From cotton to gold: extraordinary collections of the industrial North West

Two Temple Place, London, 31 January - 19 April 2015

Tucked away near Temple Tube station, Two Temple Place is an unexpected cultural treat in a part of London dominated by office blocks and law firms. The house was once the office of the wealthy businessman William Waldorf Astor, and remains an exquisite example of neo-Gothic opulence. (For Downton Abbey fans, its magnificent Great Hall was the location for the wedding of Lady Rose to Atticus Aldridge). In itself, the house is worth visiting for its wonderful interiors - a late Victorian time-capsule in a city that is ever-changing.

Now run by the Bulldog Trust, Two Temple Place is opened up to the general public for three months a year, when the winter exhibitions are on show. These exhibitions are designed to promote an awareness of museum and gallery collections from around the UK in a prestigious central London venue. This year's display, From cotton to gold, draws on collections from three Lancashire museums: Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Haworth Art Gallery in Accrington and Towneley Hall in Burnley.

Here I must confess my own regional bias. I was born in what was once part of Lancashire, and am proud of my roots in the north-west of England, shallow as they are. Although my family history is not one of textile producers, but rather railway workers and labourers, the rapid industrialisation of the nineteenth century - and subsequent slow decline in the mid-twentieth - has had a profound effect on the region as a whole, and still resonates today. The wealth that was generated for some by many has long since gone, but its legacy, not least in the form of museum collections, remains.

The Queen Street Mill loom, with medieval manuscripts behind

It is easy to forget the human cost of just how cotton was spun into gold, particularly when surrounded by the gorgeousness of Two Temple Place. Clattering looms, hot and humid conditions, long hours and the potential for horrendous accidents - all typified the working conditions for mill workers during this period. These stories can still be explored in Pennine Lancashire today, through the displays at Helmshore Mills and Queen Street Mill Textile Museums. But this is not the point of this exhibition. Rather, it focuses upon the ways in which historic collections have been formed, trying to discover what this can tell us about the lives and times of those who made them.

In fact, few of the collectors highlighted in the exhibition actually said much about what motivated them to collect. And even though these men (and they are all men) were prominent in their local communities at the time, their voices are relatively muted in the display itself. So what meanings can be drawn from the objects on display - which include books, coins, Japanese prints, ivories, beetles and Tiffany glass - other than that they are both eclectic and fascinating reflections of the interests of their collectors?

I was most drawn to the fact that many of the artefacts on display are resolutely hand-made or products of the natural world: there is a strong sense of nature in the culture on display, and complex links with the medieval past. The first things that caught my eye were heavily illuminated manuscripts, beautiful fifteenth-century Books of Hours with such vibrant colours that you might forget that some of them are 600 years old. (It seems like I'm not the only one who's a sucker for medieval manuscripts - the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts account has over 24,000 followers on Twitter). The early printed books on display (I want to use the term 'incunabula', as I had to look up what it meant) often had hand-drawn additions, whilst the Japanese wood-block prints (ukiyo-e), collected by Thomas Boys Lewis, were similarly the result of complex processes of production. There is Tiffany glass, with its motifs drawn from the natural world, Louis Comfort Tiffany himself strongly influenced by both the Pre-Raphaelites and medieval stained glass, and private press books from the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Vincent of Beauvais' Mirror of the World, printed in 1481. The world is divided into Asia, Europe, Africa and 'Inhabitable'

And there are natural history specimens, such as Arthur Bowdler's beetles and George Booth's birds, each themselves transformed through human agency into artefacts, literally pinned down or encased. Through such processes, the natural world could be consumed and understood in a domestic context, made comprehensible and contained.

Carved ivories, including scrimshaw, a West African carved elephant tusk and a miniature bust of J. M. W. Turner

Upstairs in the Great Hall, there are further elaborate nature-culture interactions: intricately carved ivories, beautiful human bodies drawn by Millais (the Pre-Raphaelites again) and Turner watercolours, by an artist famous for his sublime depictions of nature.

