Inspired by heritage

I have finished off one of my pieces for my Inspired by heritage residency project today. This bracelet is inspired by a number of objects from the museum collection of Whitby Museum. The patterns on both sides of the pieces are made using photo polymer plates. I have made the plates from photographs of objects in the museum collections.

On the underlying surface the patterns are created from photographs of spears made from wood and shark teeth. On the top or outer curve the patters are from pressed flowers preserved in the herbaria and not usually on display. The design of the form used to make the shapes is inspired by this beautiful shell necklace from the Pacific which is part of the ethnographic collections and currently on display in the Cook and Scoresby room of the museum. The very textured inner curve also has gold applied using the tradition technique of keum boo.

The piece has been oxidised and then highlights polished back up.

Badge making fun

Tomorrow I am due to run a badge making session in Whitby Museum.  I love these, it is a great opportunity to chat to visitors and to get them to spend a bit of time looking at things more closely. I will be there with my little badge making machine and lots of bits of paper, pens and crayons and look forward to meeting whoever comes in.  If it happens to be a quiet day I will get on with my own research as I have a few ideas and need to get a bit of sketching done.

Fun making badges

My badge making thing has arrived.  What fun this is!  I just thought I would try it out so did a couple of felt pen sketches - from my original drawings done at the museum.  I then took three of my photographs and played around with them and printed them out.  Here are the results.  The idea is that I will get visitors to the museum to do their own little sketch or drawing and make it into a badge so that they have their own original souvenir..... that is if I don't use them all up playing around with them first :)

More fossils

I did go back to Whitby Museum on Thursday and spent the whole day sketching and photographing things, concentrating mainly on the extraordinary fossil collection.  If you 'click' on the picture of the Museum on the right it will take you to their website, with details of the collections and of the opening times.

The plant fossil is Cladophlebis denticulata which is a very graphic matte black, with the delicacy almost of a watercolour painting across the surface of the stone.  

In contrast the photograph of rib cage (below) is just the central section of a large Plesiosaurus Propinquus.  It is astonishing to me that such contrasting things can have survived almost intact for an inconceivable period of time.  There are so many beautiful patterns and structures in this part of the collection I could spend the whole year of my residency at the museum staring into one cabinet and not get bored but there is so much else to investigate in there.

I am beginning to develop a few ideas and at some point will publish a plan of workshops I will be involved in running inspired by the collections throughout 2009

Holotypes and ammonites

I have been into Whitby Museum again this afternoon, thinking I would do a bit of quiet sketching. Instead I have met a number of very interesting people (and apologise in advance to them as I won't remember any of their names) and been introduced to some holotypes of ammonites.  Now I have always liked the fossil collection but really only ever viewed it as a series of interesting patterns and forms.  I had realised that the museum had an important collection but now know that it has a number of 'holotypes' - which as I understand it are the actual physical examples (or one of several examples) used when the species of ammonites were being formally described for geological and scientific identification purposes and, yes, when you look more carefully you can see the differences in them!    I need to go in when there is no-one around now so that I can look more carefully and maybe even sketch and photograph some of them.  

I knew being artist in residence at Whitby Museum would be interesting and exciting but had no real idea of the wealth of inspirational material there was tucked away there............ just waiting to be explored.

A book of glorious hands

I have had a very exciting day my book is ready!  I got the phone call at lunchtime and rushed off into Whitby to collect it and I think it is really beautiful, just right for my project.  The book was created by Brian Cole at www.thecastlebindery.co.uk.  I was so excited I went straight up to the museum to show anyone I could find and found visitors...... so have actually started to collect the glorious hands.  I am asking people visiting the museum while I am there whether they would draw around their own hand and write inside the outline to say what is their favourite thing in or about the museum.  Entirely without my prompting some of the participants decorated their drawings so what I have started with are some very lovely colourful hands to cut out and stick into my book.

Wire bird

Well here it is fastened to the collar of my cardigan, my latest experiment is a little wire bird brooch. So now I've got that out of my system maybe I can get on

Glorious hands and the hand of glory

Whitby Museum has a very popular object called the Hand of Glory.  It is ironic that the myth surrounding it is about sleep as there I was at 4am last night wide awake and thinking about it.  I should have just gone to work at around 10.30pm when I began doodling birds in my notes and perhaps I would have worked out my ideas then ........ instead of later lying awake wondering whether I could make a wire bird small enough to be an earring.  Anyway, there I was at 4.20am with Earl Grey tea and my notebook thinking about hands......... glorious hands!

Hands are of course important to the making process and at some point in my residency I will almost certainly start making bracelets or bangles, as they have always been a key part of any collection of jewellery I have designed and made.  The large size of my own hands originally influenced me wanting to make bangles as I could never find any to fit.

I then started thinking about the way we use our hands, particularly in western society - we shake hands, kiss hands, hold hands, using them to write (or more often these days to type and text) we wave in greeting; to attract attention and goodbye.  They are unique, each with their own set of marks of our personal histories - fingerprints and rings signifying our personality and our attachments.  I recall once reading that wearing a ring for any length of time leaves a mark on the bone not just in the flesh of the wearer and also remember being fascinated by a necklace of wire hands in a museum somewhere - was it in the Ashmolean? ..... which brings me back, full circle to the wire.

For my visitors book at the museum I would like people to draw around their own hands on paper, then write their name, date and favourite thing about the museum within the outline - maybe a small drawing in the palm?  I will then cut them out and stick them into my book, which is in the process of being bound by Brian Cole www.thecastlebindery.co.uk and they will become a record of my days at the museum.

And so to sleep...... maybe mandrake would help :)

 

Birds and feathers

I spent Tuesday afternoon looking more closely at the bird collection in Whitby Museum.  I did various sketches  particularly of the interesting patterns of the feathers forming irregular triangles and ripples and waves.  There were many beautiful forms and colours and I took quite a few photographs that will help me later on in my project.  I then went around looking at representations of birds in other parts of the collection and found interesting bird patterns of inlay in a gunstock, ceramic birds, prints in the pages of a Japanese book and of course all the birds in the Noah's ark.  I came away really inspired but with a head full of feathers....... all ideas that need to be sorted out.