The working life of Museum of London

Starting to look at art

During this week’s Many East End session, we asked members of youth organisation Tolerance in Diversity what they thought was the most significant event in the East End in the last two years. I’ll reveal their answer in a bit, but first a little about the session. (As we were starting to examine, and create, art this week, you’ll see the photos have taken on a post-modern feel).

Selecting photos

Artist Sarah Carne started off by asking everyone about the photos they had taken in the galleries last week to represent their favourite East End place, person, image and thing. Collectively, the group discussed each photo and sorted them into three categories: Definitely representative, Definitely not representative and Not sure. Strong strands started to emerge amongst the images, the strongest of which was family. Others included Canary Wharf, The Thames, water more generally and modern architecture. One participant had chosen ‘Turkoman’ to represent her favourite East End person, her brother. She said Turkoman reminded her of him when he was little dressing up in girls clothes and in her words, ‘being a girl’.

Turkoman

The ‘Definitely representative ‘ and ‘Not Sure’ photos were then gathered and saved, and participants will be adding them to their project portfolios.

Sarah then introduced us to her art.

Sarah Carne - Loving her Yugo

Sarah explained that she  does a lot of work in film and photography and that, in her words, ‘My art is all about me’. As well as showing us interesting commissions she has done on a variety of topics she also introduced us to what it would appear is the love of her life – her Yugo. The amazing Yugo has been photographed, written upon, Letrasetted (if that’s a word), converted into a cinema, use to ferry people between exhibitions, travelled ‘home’ to Yugoslavia, rotted, molded, broken down and vandalised. And now Sarah is  writing a musical about it. The Yugo is Sarah’s. As art, it represents her and reflects her. The Yugo also provided the subject matter for a series of photos, which when shown in quick succession, convert into a mini film. The combination of self, and the creation of film, was our inspiration for our next task.

Personalising a peg

Sarah gave everyone a peg and asked them to customise it to represent them. One person simply added their name using Letraset, followed by a semi-colon to represent the fact that he does a lot of computer programming. (The semi-colon occurs alot in computer programming, we were told!) Other pegs were converted into a girl with little pigtails and a shark. Others were covered in letters and stickers and one was not touched in itself, but attached to a Bangladeshi flag, to represent nationality.

Loving the peg

So, you may be wondering how all this relates to most significant event in the East End in the last two years. Well…

Sarah explained that the customised pegs, and other pegs if necessary were going to be ’brought to life’ in a quick film to represent that event, whatever the group thought it may be. So, a discussion began on possible contenders for this event. Suggestions included:

1. Construction of the Olympics site
2. Losing the bid to host the World Cup
3. English Defensive League march this summer
4. Construction of Westfield
5. Riots in Hackney

After some to-ing and fro-ing the group came to a consensus that, in their opinion, the most significant event in terms of impact on their East End was the English Defensive League march. Several of the group members had been there on the day, having joined lots of people in coming out against the march. In the midst of the tension, the EDL coach broke down, just outside the East London Mosque, and a previously unpredicted flash point erupted.  You can read more about the event here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14779772

So, using pegs, and a healthy slug of creativity, the group created a short film of the events of the day. We do have the film footage but haven’t had a chance to do anything post production yet so a photo will have to do!

Us and Them - In Pegs

And that concluded last night’s session. I’m sure we will be going back to this topic, and looking in further depth at why the group felt that this is the most significant East End event in the last two years. Because of the public sector strike we are not meeting next week, so the group are meeting independently. Leading on from examining what their East End is, they are going to be considering how they would represent it artistically. Their ‘pitch’ is going to be presented to the curator of View Tube in Stratford on 7th December. Watch this space…

Team bonding

Down at Docklands, we are working on a new concept for the part of the museum that looks at the Docks since 1945. The working title of this project is Many East Ends.

In order to tell as rich a history as possible in the new gallery, Docklands Strategy Manager, George Young, is doing lots of creative colloborations with all types of groups and individuals. One of these groups is Tolerance in Diversity, an organisation based in Limehouse led by young people for young people. TiD work to reduce discrimination and prejudice by delivering training and running events throughout London. They have worked with the museum before and we have invited them back for their input into the concept for Many East Ends.