I'm probably reading too much into their motivations, but I think these men were, through their collections, grappling with the changes in making and living that their own industries were generating. It seems to me that their predilection for artefacts of the more distant past, laboriously made by hand, or for things that had strong natural connections, was a meditation on the increasingly mechanised and rapidly changing world in which they found themselves and made their fortunes. Whether or not they were nostalgic for times past and nature seemingly lost is now impossible to know. But what is certain is that theirs was a world of transformations: of water into steam, raw materials into finished consumer goods, rural into industrial, of villages into towns, and, as this exhibition demonstrates, cotton into gold.

William Taylor's Peruvian diary (1913), bound in llama skin

Exhibition review: British Folk Art at Tate Britain

This review was first published in the August 2014 edition of The History Vault
http://www.thehistoryvault.co.uk/british-folk-art-at-tate-britain/

British Folk Art

Tate Britain, London, 10 June – 31 August 2014

I imagine them sitting together, heads huddled close, whispering, choosing what to embroider next: two dancing pigs, a peacock with a fabulous tail, an anchor, or a sprig of daisies. Over the course of a year, their quilt becomes filled with an eclectic mix of motifs, sewn by both their hands. They add in their initials, HB and CAS. In 1891, Herbert and Charlotte marry, and the Bellamy quilt is passed down through their family until it is donated it to a museum in the 1970s. Today, it hangs in Tate Britain as part of the British Folk Art exhibition, a beautiful familial object now transformed into art.

Walking into the vibrant first room of this exhibition, you are confronted by objects. A whole sunshine-yellow-coloured wall is filled with shop signs – a golden padlock, stout boot, gruff-looking bear and sun, to name but a few – all of them enormous. The scale is unexpected: ‘folk art’ often conjures up objects on a smaller scale – pincushions and corn dollies, more usually from a rural context. The display begins, therefore, with a provocation. If you thought you knew what folk art was – and, the curators argue, the concept is incredibly difficult to pin down – then your assumptions are overturned. Throughout the exhibition, we find out that folk art is both urban and rural, large and small, male and female. It is objects from homes, shops and ships, by makers known and unknown.

The exhibition does not have a defined linear narrative, nor are there clearly defined groupings of objects. Instead, things are arranged according to loose categories: things from towns, the sea, and the countryside. Some are grouped together because they are similar in form or according to more traditional art historical conceptions of the figurative and the abstract. Objects that are more familiar in a museum context, particularly from social history collections, are here in abundance. Much about the exhibition can be enjoyed by simply looking at these glorious things. One is often overwhelmed by the amount of work and skill that the making of monumental figureheads or quilts of over 10,000 pieces must have entailed. Superficially, many of these objects somehow seem more accessible than ‘fine art’; evocative, like the Bellamy quilt, or instantly legible, like John Vine’s painting of three magnificently enormous pigs. But although we can admire them, we cannot know them. Objects do not speak for themselves, and some of these pieces are so individual and idiosyncratic, their makers unknown, that any deeper understandings are elusive. Some might argue that to enjoy things for their aesthetic appeal is enough, and that this is what experiencing art should involve. Whilst there is much pleasure to be gained from simply looking, a greater level of appreciation can always be gained by understanding about contexts of production and use: this is as true of Western fine art just as much as it is for art from elsewhere. Here, folk art proves to be particularly elusive in yielding meaning.

Whilst the notion of folk art is all-encompassing, there are several noticeable absences throughout much of the display. For all the stress on ‘folk’, people are shadows within the exhibition. Few makers are known, and even when there are names, individual biographies are rarely extensive. There is little information about the regions and communities that things come from, about the collective identities and traditions that they supposedly represent. The final room contains a fantastic array of photographs which provide a greater sense of who and where some of these things might have come from, and the particular customs and lifeways with which they may have been associated, but this is limited. The other thing missing is the contemporary. The newest artefacts here are from the 1950s and 60s. Searching for the folk art of today could be equally thought-provoking.

