The Salisbury Museum Volunteer Blog

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The Salisbury Museum Volunteer Blog

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24 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by Salisbury Museum in Education, schools, children, Special Events

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Children's activities, Visitors, Volunteering, Volunteers

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With the Terry Pratchett: HisWorld exhibition as their inspiration, one hundred children this morning, and surely as many this afternoon, have reveled in the opportunity to allow their imagination to run riot. They have been creating their own worlds, using a tempting array of resources, with wonderful results.

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The adults present were clearly enjoying the creativity as much as the youngsters! Thank you Liza Morgan and thank you, as always, to the willing Volunteers, without whom these things could not happen.

The Costume Story

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by Salisbury Museum in Uncategorized

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Some of the NADFAS ( National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies) ladies were in, as usual, this Tuesday, working on the cataloguing of the museum’s impressive, massive and delicate collection of historical costume.

Selina, Pam and Caroline (and, usually, Sarah in this group) are amongst a number who work tirelessly on this project. Every box is a bit like Pandora’s, and may contain a number of items – anything from babies’ bonnets and Victorian underwear to military greatcoats and lavish evening gowns. Each item must be checked against any pre-existing references, combed for bugs (moth, carpet beetle…), identified, measured, assessed for condition, and any background details noted

All this is then recorded on a carefully designed form.

Sue Allenby and Muriel Redding, two more of our ‘costume ladies’, processed this gorgeous Edwardian black skirt:

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With this 1912 item was some information about the dressmaker (a firm in Bradford), and the owner, a Fanny Garnett, and we are also told a little of the history of it. Apparently Fanny wore it on her Golden Wedding Anniversary day.  It came to the museum with a matching bodice and is described by the costume ladies thus:

“Asymmetrical black satin skirt with gold gauze overskirt. Deep border black silk tulle with Regency design motifs in gold thread…Petersham waistband reads Gibson Boyce and Co, Bradford. Nineeen groups of five yellow glass beads, eleven missing. Overlay fringed in black. Back fastening with hooks and eyes.  Loops inside waistband to retain fastenings on bodice. Gold saltire cross embroidered centre front on waistband (for alignment?). Overlay is black gauze over gold satin silk.”

In addition to this ‘long description’ further details of the material, weave, colour and so on are recorded on the form.

This form is then passed to another volunteer who matches it with photos that are taken, records the photos on a data base and then passes the form to yet more volunteers who bring all the information and photos together and record it all on our famous MODES database from where members of the public, including researchers, can eventually access the information.

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A dress from the 1730- 1750s with detail of embroidery

 

 

 

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This is an item labelled Women’s Home Industries.

WHI was a company founded in 1947 in London in order to earn export revenue for the UK in the post war period by harnessing women’s craft skills, such as knitting and needlework.

Originally seen as part of the effort to rebuild the economy – and a way to give women practical work they could do from home – between the 1950s and 1970s its reputation as a retailer and supplier of hand-made knits and traditional crafts grew, with exports to match.

Christening robes, evening gloves, uniforms, shepherds smocks, vests – it is an endlessly fascinating collection, much enjoyed by those who work on it. Thanks to all concerned.

More from Volunteer Alan Crooks, Reflecting on Sir Terry

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by Salisbury Museum in Uncategorized

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In my very first teaching post (I came into teaching as a second career) I vividly recall being appalled when a teacher of English came into the staff room one break-time and commented of a pupil, “Poor Jason, he’s so limited. He’s never going to achieve anything, he’s so dyslexic”. Well, this pupil, an eleven year old boy, used to attend my Science Club after school. In the last session before a half term, I showed the BBC2  ‘science strand’ programme ‘Horizon’ about buckminsterfullerene, and intended for somewhat older audiences. Buckminsterfullerene, also known as C60, is a molecule, made solely of carbon atoms, which a British scientist, Professor Sir Harry Kroto had worked out to be spherical and, in fact, made up of hexagons and pentagons – like a football (Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Model of Buckminsterfullerene (C60)

In elucidating this structure, Professor Kroto had accurately constructed pentagons and hexagons on thin card, cut them out and sellotaped them together to make a ball. Imagine my delight and pride when Jason, a boy who was “never going to achieve anything”, came in after half term with a fine cardboard model of buckminsterfullerene which he’d made himself. I ensured that this took pride of place in a cabinet in the dining room, where pupils’ finest work was displayed. My thoughts turned to this when I read that Terry Pratchett’s former headmaster, Mr Tame, had told him that he would “never amount to anything”.

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In our exhibition, the legend accompanying Terry Pratchett’s Olivetti Quaderno electronic notebook reads, “Although I have no particular need of it, I can’t bring myself to throw away what is now vintage technology”.

