Young V&A’s Making Egypt: Secrets of the exhibition’s design

2600 BCE: The Great Pyramid is built. 51 BCE: Cleopatra begins her reign. 2025 CE: Making Egypt opens at the Young V&A, making the exhibition closer in time to Cleopatra than to the Great Pyramids.  The vastness of the civilisation of Ancient Egypt spanned over three thousand years – and a whole lot of art, craft, and creativity.

For the exhibition design of Making Egypt, we tapped into this wealth of creative matter, bringing some of the colours, materials, and patterns from Ancient Egypt to Bethnal Green. Here we unpack the story of the design, including a few hidden secrets.

The exhibition opens with a section called ‘Imagining’. Here, visitors encounter a morning on the lush banks of the Nile, with tall rushes that flank the entry and set the scene. The rushes are real coppiced willow from Bedfordshire, and are a natural byproduct of forest maintenance. To ensure their safe use, the willow reeds have been pre-treated – frozen by preventative conservator Amanda Hahn and the wider preventative conservation team. 

Upon entry, we also meet the cast of gods who will take us through Egypt: Atum, Thoth, Ptah and Osiris; all charmingly illustrated by Jean Wei. Accompanying the gods are section panels shaped like ‘ostraca’, the Ancient Egyptian equivalent to scrap paper. 

Once through the rushes, a fully hand-illustrated panorama sweeps around, taking us from the blues and greens of the Nile’s water and plants that teem with birds, fish, and crocodiles, to the golden dunes of the desert landscape, host to jackals and scenes from the 1999 classic film, ‘The Mummy’.

The animals and background are illustrated by Carlos Romo-Melgar of Spreeeng, the graphic design co-operative engaged for the exhibition, with each animal being a reincarnation of an ancient predecessor. The heron is adapted from a wall painting of the bird god Bennu from the Tomb of Inherka, the jackal from the Tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan, and the two-meter-wide crocodile from the papyrus Book of the Dead of Nakht. 

The jackal leads us into section two, ‘Communicating’, where the dunes part to reveal a bustling city marketplace at the height of the day. As Ancient Egyptian cities and houses were usually made of mudbrick, there is scarce historical evidence of how they really were. However, we did find a type of sunshade that has appeared in paintings from the early Fifth Dynasty through to modern day markets, suggesting a remarkable example of an uninterrupted type of form, as discussed by Egyptologist Henry George Fischer in the Journal of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fischer, 1972). 

The structure of the sunshade is simple; two timber members are lashed together to create an ‘X’, and a cloth is draped on top, with a signature hanging flap on one side. A supporting pole is lashed to the centre. For the timber, we used thicker pieces from coppicer Guy Lambourne, which we prototyped with woodworker Alex Worsfold to find the best diameter. 

There are three themes in the ‘Communicating’ section of the exhibition; drawing, writing and colour. Each one has its own station shaded by a specially-commissioned canopy that brings each theme to life. Spreeeng’s John Philip-Sage illustrated each one by hand, making reference to tomb ceiling patterns, which themselves were references to the Egyptian textiles of the day.

In the ‘writing’ canopy, there is a hidden message selected by exhibition curator Benjamin Hinson, (at least for those who can read hieroglyphs). It reads: ‘I will make you love writing more than your mother’, a cheeky message taken from the ancient Egyptian text, the Satire of the Trades. 

After a day in the city, the sun sets in the final section, ‘Making’. This section focuses on the physical objects that populated everyday life and the afterlife. There are items ranging in size from a single bead to a 1:1 scale replica of a pyramid block – we wanted to amplify the tactility and materiality that connect these objects. 

Clay and earth therefore appear in multiple forms in this section: in ‘shabtis’ (small figurines made for the afterlife), jars and vases, and through various forms in the build. We collaborated with Madoka Ellis, a founder of the craft and community-focused design practice 121 Collective, who taught us how to ram earth and crushed waste bricks into plinths, and make clay panels from straw, water, and different sands. The final clay panels frame the two videos in this section that explore carving stone and moulding faience (a ceramic paste made of quartz, ash and metal salts).

We also used unfired ‘strocks’ – structural blocks made of chopped straw and earth – sourced from Cheshire, which were tapered and stacked into earthy arcs by the build contractor Sam Forster Associates, forming seats and tabletops between showcases and plinths. 

The size and diameter of the seat, table and cases reference the proportions of an archaeological dig site at Amarna, an important site of glass and pottery production in Ancient Egypt. For visitors who sit at the amulet activity table, they will sit on an earth structure the same exact 1:1 size as an Egyptian kiln from that site. 

As a designer, learning from the ancient past was a special opportunity to reflect on craft and materiality at a depth that often gets lost in our current world. We now have more digitally-aided creative and fabrication tools than ever in history, but do we use these meaningfully? Do we always need them? We also have more responsibility than ever before to use materials carefully and thoughtfully. (V&A’s 3D designer Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita writes more about how we aimed to do this within Making Egypt in her blog, here.)

Over 3,000 years later, the stories and creations of the Ancient Egyptians are still resonant, iconic, and original. Three-thousand years from now, what of our current society will be remembered?

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Making Egypt’s curator Benjamin Hinson, and design colleagues Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita and Evonne Mackenzie for their contributions to this blog.

References

Fischer, H. G. (1972). Sunshades of the Marketplace. Metropolitan Museum Journal, 151-156.

Griffith, F. L. 1900. Beni Hasan, Part IV: Zoological and Other Details. Archaeological Survey of Egypt 7. London: Egypt Exploration Fund. 

Nicholson, P. T. (2007). Brilliant Things for Akhenaten. London: The Egypt Exploration Society.