The fundamental question at the heart of the exhibition could be ‘is it art?’ Definition is deliberately shied away from, the curators rather encouraging us to think about the ways in which objects may slip between or occupy multiple categories (‘art’, ‘social history’, ‘domestic artefact’, ‘curio’). That question confronts you everywhere, but there are no answers here; this is either liberating or frustrating, depending on your perspective. Fundamentally, though, the central question is ‘what is art?’ The exhibition in this reading is not about ‘folk art’, but is an unsettling of the notion of art itself. Power is inevitably at play: anonymity, for example, is partly symptomatic of names not being thought important enough to remember. Even when makers’ names are known, their positioning in relation to the artistic canon can be precarious. Alfred Wallis is regarded as an artist but Mary Linwood is not; her needlework reproductions of works of art, once wildly popular, are now out of fashion despite their temporary foray into a twenty-first century art exhibition. There are issues of taste and connoisseurship, training and skill, and the institutional structures within which art is embedded. For art to be art it must be recognised as such. It is not enough to simply revel in the making of beautiful things. 

Despite the eclecticism that the curators display, there is still a danger that folk art appears to be ‘other’ then, coming from other times and, often, from other places, away from the metropolitan gaze. From the Tate’s perspective, it is also largely from other collections. Whether or not folk art is a useful term – and its nebulousness raises questions – this exhibition is a visual treat and a tantalising taste of a world of objects. Certainly, it makes me want to visit or return to the collections that Tate borrowed from. There, perhaps, I may not find answers to the questions that this exhibition raises, but I will learn something different: about contexts of making and use, and about as much of the history of these artefacts as it is now possible to know.

Exhibition review: Ancient lives at the British Museum

This piece was originally published on the Historical Honey website in September 2014
http://historicalhoney.com/ancient-lives-new-discoveries-eight-mummies-eight-lives-eight-stories/

 Ancient lives, new discoveries: eight mummies, eight lives, eight stories

The British Museum, London, 22 May – 30 November 2014 (now extended to 12 July 2015)

When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, he was accompanied by 167 scholars, his Commission on the Sciences and Arts. Their work revealed a dazzling world of ancient temples and tombs to European eyes. The expedition’s results, published in the 23-volume Description de l’Égypte, made Ancient Egypt fashionable. The rage for collecting Egyptian antiquities, and the race to fill European museums with them, had begun. Ancient Egypt entered popular culture, and its remains are still familiar today: mummies in magnificent decorated coffins, funerary masks, hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone, one of the most iconic Egyptian antiquities, was discovered by Bonaparte's Commission, captured as a war-trophy and is now on display at the British Museum. The Stone was central to deciphering hieroglyphs, helping scholars to understand this ancient world. In a fascinating exhibition at the same institution, eight mummies, whose secrets are being unlocked by cutting-edge technology, prove themselves to be key to new insights into Egyptian lives and culture.

The exhibition begins with an image of family life: a statuette of a priest and his family, apparently in their prime. Yet this was placed in a tomb, perpetuating a memory of pristine youth. The whole display is about the interplay between life and death, representation and reality, realised through human remains, artefacts and visualisation technology. The mummies themselves have never been unwrapped, for fear of damaging them. The advent of CT scans now allows experts to look inside in incredible detail without harming them. At the most basic level, they help us to begin to visualise people: we learn ages, sex, heights and about some of their ailments. The CT scans sometimes expose the gap between what is represented on coffins and what lies inside. One coffin of a woman actually held the body of a man. Skilfully treated, carefully mummified and beautifully wrapped, the scan nonetheless reveals that part of his brain – and a tool – had been left behind in his skull. Padiamenet, a temple doorkeeper – was not so lucky. The serene exterior of his coffin hides the fact that his body was shoddily treated after death: the embalmers needed rods to reattach his head to his body after it fell off. To add insult to post-mortem injury, his feet projected out at the end of his coffin and had to be covered with cloth.

