These Windows: A collaborative project with the V&A Dundee

“These Windows” was conceived of as a word and image collaborative project with the V&A Dundee in 2019.

Every year our student-led publishing project starts with a sense of anxiety and excitement because we don’t always know where the project will take us and are understandably nervous about its outcome. In different ways, everyone feels their way along the path―sometimes hesitantly, sometimes boldly―but always attentive to how and where the lines on the page spool and fan out. We might set aside what we’ve done and start again, but we learn from every stop and start. We might risk following that line out into places that we didn’t know about. But always we return to sketch, write, edit and graft some more.

During that day in Kengo Kuma’s magnificent building, we were all fascinated by the apertures, and how the space within might be imagined as the city of Dundee’s living room. Windows became a metaphor for looking into and also looking out of the V&A Dundee. Then we had no idea how apt the idea of windows became as the project was completed during the Covid pandemic. Such a creative gathering up of words and images, published online and in print, in one glorious alchemy—more than the sum of its parts— came together, delivering surprise, pleasure and joy at a time when we were all staring out of our own domestic windows. 

There are two quite different “windows”: one online and one in book form. Kirsty Gunn also hosted a workshop with her students at Merton College, Oxford, to respond to items in the V&A in London, and these were incorporated into the print version.

View These Windows on DURA

Hannah Whaley narrating the genesis and progression of “These Windows”.