1001 Days
What was the challenge?
MAGNET (Museums and Galleries Network for Exhibition Touring) commissioned us to pioneer a new model for touring exhibitions – one that could travel seamlessly to five museums across England while delivering a powerful, cohesive visitor experience in radically different spaces. The Human Natures exhibition explores how humans shape the natural world – positively and negatively – by examining themes of waste, pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change. From day one, we knew the project demanded not only a fresh creative approach but also our most ambitious and rigorous sustainability strategy to date.
MAGNET also saw this exhibition as an opportunity to reach new audiences, particularly families with children aged 10+. To meet this ambition, we needed to create a journey filled with experiential moments – playful, provocative and emotionally resonant touchpoints that could link archival history with contemporary life.
What did we do?
We worked closely with MAGNET’s Interpretation Planner and curatorial teams in a genuinely collaborative process, shaping the narrative while the content was still evolving. Together, we created a three-part journey that immerses visitors in distinct narrative worlds:
A reimagined warehouse invites the visitor to explore how humans intentionally and unintentionally reshape nature
An oversized wardrobe reveals the resources we take from nature to clothe and comfort ourselves
A sculptural landscape of waste examines what we extract from the Earth, and the lasting scars these choices leave behind.
We designed each zone with its own unique aesthetic and spatial rhythm. Changes in scale, colour, texture and pacing gave visitors intuitive wayfinding cues and created three atmospheres that were visually striking yet coherent as a whole. A series of spatial vignettes combining found objects, tactile materials and bespoke films encouraged curiosity, movement and immersion.
Crucially, we developed the exhibition to be adapted and reimagined within each host museum. A modular system underpinned every element – from structural components to interpretive assets – giving each venue the freedom to configure the experience to its own spatial constraints and curatorial priorities, while maintaining the exhibition’s conceptual and visual coherence.
Detailed installation plans further ensured that host teams could confidently assemble, tailor and restage the exhibition within their own environments.
Sustainability is embedded in The Liminal Space’s creative philosophy, and for Human Natures it guided every decision we made – from concept to construction to end-of-life planning.
Interventions were designed to make inventive, low-impact use of materials – prioritising found and repurposed materials over new fabrication, and deploying them in inventive, unexpected and sometimes subversive ways.