If these bodies form a highly emotive and informative link between past and present, their lives are a point of connection to Egyptian culture more broadly. Through Tjayasetimu, a 7-year-old temple singer, we learn about music, an array of instruments arranged behind the showcase glass, tantalising in their silence. Again there is a disparity between the representation on her coffin and the body within: the coffin depicts a mature woman, whose unwrapped hands and feet signal life, not a dead child whose adult teeth are still waiting to erupt in her jaw. The length of the hair that still remains on her head leads to a discussion of hair’s symbolic importance. The way in which hair was dressed reflected age, gender and social status: young children had their hair shaved; the wealthy wore elaborate wigs, an astonishing example of which is on display, a profusion of curls and plaits made up of hundreds of human hairs. The tiny coffin of a toddler from the Roman period emphasises the importance of the family to the Egyptians, the nearby toy mouse and wooden horse shrinking the two-thousand-year gap between them and us.

Museums and technology are not always the happiest of bedfellows. There is a danger of gimmickry, and the inevitable but frustrating risk of things breaking down. Here, there is a sympathetic balance because what the technology can reveal is totally new and fascinating, and it is elegantly incorporated into the exhibition design. Along with the CT scans, many of which the visitor can explore for themselves, there is sparing use of 3-D printing, allowing us, for example, to see replicas of the amulets still preserved in the wrappings around the body of priest’s daughter Tamut, their hidden forms revealed after millenia by the CT scans.

Exhibitions about the past have to tread a fine line between strangeness and familiarity. There needs to be a point of connection for us to care about lives lived thousands of years ago, something about the experience of being human that survives the passage of time. Being able to picture Ancient Egyptians as people, through understanding more about their bodies, is a first step. Yet these eight people came from a very different culture and belief system, where the dead might see with incredible powers and become transformed into immortal beings. Through objects, technology and the bodies themselves, this exhibition provides an absorbing view of ancient Egypt that left me wanting to know more.

What is a curator?

This piece was written as my contribution to the Art and Science of Curation project at the University of Cambridge. The project website can be found at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/museums-and-collections/collaborative-projects/art-science-of-curation 

It started with an object, as perhaps these things should. A model crest pole, made from the black stone argillite, by the Haida people of the Northwest Coast of Canada. It was on display in the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology whilst I was an undergraduate and from it, and from the Museum’s curator, we learnt about the interplay between tradition and culture, and a great deal more. Within this miniature artefact, so much had coalesced, not least consummate artistic skill, myths, complex histories and many layers of cultural knowledge. My astonishment at the capacity of one small thing to convey so much set me upon a career path that I have followed ever since, one that constantly challenges me to think about how people and things interact, about how histories are constructed and about how knowledge is created, transmitted, made and remade. I have now worked in various museums for seventeen years, starting as a gallery assistant and moving between roles in documentation, exhibitions and interpretation. Having begun with a specialist interest in ethnography, thanks to that model pole, I find myself running the interpretation team at a national museum. Here, I will reflect on what I believe curators do and, in tandem with this, what museums have done in the past and may do in the future.

Despite the clichéd dusty image, museums are far from the static time-capsules that they are sometimes perceived to be. In fact, they are constantly changing in a myriad of ways. Objects may enter collections, as acquisitions, loans or purchases; they may exit the institution temporarily on loan, or more permanently if they are deaccessioned or returned to their owners. Permanent displays are really no such thing, but rather shift subtly over time, whilst many museums mount temporary exhibitions that frame their collections in a new light, sometimes juxtaposing them with artefacts from elsewhere, asking different questions and making alternative associations. Museums have more recently been conceptualised as central to vast networks of objects and people, within which both are seen to have agency. These networks expand far beyond the institution’s walls, and embed museums in the imperial and colonial contexts within which many collections were formed. The vastness of these interconnections makes museums truly mind-boggling places, linking artefacts, people and places across time and space. 