Why the long face?

The process started last night, under the guidance of artist Sarah Carne. www.sarahcarne.org

Sarah asked everyone to think of  their favourite East End person, place, image and thing.  Everyone was given a video camera and asked to give their four examples to camera. This has delivered some very interesting footage that we hope to put online in the future, together with other footage as the project progresses.

After filming, and armed with a camera, everyone was asked to find examples of items in the gallery that connected to, or represented, their four examples. Here is a snap shot of some of them.

Canary Wharf model

Bridge for DLR

East End family

Bomb by William Ware

We then started talking and thinking about what everyone wanted to get out of the project.

Thinking of ideas

Sarah asked everyone to answer the following questions:

What skills to I bring to the project?
What do I want to get from the project?
What could stand in my way?
What skills do you need in the East End?

Hard at work

Lastly, Sarah led discussion on what elements of the East End would need to be included in the gallery when it was redeveloped, based on the thoughts from the evening’s activity. On initial discussion, the following ideas and elements were put forward.

• Politics
• Immigration
• Buskers
• A working DLR train
• A mock tube station – not Bermondsey
• Gangs
• The River Thames

Developing, expanding and honing this list will form a key element of this project as it continues towards Christmas and into the New Year. Next week we will be returning to it to see what ideas have changed or grown. We will also be looking at how far back in time the Many East Ends gallery should go, as well as having more fun with cameras, creating more bunting (as seen in the background of the photos) and adding more to our project portfolio books.

Roman Strigil

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an instrument of torture? No, it’s a Roman strigil. And what is a strigil you may well ask. Well…

Instead of using water to clean themselves, Romans used olive oil. They would pour it onto their body and let it it sit there for a few minutes. The oil would make its way into the pores of the skin, picking up any dead cells, dust and dirt. Then, the cleansing Roman would take a strigil (like the one pictured above) and scrape the grimey oil off his or her body, leaving them looking good and feeling smooth. In Roman society it was considered rude to bathe any less than once a week and cleanliness and beauty were prized much as they are today.

Things have not been the same through the ages though. Around the tudor period, bathing went out of fashion, maybe because for lots of people, it was harder to bathe. Clothing also changed, with a fashion for a layer of under garments beneath your outer clothes. People washed their under garments more regularly than themselves and society became less concerned about regular bathing. During tudor times, people would carry pomanders, believing them to bring health. Common belief was that disease lived in bad smells and that nice smells would dispell illness.

All of this fascinating information was imparted to the October participants of Continue Creating by expert Sally Pointer. After speaking of more distant times, she then brought us more up to date. We looked at bars of soap from the collection, including the unforgettably smelling carbolic.

Soap made for Children's Home residents, Hounslow

We discussed soap’s multiple functions from something with which to scour a chip pan or clean a tin bath, to a myriad of beauty products. And it was beauty soap that we were interested in, as this was the type that Sally was going to show us how to make. Very exciting! We discussed the different base fats that are used to make soap, including olive, vegetable and animal fats. One of the workshop participants told us about her mother in Africa, who makes soap using palm oil and coconut oil. Sally also showed us the various flowers and other ingredients that you can add to the fat to make it both look and smell nice. She had lavender, marigold, rose as well as oats and an array of oils including sandalwood and geranium.

Putting the work in - grating soap

Firstly, we grated existing unperfurmed castile soap made by Sally. Grating soap is hard work. We discovered that it is much tougher than cheese! But everyone got stuck in and put in a lot of elbow grease.

Hands at work

To combine the grated soap, flowers and other smells, Sally recommends subtley scented boiled water like orange blossom or rose water. We used rose water. The variety of ingredients meant that participants made a lot of different combinations: oatmeal and lavender, all rose, marigold and sandalwood, oatmeal and geranium… and the list goes on. There were a real range of shapes too with some people creating balls and others fashioning them into stars and even a monkey!

Ta Da! Homemade soap

Who wouldn't be proud?

We all had a thoroughly fascinating and fun afternoon and would like to thank Sally for such a great workshop. What beauty products could we make next? Answers on a postcard please.

