[RE]work: The Butter Museum | Cork, Ireland

The Butter Museum is part of a distinctive urban arrangement in Shandon, Cork. It is close to St. Anne’s Church (1722) and is part of the original site of the Cork Butter Exchange – built in 1770 and added to by Sir John Benson in 1849 in the form of a monumental entrance portico with paired Doric columns. At street level, it is framed by the distinctive rotunda of the Benson- designed Firkin Crane (1855) – which now operates as a centre for dance and exhibition space. The most recent works aimed to consider the collection of artefacts and spaces in the Museum in order to reanimate a distinct set of socio-cultural historicities and heighten the awareness of the role of buttermaking in Ireland. Within this context, the design evolved as a [re]working and curatorial strategy - attempting to excavate and erode existing boundaries between spaces and encourage new readings between objects and viewers through new juxtapositions and spatial configurations.