Abstract

The project “Bedlam: Living with a Mental Asylum in Town” has collected narrative data and artefacts for a few years, and its first exhibition was curated in 2016. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the exhibition material looked at “Mayday Hills,” or the former Beechworth Mental Hospital, as a space and environment that was planned, made, changed, and responded to by humans. The researchers have been using crystallization as a framework for a multi-method approach to collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data. Since the collaborators in the research are from different disciplines, history and creative arts, crystallization has enabled them to look at the data in different but complementary ways. The exhibition was an engaging mix of historical narrative and creative work telling human stories that changed what is possible on the site. This article is written from the perspective of the creative arts researcher.