                As others have commented, to curate means to care for. This caring happens in different ways. There is a very pragmatic physical care of artefacts that happens, often in tandem with conservation staff, to ensure that they are preserved. There is the care that ensures that we know where things are within the museum, in store or on display, which is designated collections management. But the caring I am most interested in is of a different nature, and it is this that I believe is a curator’s most substantial role. To curate is, for me, to understand what objects may tell us, through research into and an understanding of their histories (or ‘lives’ as they are sometimes known). It is to know your collections in depth and to appreciate their complexity, to understand their originating context and how they have travelled from there. Objects do not speak for themselves. Something of their histories is inherent in them, of course: what they are made from, how they were made, whether or not they have been used – much of this we can glean through sight and touch, and through the cumulative experience of having seen other such things. Yet much now relies on the information that accompanies objects. Museums are about both the material world and the written word: the ‘cabinet of curiosity’ for the cognoscenti, in which objects in and of themselves were the primary focus, no longer exists. Of course, things have the capacity to engage us through their materiality in unique ways. The most powerful objects are those which catch our eye, dazzle us and demand our attention and, through aspects of their being, engage our emotions, moving us in ways that may be hard to articulate. But more often, words written or spoken are a vital counterpart to things, institutionalised in the museum through catalogues and accompanying documentation. Now, when we display objects, we usually display a few well-chosen words too. 

Curators have become the facilitators of stories, incorporating new narratives into objects’ histories, and entangling objects with people’s lives in new ways.  Thus curation is caring for objects and the stories they may tell, treasuring the lives they have lived. It is about expanding upon these stories through research, writing their biographies, contextualising them and understanding them in the fullest sense possible. It is about deciding how and when to convey this information: through highly-structured exhibitions, or catalogues, or talks.  It may also be about reconnecting objects with other people who have also cared about them. My current PhD research focusses upon the intersection between family history and national history in the museum, looking at the ways in which families use objects in the home and the histories they construct around them, and how these histories can find their way into the museum context. For an institution like the National Maritime Museum, naval families are a key source community, with a deep and abiding interest in its collections and displays. Whilst not curators in the professional sense, family members look after things, have a significant impact upon what enters the museum and when, and what they know about objects is firmly embedded within the catalogues, thus forming a key part of how they are understood. It is important that curators help to maintain active relationships with such people, to ensure that these histories live on.

Museums do not exist in splendid isolation, if indeed they ever did. Most curators have exited their ivory towers and firmly shut the door behind them, entering into dialogues with their audiences that are much more fruitful for both parties. Taking the idea of dialogue to its logical conclusion begs the question whether we are somehow all curators now? Despite the ubiquity of the term, I would argue no, nor should we be. The reciprocal exchanges of a dialogue in no way preclude or substitute for expertise. Museums are sites of negotiated authority, in which curators remain responsible for the objective documentation of their collections, shaping credible narratives around artefacts through research and exhibitions. Museums’ raison d’être is in part to be places where those who have spent their lives building up expertise share it and collaborate with others, learning from each other. They have become much more democratic institutions than they ever were, and as a result are exciting and challenging places to work. Although issues of power, knowledge and authority are tricky to negotiate, museums and their curators now recognise the need for many voices contributing to their work and the benefits that flow from this.

Thus, for me, being a curator is contingent upon open-minded expertise, upon authority and specialist knowledge tempered with a desire for dialogue. It is no coincidence that curator and curiosity ultimately share the same etymology, for curators combine a pragmatic concern for objects with a thirst to know more about them through research. We are curators because we believe that the artefacts in our collections are powerful, moving, unique and fascinating. We are curators because we want to know what their many lives have been, to share them with and learn from others about them, to make connections and build relationships. We care about things, with their glorious complex capacity to engage people across time and space, and we hope that our work will help others to care too.

Present pasts or absent pasts?

Recently, I went to visit the Glorious Georges exhibition at Kensington Palace (KP), thanks to the London Interpretation Network. Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) have been doing some groundbreaking work over the past few years at KP, not least in their temporary installation The Enchanted Palace, which, like it or loathe it (I rather liked it), pushed the boundaries of interpretation practice - and this, in itself, must surely be a good thing. The last time I visited KP was over the Christmas period, when I enjoyed the Game of Crowns installation. So, what to make of my visit this time?