I know this feeling well as my desk drawer is cluttered with, among other things, a British Thornton slide rule, which I haven’t used in at least 30 years, a Sinclair Scientific calculator (1974), whose ‘reverse Polish notation’ taught me how to keep track of the exponent when using the slide rule; and a Nokia 6030 mobile phone (2006), which I believe is now regarded as ‘retro’ (Figure 2).

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Figure 2. Alan Crooks’ collection of ‘vintage technology’

Moving on to the Corridor Display, the caption against ‘Death on Binky’ (Paul Kidby, 2000) reads”When I was a kid I was scared rigid of skeletons”. I can empathise with this as because, when I was about 6 or 7 years old, I had to walk home from school across a meadow, within which was a small copse. One day, one of the friends I was with mentioned casually that there was a skeleton under one of the trees in the copse. Well, at the time, I didn’t know what a skeleton was but imagined it to be some sort of crocodilian, like an alligator. I used to give that copse a wide berth thereafter, but wonder to this day what it was that was in this copse.

Whilst on the subject of Death, a visitor came in one day and commented that she wants Death at her funeral. She has written into her Will that , at her funeral, she wants there to be a tall man in a black coat carrying a scythe, and she wants her daughter to tether her white horse at the church gates!

More next week in this fascinating series from Alan.

THE FIRST WEEK…some observations by Volunteer Alan Crooks

26 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by Salisbury Museum in Special Events

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Terry Pratchett – The First Week

Alan Crooks, Engagement Volunteer

Returning home from a fortnight’s holiday on the morning of Friday 15 September, I opened my emails to find one from Jan Thorne inviting Gallery Stewards and Engagement Volunteers an opportunity to walk around the exhibition that very afternoon. Knowing that this would be my only opportunity to view the exhibition before my first shift (in this case, as a Gallery Steward) on the following Tuesday, I accepted.

As a former scientist and science teacher, paradoxically I have never been interested in either science fiction or fantasy – the genre to which I’d assumed Terry Pratchett fitted. Consequently I’d never read any of his books. Therefore, in preparation for my duties at this exhibition I had taken my first book of his to read whilst on holiday. This was Wintersmith, the third tale in a sequence about the trainee witch, Tiffany Aching, which is intended for younger readers. I chose this because in December, 2013 I had attended the Steeleye Span ‘Wintersmith’ concert at the City Hall, during which Terry Pratchett joined the band on stage.

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This was a great choice as characters from this: Tiffany Aching, the Nac Mac Feegles, Granny Weatherwax, feature heavily in the exhibition. Furthermore, as I had read this on a Kindle, the first chapter of the next book in the series starring Tiffany Aching was provided free of charge. This was ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’. Here Tiffany came face to face with the giant:

“He – and he was quite definitely a he, there was no doubt about that – had been carved out of the turf thousands of years before. A white outline against the green, he belonged to the days when people had to think about survival and fertility in a dangerous world.  Oh, and he had also been carved, or so it would appear, before anyone had invented trousers”.

Quite clearly, this had been inspired by the Cerne Abbas Giant, and so provided a nice link with the previous exhibition, ‘British Art:Ancient Landscapes’. I was hooked!

Immediately prior to my first shift, Jan Thorne had warned us that museum staff had been taken completely by surprise by the emotional responses that the exhibition had elicited among some of its visitors, as many had been supported by reading Pratchett novels during difficult periods of their lives. I encountered some very positive emotions. There was a young Australian woman wearing the broadest of broad grins, but which amazingly appeared to get even broader as she wandered around with what appeared to be a telescopic monocular, that enabled her to examine detail on pictures some distance away in Terry’s study.

Another girl was wearing a particular kind of badge with ‘Terry Pratchett’ inscribed on a red ribbon, with green leaves and a flower (pictured), and proclaimed that she thought I wouldn’t encounter many of these. I think she explained that this was the Terry Pratchett Memorial pin, only it does not have ‘1948-2015’ on it.

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Somebody else informed me that the novel writing itself on Terry’s typewriter was in fact a chapter from The Nightwatch, featuring the Assassins. Yet another person informed me that the chest with feet to the side of Terry’s desk was from ‘The Colour of Magic’.

During my second shift I overheard two young lads talking about Pratchett’s Carnegie medal and they told me that their school had been among those chosen to vote for the Carnegie Award, and many of them had proudly voted for Pratchett.

