot of research for the kids workshops, getting down into some specific information, facts and storytelling, making some information packages, so it was interesting to see that most of them had no interest in my stories of choice and so we iterated and adapted on the go to find the things they were drawn to in the museum collection. The NSW brass fireman’s helmet was a big hit, possibly because, Margaret, the 90 year old curator gave one of her delightfully funny tours which included the helmet.  Regardless of my story failure,  I loved working with the kids and teenagers of Scone, finding them full of life and inspiring, but also getting the chance to see history and objects through their eyes has at times been pretty funny. In one of the holiday workshops we were animating kerosene lamps and when discussing why they were used one very young girl casually presented the entire reasoning of why they were no longer needed – we have solar that powers our phones, which powers our torches, which makes kerosene lamps obsolete! I really enjoy working with teenagers, they are funny, although sometimes challenging and always there to teach me something. As I said before, I very much had the audience experience in mind  so the workshops also allowed me to understand the audience of Scone and who might come to the museum from the local area – that was really important to me.

In creating Time Portal, did you explore opportunities to acknowledge or engage with the Aboriginal history and cultural stories of the region?

Suzannah Jones:
Through my work across the Upper Hunter, First Nations content is approached depending on the project, context and situation –  and in other projects, this content is very much explored.

In the case of Time Portal, the Scone Museum installation was intentionally designed around the museum’s existing collection, which contains minimal First Nations artifacts. During early development, we were advised that placing Aboriginal content within a former lock-up jail cell would be culturally inappropriate. Out of respect for that advice and cultural protocols, we made the decision not to include it in this specific display.

This scope was clearly communicated to Create NSW from the outset, with our initial application stating that First Nations content would not feature in this installation.

While we remain mindful of the region’s broader Aboriginal history, the scope of this project is strictly focused on activating a heritage jail cell with the museum’s core archival collection. Exploring First Nations history deserves a dedicated, separate project at another time, in consultation with the appropriate communities.

In your artist statement, you describe both the stories present in museum collections and the histories that are absent or fragmented. How did Time Portal explore these gaps, and why is it important for contemporary artists and museums to engage with them?

Anna Fraser:
As a white woman, who actually has the first fleet ancestor somewhere down the line, I found being in a settler collection pretty confronting at times. The museum collection, not unlike any other Australian collection, is overwhelmingly about settler colonisation – the absence of FN people and their experiences is visible. It leaves me with a deep sense of unease, a sadness. We had very specifically planned not to do any FN stories as it wasn’t respectful or appropriate.

Looking back through so much documentation you realise we can never have the full grasp of a moment, just a fragmented experience. It’s fleeting, with glimpses of information and images, but never a whole picture. Viewing the collection from the perspective of class, technology and gender, you also realise that people and things were lost before they were even thought to be captured – those that have social capital and time share their letters and have the technology to take photos, others with less are lost to time, destined to be forever absent.

We then have our own biases, which we fill the gaps with – I definitely felt I was looking through the lens of being a woman with probable bias and felt I responded to how women were spoken about, what their experience was through fabric and sewing, but also explored the power they had in the roles they could undertake, like Nursing and the CWA. At one point I madly tried to shove in some Buckjumpers to even up the gender, but Carolyn the President of the Museum assured me it was okay!

As humans, artists, designers, museums, film makers, cultural workers and the caretakers of institutions with collections, it’s important to go back and look through the past – the present moment can be hard to take in and understand, it’s often not until some time has passed that we understand what happened or how we felt, so taking the time to go back deeper into the past allows us to reflect not only on social, political, economic history, it also allows us to reflect on our own thoughts, experiences and emotions – a checking in with ourselves and the society we live in so we can, learn, adjust, adapt and change.

Time Portal combines local history, digital technology, sound and moving image to create a new way of experiencing a museum collection. What do you hope visitors take away from the installation, and what does the project reveal about the potential for regional museums to embrace contemporary creative practice?

Suzannah Jones:
I hope visitors leave feeling that history is not distant or irrelevant – that it lives in the objects around us and in the stories of ordinary people. Through our history we understand our present, and perhaps even our future – which in our current climate feels particularly important and relevant.

For me, the deeper question this project raises is about the untapped potential of regional museums. These are extraordinary repositories of community memory, often under-resourced and struggling to attract new audiences. Time Portal demonstrates what becomes possible when contemporary artists work deeply with a regional collection. The stories are already there – they just need new ways of being told.

Anna Fraser:
I worked with Gary Sinclar, the sound designer and composer on this piece to create an immersive work. Immersive projects really come to life with sound. They take you to another place that just an image can’t. In this instance the sound within the four concrete walls of the lock-up resonates into the audience, almost physically. I hope the audience can feel their own presence in the space, in the moment. Hopefully they catch a fleeting glimpse of stories, not quite complete –  a subtle movement unexplained and brought to life in a photograph, layers of voices, the slow motion flutter of fabric in the breeze, images, textures, words, landscapes slowly receding into the past.

What I love about this project, is the willingness of the guardians of a very tangible, tactile artefact driven history allowing it to collide with a more elusive digital and immersive experience. Perhaps one day we will be able to go on a road trip tour of small regional museums in small country towns where we can see both the real, the tangible and the artefact driven along with a more elusive digital exploration of documentation and stories. I’d love to experience some sound driven explorations in regional and museum space. That would be great.

Time Portal was supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW as part of the Creative Steps — New Work funding program, which supports the development of new artistic works across NSW.

Insights interview conducted by Jason Gee, Communications Manager, Museums & Galleries of NSW.

Insights is an interview series highlighting the voices of museum and gallery professionals across New South Wales. The series features conversations with individuals working at the forefront of the sector, demonstrating how their ideas, leadership and day-to-day practice contribute to a more vibrant, resilient and inclusive future for museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres.