SUGARCOATED COLLECTIONS Presenting my sweet proposition for the delicious Wunderkammer Field project, based on cloying experiences and deep glazed research during our scrumptiously immersive trips around the UK’s rich collections and sumptuous museums.
It was fun to create this proposition, play with individual artefacts, explore their ideas and put them in a different context, or rather present them in a different way than the traditional one.
As I wanted to make something physical and play around with clay, I quickly sculpted a ‘sketch’ of the Spanish baby Jesus. To make it more ‘commercial’ and ‘shiny’. I roughly vacuum-packed it, or rather just suggested it by slightly melting a piece of plastic from the bin over it.
I like the visual contradiction, as well as historic, from these 2 revolutionary materials; only from opposite ends of history.
Even with rather tight deadline to produce this presentation, I felt fairy confident with it.
However, presenting it I panicked and rushed it too much, not allowing me to explain my proposition as clearly and well as I would wish.
I should really just calm down and slowly make sure that people can actually understand me, and not make them confused as much as I’m normally at these situations.
My collection gathered while visiting collections and museums across the UK with the Wunderkammer Field project.
The ideas and context behind it.
A collage of a selection from my cake collection.
Before starting our travels across the country, I decided to scrutinise the catering facilities of each of the establishments we would visit, through a quick review of cakes – their taste, texture, etc., but also the ideas behind them, the presentation, and the context – of the environment, museum, company, etc.
Classical museums were hardly built with cafes as one if its main attraction points, or hardly even included in the architecture.
However, they became the hearth of museums and galleries, which not only soothe the thirst for knowledge, but the more bodily needs too. For most visitors, cafe experience in museums is as essential as seeing the fossils and dinosaurs, learning facts about coal, playing around with electronic interactive exhibits, or seeing Rodin’s Kiss.
I like sugar. I like fat. I’m human and therefore interesting in consuming, but I’m also interested in seeing how I’m consuming art, information and knowledge, and how they effect each other, and how I remember the experiences while visiting museums and galleries on this Field trip.
Ratings of museums on Google Maps are largely influenced by the cafe experience, with as many words and photographs, if not more, dedicated to cafe – its staff, menu, cleanness, presentation or price and value.
Nevertheless, I feel that my enjoyment of the cakes had no influence on how I enjoyed and seen the art and collections.
I felt rather lost and uninspired in the Whitworth, Manchester, but their cafe was magnificent, with the highest rated cakes.
There’s a great distance from the cafe experience and museums, they don’t influence or interact with each other much, other that the medium of blood, as when my sugar levels drop I feel distracted and couldn’t concentrate.
However, there’s one aspect, and that is the feeling of welcome. I did feel more welcomed in the museum where I could slow down, reflect and satisfy my tastebuds.
I think I would ordermy collection by how welcomed the whole experience made me feel in the museum or gallery, not by the taste test (as all of them were comparatively good).
The Wellcome Collection, Cardiff Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum and St Fagans would be on first place, as their cafes are located in very central location of the establishment, with at least some exhibits or artworks displayed around. With the St Fagans it was even more special as you enjoyed themed food, technically within the exhibition object/relic, while experiencing history and tradition.
Ashmolean Museum, Birmingham Museum?, The Hepworth Wakefield, YSP?, The Whitworth or Manchester Gallery were rather disjointed from the rest of the building and collections, making the whole experience less wholesome.
At the other end, such as Hunterian Museum, had no cafe and you felt rather alienated as the building’s main purpose was to house the Royal College of Surgeons, not you as a visitor; or the Soane’s Museum where limited space restricted the maximum visitors and their time in.
A very unique museum experience and like no other encountering on our Field trips. Objects and historical artefacts are displayed within historical buildings, deconstructed from their original location and reconstructed on the museum’s grounds, together telling the story of Welsh life. It’s really an anthropological museum, like Pitt Rivers or Anthropological Museum in Cambridge, just curated in very different way.
What a sumptuous start to our first 3 day trip across Souther part of England, in beautiful Ashmolean Museum first opened in 1683, housing treasures of the greatest civilisations across time.
Ashmolean Museum is the first university museum, which was established after donation by Elias Ashmole of his cabinet of curiosities mostly including antique coins, books, engravings, geological specimens, and zoological specimens.
Its front, classical style building was designed Charles Cockerell and finished in 1845.
The museum now houses prominent collection of artefacts from greatest ancient civilisations such as Greek and Roman, Egypt, Nubia, Iran and Babylon, Persia, Aegean, or Cycladic civilisations, grouped together. In the upper levels, the collection is themed by European cultural aspects such as violin making, tapestry or ceramics (Delftware, Majolica). Art collection includes modern masters such as Turner, Picasso, Cezanne or Pissarro.
Its main ethos is to educate the public, however some efforts to innovate is evident with the interesting open room close to the entrance showing objects together, across different cultures and time, with a piece by Barbara Hepworth introducing the ensemble.
