Stories in Small Spaces
Explore Mini dioramas bring a story, place, craft, or process into a small, three-dimensional space. The first series presented here was created for the King Matthias Programme Year: eight scenes depicting four court occupations and four guild crafts.
The Court of King Matthias and the Crafts of the Period
The series consists of eight scenes: herald, manuscript scribe, court kitchen, heraldic painter, baker, potter, armourer, and musical instrument maker.
Each diorama is housed in a 37 × 23 × 18 cm enclosed box. The scenes are viewed through a 6 × 6 cm viewing opening and can be illuminated from above with a flashlight. The small opening reveals only part of the scene at a time, while the light helps guide the eye through the details inside.
A surprising amount can fit into a space of this size: a table, an oven, shelves, vessels, tools, works in progress, details on the walls and, of course, the figures themselves. The manuscript scribe is surrounded by books and the tools needed for writing and illumination; the court kitchen evokes the world of food preparation at the time; while the workshops of the potter, baker, armourer, and musical instrument maker contain the objects and working processes that make it possible to recognise where we are and what is happening.
Designing a diorama begins with researching the subject. From this material, I select the objects, gestures, and details that can make the story understandable even within such a small space. The scene also has to be designed from the outset with its viewing point in mind: a detail that cannot be seen through the viewing opening, however carefully made, remains outside the story.
I use a variety of materials and techniques to create the dioramas. Many elements of the King Matthias series were made from my own handmade paper pulp, alongside wood, paper, textiles, and other materials selected according to the object or surface being recreated.
What Can a Diorama Be Used For?
A diorama can show things that no longer exist in their original form, are inaccessible, or are simply too large to be brought into an exhibition space.
For an open-air museum or ethnographic collection, a historic kitchen, room, outbuilding, or local craft workshop can be reconstructed. Objects preserved in a collection can thus be placed back into the kind of setting in which they were once used.
In a local history or archaeological exhibition, a vanished street, building, workshop, or the original surroundings of an archaeological object can be brought to life.
For natural history and scientific subjects, a diorama can make a difficult-to-observe world visible: the inside of a beehive, an underground habitat, or another process that cannot normally be observed directly.
A craft or production process can also be divided into a sequence of dioramas, allowing its different stages to be followed step by step.
The format and dimensions are always adapted to the subject. The 37 × 23 × 18 cm boxes used for the King Matthias series represent just one possible solution. A different story may call for different dimensions, a different viewpoint, another way of viewing the scene, or a different level of detail.
Through Explore Mini, I design and create bespoke dioramas for museums, open-air and ethnographic museums, visitor and interpretation centres, local history collections, and educational and cultural institutions.
If there is a place, story, craft, or process worth presenting in a small space, we can work together to find the diorama format that suits it best.
The diorama series presented here was created for the King Matthias Programme Year within the framework of MCC. Staff members of MCC Transylvania also contributed to the制作 of the Court Kitchen and Manuscript Scribe dioramas.