Museum of The White Horse

Developed as part of a Visiting Fellowship awarded by the Oxford School of Archaeology, University of Oxford in collaboration with the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, the project has offered the artist supervised access to the Uffington White Horse since 2005, and to information and finds deriving from the most recent excavations. These have been used in the development of artworks based on self-suggested themes and culminating in the ‘Museum of the White Horse’, a travelling landscape museum.

For Kovats the White Horse intersects her interests in landscape and drawing. Her response to the project has been to develop The Museum of the White Horse, which comprises a converted horsebox containing a collection of archaeological, aesthetic and vernacular ephemera that presents an anthology of material that examines the relationship to this monument and to white horses. The mobile museum also questions the concept of the museum as an institutional space. The museum is presented as the focus for an anthropological centre with interactive potential, extending interpretive techniques to better understand the current status of the monument and its place within consciousness. The mobile museum has a schedule of sites, and is in effect a touring show, including towns and festivals in the immediate vicinity to The White Horse, and cities further afield. The museum generates publications relating to the outcomes of its programme.

Kovats also worked with the Mineralogy and Palaeontology Department of the Natural History Museum, London, to inspect the landscape of the White Horse on a microscopic scale. The White Horse Project is supported by The Arts Council, The University of Oxford, English Heritage, the Leverhulme Trust, The National Trust, Oxfordshire County Council, Oxford Exhibition Services, Tom Brown’s School Museum, Vale of the White Horse District Council, Van Houten Fund and the White Horse Brewery.