Reflections on my work placement

As part of my Art Gallery and Museum Studies MA I am doing a work placement at the Hardman’s House. This is a small National Trust property in Liverpool that was once the home of Edward Chambre Hardman and his wife. The house has be preserved as it was when the Hardman’s lived in it. The National Trust also own a huge collection of Hardman’s photographic prints and negatives. The house is amazing. Hardman and his wife rarely threw anything away, so the basement is full of junk and the kitchen cupboards contain rations from the war still in their boxes.

The house contains two temporary exhibition rooms which is where s focus of my work has been. One of these contains an exhibition of photographs from the collection. The other exhbition is geared more towards social history, using objects and photographs from the collections.

My role at the house (along with Caroline, a fellow AGMS student) is as an exhibitions assistant. Together we have helped research background information for the two new exhibitions, put together an information booklet and collected together images for a slide show in the galleries. We have also begun to help select images and objects for the exhibitions (and find them in the building, which can be challenging!)

Being involved in the exhibition process from fairly early on has been a really interesting experience. I have been able to observe and be involved in the process of developing the concept of the exhibitions and working out how to bring them together. This has highlighted some of the challenges and enjoyments of working on exhibitions, as well as giving me valuable experience in very practical things such as object handling and storage.

The two exhibitions have produced very different experiences and sets of challenges. The photography exhibition is linked with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic this year and so consists of photographs Hardman took of the Liverpool docks. The selection of images was effectively done for us because only a small number of the prints are mounted and framed. As there is no money to mount and frame more we had to choose from those already framed. Fortunately this covers a range of different photographs Hardman took and should make an interesting exhibition. To allow more of the images to be seen by visitors I created a powerpoint show of all the images Hardman took of the docks that have been digitised. This will be played either in the exhibition or in the ticket office.

The social history exhibition is based around the make-do-and-mend and rationing campaigns during and after the Secodn World War. Objects from the collection are being used to illustrate some of the different ways people coped with the shortages and the campaigns the government ran to encourage people. Helping put this exhibition together has been an interesting process. Caroline and I started by doing research and gathering information about the various areas of rationing. This was partly so we could put together a timeline of wartime and rationing events. Now we have begun to find objects and work out where they will go in the room.

At this point I do not know exactly how the exhibitions will finally look, but being involved in creating them as been an enjoyable and interesting experience which has taught me a lot that I hope will be useful in my future career.

Grave Secrets: small but beautiful

Last week I attended the opening of Grave Secrets: Tales of the Ancient Nubians, Manchester Museum’s latest temporary exhibition. This exhibition is up on the 3rd floor next to the resources centre. It is basically a small display of bones and other artefacts excavated by the Archaeological Survey of Nubia between 1907 and 1911. The main focus is on how these bones have been used to tell us more about life, death and particularly disease in Ancient Nubia. Having passed it several times as it was being set up I was not sure how much information such as small space could contain.

Entering the space I was surprised by what I found. The whole display is enclosed and all the walls are black. This creates a slightly mysterious, secretive atmosphere but not in a gimmicky way. Along one wall are a series of text panels explaining the exhibition and how the bones have been used for research. Down the centre of the room and on the other wall is a long case containing examples of the bones and other artefacts. Each object is accompanied by a short text panel explaining what it is and what has been found out about it. There is a relatively small number of objects but they are chosen and used carefully to tell a powerful story. From each bone you get a sense of the life the person may have lived, whether it’s the severe pain of a person with arthritis or a broken bone that has not healed straight or the sense of love that comes from seeing that someone with a severe physical deformity lived a long life and so must have been cared for by their family. The simple presentation of the objects allows them to speak for themselves and tell their own, human, story. A screen on the end wall displayed revolving images of the bones to allow visitors to see them from all angles.

The only thing that did not seem to fit was the comptuer. This seemed to be there for people to find out more about the Centre for Biological Egyptology at the University. However, it did not seem to say much and I felt the techonology could have been better used to allow visitors to find out more about the specimins and the processes used to analyse them.

Appart from this the exhibition is a small but beautifully desgined display that manages to blend science and Egyptology into an engaging human story.

The distractions of museum architecture

I am struggling to remember what was on display in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History because the minute I walked into the museum my attention was caught by the architecutre of the building and I spent the next 20 minutes wondering around, staring the ceiling and nearly walking into things. This may have something to do with the fact that my interest in architecture outweighs my interest in natural history, but it got me thinking about museum architecture and what we expect of it. Does it matter what the architecture’s like? Does it need to ‘fit’ with the objects on display?

The design of the Natural History museum in Oxford was based on Ruskin’s idea that architecture should be shaped by the energies of the natural world. The museum’s website describes it as a ‘cathedral to science’. The architecture is certainly reminiscent of a cathedral with its soaring neo-Gothic arches and delicate columns. It also has a sense of having been shaped by the natural world; there is a certain similarity between the architecture and the skeletons on display.

Museum architecture that has been influenced by religious architecture is nothing unusual. The first museums as we know them were designed based on classical temples. I am quite used to walking into a museum with soaring, decorated ceilings. I am not used to that building being full of natural history specimens. I think that was the thing that struck me in Oxford; I don’t associate ‘cathedral’ type architecture with natural history. I would normally think of a natural history museum as something more clinical or scientific.

At the time the architecture completely distracted me from the objects on display and that almost annoyed me. It seemed out of place. Since researching the architecture I can begin to see how the architecture fits with the nature of the objects and I parhaps appreciate it a bit more. I think that on a return visit I would focus on the objects more, although probably still in the context of their links with the architecture. But that allows me to look at the objects in a different way, so maybe that’s a good thing?