Also on this day, a young man wearing a ‘Guns ‘n’ Roses’ jacket asked me, incredulously,  whether a letter on the pin board had really been written by Neil Gaiman. Not being a fan of fantasy genre material I had never heard of Neil Gaiman. I didn’t admit this to him, but went to have a look and, to me, it seemed a perfectly genuine letter (pictured) (Editor’s note: and it is…)

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Alan’s blog underlines what an extraordinary thing this exhibition is.  If  any other volunteers have interesting stories to tell, please pass them on.

SOME OBSERVATIONS by Volunteer Alan Crooks

05 Tuesday Sep 2017

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As we bid farewell to our summer exhibition, some observations on British Art:Ancient Landscapes by Engagement Volunteer, Alan Crooks…

With my scientific background (former Health Service scientist and latterly a Teacher of Chemistry) I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that there are several artists featured in this exhibition of whom I had never previously heard, despite them being well-known – even famous. Among these are Eric Ravilious and Derek Jarman.  Indeed a major joy of having retired and taken on a role as a Museum Volunteer is the opportunity to learn things outside of my previous sphere.

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Eric Ravilious

My scientific background gives me a completely different perspective on many of the works, that were not picked up by the curator, Professor Sam Smiles, either in his introductory lecture or in the accompanying book. For example, several visitors have commented to me that they are not keen on Derek Jarman’s ‘Avebury Series IV’ (1973) picture. However, this is one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition because, I think,  it evokes the scientific approach to archaeology. Thus the horizontal and vertical lines are evocative of graph paper, hinting at the need to precisely record the positions in which artifacts are found, whereas the horizontal lines also hint at stratification: the layering of deposits within an archaeological site according to age. The images of the stones exemplify the need to accurately record artifacts by drawing.

To another visitor however, the colours in the picture were reminiscent of Mondrian art.  The Dutch artist and architect, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)  evolved a non-representational art form called ‘neoplasticism’ which consists of a white ground upon which is painted a grid of horizontal and vertical black lines and the three primary colours. Piet Mondrian was another artist of whom I had never heard until mentioned by this visitor.

Having never previously heard of Derek Jarman, it is interesting how his name has impinged on my consciousness several times since this exhibition started, including two BBC Radio 4 programmes. One of these was ‘The Film Programme’, in June,  when they were discussing Jarman’s 1990 film, ‘The Garden’. Jarman created a garden on a shingle beach in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station. He retreated here to live in a “humble fisherman’s cottage” when he was diagnosed as having HIV AIDS, the “gay man’s plague”.  Jarman commented that he “became a hermit in the desert of illness”

While on the topic of stratification, another visitor commented on Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Two Figures (Menhirs) (1964) asking, “How did Barbara Hepworth find such a large block of slate with no cleavage lines?”.  In fact, if one looks at the ‘face-edge’, to use a woodworking term, one can see that there are cleavage planes, but the slate has been so highly polished as to render them almost invisible. Another visitor wondered whether Barbara Hepworth had selected the block because of the “lovely pattern” on its surface. All of a sudden I realised that this pattern was a fossil whereas, hitherto I had wondered whether she had carved it, even though the sculpture is perfectly smooth to the touch. This set my brain to ‘scientist mode’. Slate is a metamorphic rock; that is a very old rock that has (usually) been subjected to enormous heat and pressure, sufficient to change its appearance and behaviour. Slate is derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock. However, compared to most metamorphic rocks, it was formed under relatively low heat and pressure, leading to ‘low grade metamorphism’. For this reason, any fossils formed during the sedimentary stage  can sometimes survive. The description of this fossil given by The Tate is that it “was caused by a small creature swimming through the silt that solidified, preserving the pattern of eddying mud in the stone”.

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) served as a war artist and died when the aircraft he was in was lost off Iceland, while involved in a search for another aircraft which had failed to return from a patrol. Ravilious’ depiction of barbed wire in his pictures, for example, ‘The Long Man of Wilmington, reflects his wartime experiences. Professor Smiles described Ravilious’ ‘The Valley of the White Horse’ (1939) as having a foreground like the hide of an animal with hairs coming out. However, a visitor to the exhibition commented that this part of the picture was reminiscent of the top surface of the wing of a military aircraft, painted in desert camouflage colours.  When I mentioned this to a different visitor on another day, he commented that this was unlikely as the Desert Air Force (DAF) was not formed until 1941, and Ravilious had been killed in 1942. However, these were interesting conversations.

