The Imaginary Friend Collection

Background

The Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, an offshoot of the main V&A, was based in East London.

It had a simple aim: to allow everyone, but especially children, to explore and enjoy objects made for and by children.

But therein lay the issue. Although childhood was a universal experience, museums by definition were created and run by adults. By extension, parents often took their children there for a trip down memory lane.

The challenge was to find a way to represent children in the here and now, and make them the centre of what the museum did.

Idea

An exhibition was planned that would be created and curated by children. And what every child had at some point in his or her life was an imaginary friend, a creature solely of their minds, hidden to everyone (especially adults) but themselves.

AMV brought 60 children together and asked them to draw or describe their imaginary friend. The 'friends' were then handed over to sculptors, animators and model-makers who turned them into reality.

Brought to life were Swerl the Lion with his purple mane; a bespectacled, green-tailed, fox called Jamie; a furry, eight-foot-high dinosaur; a three-eyed girl called Chloe; and Leo Georgiou's Monster, a three-eyed creature with four blue arms, four yellow legs, a taste for bananas, a penchant for tennis and in urgent need of a dentist.

Results

The original exhibition, scheduled to run for six weeks became a permanent fixture of the museum.

Our Thoughts

If one of the issues a children's museum faces is that it is controlled by adults, then the idea of allowing more adults to create an advertising campaign-cum-exhibition sounds a bit daft.

But this isn't what happened. AMV's genius was, effectively, to hand the whole project over to children themselves in a way in which it couldn't be influenced by grown-ups.

The imaginary friend is a universal creation, peculiar and particular to individual children, but mostly destined to fade (but not be forgotten) as children move into their teens.

And boy, are they imaginative: Monster, Leo Georgiou's friend made real by Aardman, has three eyes, four arms, four legs, likes tennis and needs a dentist. Where did that come from? An adult would never come up with a friend like that.

Indeed, the grip of imaginary friends on our psyche is so strong that they are often immortalised in fiction and films: Harvey the Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, The Wild Things, Hobbes the tiger.

The joy of this exhibition is that, while it draws on children for its inspiration, its appeal is across the generations – and any other cultural divide.