The Royal Institution of Cornwall, the charity which runs Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery, is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2026 Dr Jayne Wackett Memorial Fund Grant. The fund makes small grants to students and researchers investigating the museum’s collections or researching areas of history with a link to Cornwall.

Cornwall-based artist and Falmouth University PhD researcher Vicki Aimers has been awarded the grant to develop Letters from the Sea: Inspired by the Life of Margaret Lanyon. This new public engagement project takes as its starting point a remarkable nineteenth-century sampler held in the collection of Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery, and will involve journaling workshops and storytelling, and creative responses using paper and textiles.

At the heart of the project is Margaret Lanyon’s plain work darning sampler, stitched while she was a schoolgirl in Mawgan. The sampler was later exhibited at The Polytechnic in Falmouth in 1879, where it was judged by an educational board. Commended for its exceptional neatness, Margaret was awarded a monetary prize, and the board recommended that plain work darning should be promoted in schools because of its practical value in repairing household linens and the skill it demonstrated.

Margaret was born in Constantine, and the family were closely connected to Cornwall’s maritime industries in Gweek. Family records held by the museum recount that, as a young woman, she piloted boats along the Gweek estuary for the family business, offering a rare insight into the varied roles women played within Cornwall’s maritime communities. She later married the celebrated Cornish wrestler John “Jack” Pearce. Following his untimely death in America while still in his thirties, Margaret was left a young widow raising their children. Her story of resilience and care forms the emotional thread running throughout Letters from the Sea.

Participants in Vicki’s workshops will create their own imagined “letters from the sea” – messages cast adrift in bottles and written to loved ones across time. Together, the workshops will explore how repair and correspondence can become metaphors for connection, loss, hope and resilience, while acknowledging the gaps and silences that often remain within historical records.

The workshops will take place at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall and form part of Vicki’s practice-based PhD research at Falmouth University. Working in partnership with two major regional museums and the University, the project seeks to demonstrate how creative practice can offer new ways for people to engage with museum collections, archives and Cornwall’s rich cultural heritage.

By bringing together historical research, making and storytelling, Letters from the Sea invites participants to reflect on the lives, skills and experiences preserved within these collections and to consider how they continue to resonate today.

I am deeply grateful to the Royal Institution of Cornwall and the Dr Jayne Wackett Memorial Fund panel for supporting this project. Their generosity will enable me to share Margaret Lanyon’s remarkable story with new audiences. I hope the workshops encourage people to connect the past with the present in meaningful and imaginative ways. Vicki Aimers

Applications to the Jayne Wackett Memorial Fund Grant 2027 are now open. Find out more here.