I suppose I have sometimes thought that interpretation in a historic house setting might be easier than in a museum. After all, you are surrounded by something authentic, a building fabric, that can help to place people in a particular time, without the need for too many words. Museums must find other ways to create atmosphere, most often through design, or rely on text, which often explains rather than evokes. Yet after today's visit, I can see the challenges of both, what they share and perhaps where they differ. Both seek to make the past present, and can only do so through fragments, whether remnants of material culture arranged behind glass or a historic building whose contents have not been constant and whose fabric has no doubt been altered over the years. Choosing which part of the past to foreground must be difficult in sites that have seen centuries of change; in a museum, at least the construct of a permanent gallery or a temporary exhibition provides instant clarity with regards to audience expectations (you hope). Whilst placing objects in glass cases draws attention to the fact that they are but the remaining small part of a rich and complex past, it does focus the mind.

Good interpretation does not distract but enriches. I loved much of what there was in the Glorious Georges. The mannequins dressed in white, music and projection in the Cupola Room brought dancing shadows into the space, suggesting lives once lived, tantalisingly near and yet far. The furniture on which the interpretation was placed was cleverly designed  in the form of firescreens, blending into the Palace but telling the story of George II and Queen Caroline in well-proportioned chunks. And the final installation in the King's Gallery was perfectly pitched; leaving the smaller space of Queen Caroline's Closet could have meant that the lengthy Gallery would feel large and impersonal. But, on the contrary, the lone mannequin dressed in mourning black, combined with a soundscape of funeral music, made this feel the most intimate room of all, despite its size, the King's grief almost palpable. I was less convinced by the smell map, which I felt removed me a little from the experience, taking me away from experiencing the environment I was in - but this might've been as much to do with my own inability to tell some of the scents apart!

In our field, many of us are striving to bring the people of the past to life in the minds of our visitors. Of course we cannot ever truly do so, but can hope to create a moment in which the past becomes present, whether through smells, soundscapes or objects, rather than emphasising its absence. For me, the Glorious Georges largely succeeded in taking me imaginatively to the Georgian Kensington Palace, connecting me with the lives of those who lived there centuries ago. Next, I'll have to visit Hampton Court to learn more of the story...

Finding your voice

One of the reasons I have been resistant to social media is my fundamental inability to separate my life into different compartments. I wear many different hats: a work hat, which centres upon museums, and thinking about them through my doctoral thesis; a play hat, which most often involves singing; and a Mummy hat, which occupies every other waking moment and then some. And I'm conscious that if I tweet extensively about a conference, I'm likely to gain some followers who will then be incredibly bored by updates about my next choir concert and who probably couldn't care less that we took a family trip to the zoo this weekend. I'm far too lazy (or, as I'd characterise it, busy) to set up separate Twitter accounts for each part of my persona. So, then, when thinking about making some first steps into the blogosphere, I encountered a conundrum: who to be? Which one to privilege, if any?

But perhaps I have been underestimating the potential for these different parts of my life to inform each other. For, after all, they all go up to make - well, me. And thinking about it, there are mutual influences. One of the most challenging things for me with regard to singing is to trust in my voice: to allow my breath to flow without constricting it and to let the sound be my sound, confident in the capacity of the air in my body to support this. In my PhD thesis, finding my voice has also been one of the most significant and difficult things that my supervisor has asked me to do. I am fully used to arguing for either side with regard to the academic literature - but, in the case of my doctoral research, what do I really want to say? And do I have the confidence to say it?

Ultimately, then, it all boils down to confidence and support. If I support my singing voice and relax, I will be able to sing with confidence and my voice, amongst many in my choir, will make its own sound. If I support my arguments and stay true to what I want to say I might get through the process of researching and writing a PhD. It's likely that, in this blog, I will mostly write about my professional life within the museum world, as that's where I am most confident and where I feel that my thoughts might make a contribution to debate, however small. But other parts of my life may well creep in, now and again. And whichever element I focus on, through all of this, I will have found what my own unique contribution - to a choir, to the museum world or to academia - is. And that's my voice.