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The Long Man of Wilmington, 1939 Eric Ravilious (Victoria and Albert Museum)

A gentleman came in and stopped sharply in front of Yoshijiro Urishibara’s two colour woodcuts of Stonehenge. Turning to me he commented that he immediately recognised these as being Japanese due to the use of the pigment, Prussian blue. He went on to explain that Japanese painters and woodblock artists didn’t have access to a long-lasting blue pigment until they were able to import Prussian blue from Europe in the 1820s. Prussian blue, (iron (III) hexacyanoferrate (III)) was the first stable and relatively light-fast blue pigment to be widely used following the loss of knowledge of how to prepare Egyptian blue. Hitherto, artists had been using indigo or other dayflower petal dyes. However, the synthetic pigment was more vivid, provided a greater tonal range and was more resistant to fading.

This conversation made a nice link with a Salters ‘A’Level Chemistry unit I used to teach called ‘Colour By Design’ which brought together ideas about why things (including rainbows!) are coloured, and ways of making colour. The Unit explained how from earliest times people used natural substances around them to colour themselves and their possessions, and went on to discuss the use of mineral pigments and synthetic dyes.

Altogether this was a fascinating exhibition which involved me in many interesting conversations in which I have been able to bring my scientific background to bear.

 

 

 

 

The last of the summer blooms…

29 Tuesday Aug 2017

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Everyone enjoys the gardens and grounds of the Kings House, the museum.  They are beautiful, at any time of the year – all thanks to four Volunteers:

Jenny Mawer, Lynne Sillett, Jane Taylor and Brenda Talbot

Thank you ladies!

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A Sublime Feeling

22 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by Salisbury Museum in Special Events

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Inspired by ‘British Art: Ancient Landscapes’, Stage 65, Salisbury Playhouse’s Youth Theatre, created a special performance at the museum which ran across three days last week. 

This was such an important piece of partnership-working with Salisbury Playhouse and we should all be  proud of all that we achieved this week. Special thanks go to the crack team of orange-sashed Volunteers who were stewarding!

Ever Wish You were Five Again?

08 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by Salisbury Museum in Education, schools, children, Special Events

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Summer is here (according to the calendar anyway!), school’s out and Discovery Tuesdays at the museum are packed. Last week we had printing with Charlotte Moreton.

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This week they are making Noah’s Ark with Charlotte Stowell, which may actually be quite appropriate for the weather!

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Photo courtesy of Charlotte Stowell

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Next week, Tuesday 15 August Sarah Holtby will be working with the little ones to produce Layered Landscape Ceramic Tiles and Pots, and the week after, Archaeologist Chris Elmer will be taking them digging.

Many thanks, as always, to the Volunteers who help make it all happen!

 

ArchFest 17 in Numbers

25 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by Salisbury Museum in ArchFest, Special Events

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In 2 days

15 staff members, a lot of colleagues from the café, and over 50  Volunteers were busy.

Over 70 exhibitors and living history enthusiasts and 22 clubs, groups and organisations were involved.

There were 12 speakers, there was one General Pitt Rivers.

1277 visitors came.

Survey of Public Art

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

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This email has been received from Julie Davis, County Local Studies Librarian:

I would like to take this opportunity to ask for your support for a project which aims to locate, record and photograph public art, namely artwork made by an artist, arts practitioner or craftsperson and located in publicly accessible spaces and places in Wiltshire. At present very little is known about the whereabouts, extent and condition of public art in the county.

Data collected as part of the project will be made available in the Local Studies Library at the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre with images deposited in the Historic Photograph and Print Collection. The images will then be pinned to the Know Your Place site http://www.kypwest.org.uk to map their location geographically. More details can be found at the link below.

https://creativewiltshire.com/get-involved/

A series of volunteer workshops are being run across the county for those interested in getting involved in the project to initiate the beginning of the data collection phase. Confirmed venues are:

Marlborough Library, Thursday 20th July, 6-7pm. Book now via Eventbrite

Malmesbury Library, Monday 14th August, 6-7pm. Book now via Eventbrite

Corsham Library, Monday 21st August, 6-7pm. Book now via Eventbrite

Events are also planned in Corsham, Salisbury and Swindon in August, and hopefully in Devizes and Warminster too. To stay informed please visit https://creativewiltshire.com/get-involved/

Each session will include:

Background, introductions and timeline of the project

Definitions – detailing what will be classified as public art in terms of the project

Grid references – quick guide to grid referencing for those who feel they need guidance

Data recording – what to record and how

Photography – a guide to what is required

Administration – how data will be sent to the History Centre, plus registration, support and co-ordination information. There will also be an opportunity to ask any questions you may have.

Volunteers can devote as much or as little time as they can spare until December and join this community effort to help support public art in the places that matter to them.

I look forward to meeting representative(s) from your society at one of the workshops. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Julie Davis County Local Studies Librarian
Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre Tel: 01249 705500 Email: localstudies@wiltshire.gov.uk  Web: www.wshc.eu

 

 

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