Although the collections and exhibition were rather classical and conservative, it was done especially well, with the sheer number of great quality artefacts almost mesmerising.
I particularly enjoyed the display of Lekythoi, with may examples of decorations and narratives, with good explanation of its ritualistic purposes and the stories illustrated. As well as method of production, and it’s construction with a broken example revealing its interior.
Musical instruments and tapestries, not normally seen displayed together, enrich each-other’s narrative and history.
One of the more modern collection I found was English Delftware from 18th century.
Commemorative plates mostly showing royalty in rather naive and simple style, with it’s stylistically disproportioned faces and bodies makes you laugh.
They depict a very messy and complicated royal relationships, which could explain it’s fast approach to decorating?
They make me happy because I feel I couldn’t paint with majolica any better and more realistic. I would like to try and quickly create and illustrate narratives on plate like this. I feel such style would just give more humour, lightness and expression to ideas and stories.
A presentation of our allocated museums, on their core collections and collectors, ethos, organisation, curation, architecture, history and context. I was allocated the Hunterian Museum in London, within the Royal College of Surgeons’ Headquarters.
I was glad I got to research deeply and digest data on a scientific based collection. My fascination was quickly directed to the strong ethos of careful observation and objective scientific method, that led John Hunter to collect around 15,000 specimens.
This approach, and the exhibits themselves, helped him to make a number of breakthroughs in medical surgery, which the curation of the museum reflects.
During my presentation, straight after the presentation on another science based collection of Wellcome Foundation, a deep conversation on ethics emerged.
The collection itself, as well as how some of the artefacts were acquired, raised questions on what is appropriate in art, medicine and science.
The exhibiting of the objects, human parts, in a public museum setting requires special attention, that’s why the ban of photography in Hunterian Museum.
Visiting the Ken Stradling collection and choosing our catalysts for our projects. My eyes were drawn to a small 1963’s book case on 4 legs, filled with orange book-spines. The extraordinary story of this small piece of furniture took me on a journey through the world wars, revolution in book publishing, architecture and all the ambitious ideas of modernism.
The ISOKON manufactured and designed by Ernest Race in the 1963 – ISOKON PENGUIN DONKEY MARK 2, displayed within the Ken Stradling collection was the starting point for me.
The father of the original Penguin Donkey was Egon Riss. As a Bauhaus-educated architect from Vienna, relocated to the UK, he started to experiment with new exploration within plywood bending and its possibilities.
His purpose build piece of furniture was commissioned by then very new, but a very rapidly successful paperback publisher Penguin Books. They revolutionised the easy of consuming our books and made it available to masses; by having best classical and modern works of literature produced in small, portable and cheap paperback format.
The new purpose build holder needed to reflect the easy and new way of reading; the books being close, always available within an arm’s reach from a chair, compare to conventional storage of great library like bookshelves.
The Donkey was manufactured using thin birch plywood, which became unavailable due to the outbreak of the Second World War, and all the plywood was directed for war purposes.
With only 100 pieces manufactured, the production ceased to halt.
ISOKON tried to revive the forgotten and never manufactured in a larger scale design by commissioning Ernest Race to create a modern version of this highly functional piece of furniture. The form changing drastically, loosing its early modernist curves for cold and sharp minimalists angles. The top is flattened to serve another function, as a coffee/side table, but still keeping its middle gap for magazines and newspapers.
This object caught my interest most from the Ken Stradling collection because of its minimal, functional design, purpose built for another object, as well as the white neutral colours giving prominence to the bright colour sleeves and ideas of display and containment.
However, it is the original curvy design and the story surrounding it and its makers and processes that I want to expand on.
In 2003 The Donkey saw another redesign by Shin and Tomoko Azumi, bringing back the curves, but still keeping some of the right angles. I feel it’s a nice fusion of the two designs, bringing extra functionality by the side handles and completely closing the top to function as a small table.
The aspects of Ken Stradling Collection that captured my attention on our first visit.
As You can probably see, I was rather drawn towards orange.
I was already unintentionally seeking some kind of containers; influenced by my project from first year as well as some ideas I was exploring over summer as a homework.
I’m really glad I discovered these themes in a very different form – furniture, and would like to explore furniture and the domestic setting in my practice.
It was actually very easy to find links and different objects relating someways in their colour, material, form or function; exploring and extending the themes in the small time and space within the Collection.
I was able to find examples that interested me in textile, ceramics, sculpture, toys or wood. At the end, I couldn’t escape the nature of Ken Stradling Collection, and a lot of the objects I chose to photograph had some form of playfulness, with tiny feet or wonky feet to moveable toys and animated animals.
Donkey was Egon Riss. As a Bauhaus-educated architect from Vienna, relocated to the UK, he started to experiment with new exploration within plywood bending and its possibilities.
Ceramic Líška 