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Late in 2024, we took a call from The Wellcome Collection, the Euston museum that explores the past, present and future of health.
Details are under wraps at the moment they said But might Magic Me be interested in working with us to create a piece for a forthcoming exhibition on the subject of ageing?
There’s nothing closer to our mission than using the arts to contemplate attitudes to ageing, so we jumped at the invitation to a commission from this flagship national museum. Over the last year, Magic Me’s programme team and our artists Sue Mayo and Skye Baker devised a project to encourage an intergenerational group of participants to think positively and creatively about ageing. Meeting at Brick Lane primary school, the group began by sorting through a large pile of commercially available birthday cards for all ages. Looking at the text and images, participants asked what assumptions were being made about the intended recipients. Teenagers are stroppy, the cards said, 40 year olds are over the hill and 80 year olds like to receive nothing more than a pastel coloured bunch of flowers.
We thought we could do better than that. We set up an imaginary design studio for the participants who worked through the whole process of card design from market research to focus group work on images and messaging to the final card design. The brief they gave themselves was to find the joy in reaching big birthdays and milestones, to celebrate the achievements of age rather than poking fun with tired ageist humour.
The result is It’s on the Cards, our installation at The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition The Coming of Age. The installation recreates the design studio process, and it sits nicely amongst the other exhibits which include the drafts of Jenny Joseph’s ‘When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple’ poem and print portraits of some (possibly unverified) eighteenth century 170 year olds.
The Wellcome team expects half a million visitors on an annual basis, so we are very excited at the prospect of a huge audience for Magic Me’s work over the coming months. We are always pleased to be invited to bring our intergenerational expertise to other organisations’ programmes and collections, and we’ve been very grateful for this opportunity to collaborate with our partners at Wellcome.
(The Coming of Age is at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, London from March 2026 until the end of November 2026.)