September’s Continue Creating session saw clients drawing inspiration from London style, design and architecture to create fabric trinket boxes. Expert practitioner Rose Firth led the group in acquiring the basic techniques of the ancient Indonesian art of batik. This involves applying hot wax and dye to fabric to create a design. First, we experimented with dying scraps of fabric.

Then, Rose showed us how to apply liquid wax to the fabric using a tool called a tjanting. A tjanting has a long wooden handle with a very thin metal spout at the end. It is used to make intricate designs and you need to work quickly to achieve precision. Workshop participants created beautiful pieces as they were learning the technique.

After much experimenting, people began on their designs for their box and you can see the gorgeous results below.

Batik proved very popular as a medium for creative expression and as you can see produced beautiful and diverse results. We would like to practice it furtehr in the future so all ideas for projects welcomed!

Last week we welcomed old friends and new faces to Museum of London Docklands, for a special visit. It was great to see old project participants and Capital A clients who know the London Wall site well, discovering our sister museum. It was also great to meet the new faces from Harringey, who we hope to see more of in the future.

After hunting for clues in our galleries quiz and visiting the Pirates exhibition everyone got stuck into a craft workshop, the results of which you can see in the photos here. We had a stunning array of final pieces – some inspired directly by Docklands and others more abstract.

This month’s Continue Creating workshop saw old and new faces alike making 1940s inspired hats. Adult Programmes Manager and freelance milliner, Isabel Benavides showed participants how to take hats bought at charity shops for a couple of pounds and turn them into new creations using ‘make do and mend techniques’. Make do and mend or what has been trendily re-branded as up-cycling, involves taking an old or tired item of clothing, in this instance a hat, and refreshing it into something better. It was popular during rationing when money was tight and often women re-fashioned their husband’s hats, jackets, ties and shirts when they were away fighting for long periods.

 There is some wonderfully kitsch government issued ‘make do and mend’ films from the 1940s on youtube. We watched one that contains the immortal line “You can turn hubby’s hat into a hat for his sweet little wife”. 

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=51689

We also got a sneak peek at some hats from the store. These included the stunning evening pieces below designed by Italian legend Elsa Schiaparelli.

They then received an introduction to how to sculpt felt, create corsages, manipulate hat wire and use Petersham (specialist hat ribbon).  Everyone really got into it and a range of styles started to emerge. From the naval inspired…

 …through the post-modern…

… to the super exotic…

 By the end a great array of male and female hats had been produced and even a child’s head band as a birthday present for one of the participants’ 7 year old niece. 

 It was good to be reminded of ways to upcycle your wardrobe, using methods from another time of great austerity… 

Yesterday, a group of Londoners roamed around the Museum creating photographs using shoe boxes as cameras. Inspired by images in the Street Photography exhibition, they used the pin-hole technique, pioneered in the 1830s. When working in pin-hole, anything can be your camera. You simply make a hole in a box to let a very small amount of light onto photographic paper. The photographers of the images above and below used shoe boxes.

The shoe boxes were painted black inside, with a sheet of photographic paper on the bottom. The photographers set them up at different points around the site and allowed light through in for about 2 minutes. The images were then developed in the museum dark room with the help of facilitator Kathryn Faulkner and the museum photographic team. The end product is an intriguing negative image, but a few clicks on Photoshop or the right type of phone, reveal the positive version.

This workshop was part of the Inclusion ‘Continue Creating’ programme.

Iron Mongers Hall - Original Negative

Iron Mongers Hall - Positive inversion

Jug and glasses - Original negative

Jug and glasses - Inverted positive

High walk - Original Negative

High walk - Positive inversion

Garden - Negative original

Garden - Positive inversion

Something missing? The plinth without the statue of Robert Milligan

In the Picture is now mid way through. For those, who don’t know this is a project in partnership with the Stephen Lawrence Centre in Deptford. It is based around the concept of the ‘Fourth Plinth’ at Trafalgar Square. A statue of the C18th sugar trader Robert Milligan stands on a plinth outside the Docklands Museum. But is this appropriate? And if not, who, or what, else could stand in his place? We put this question to twelve Londoners, from all different boroughs and asked them to submit a new proposal for the plinth. Their proposal will be presented as a photoshopped image of the front of the museum with their new art work on the plinth. These images will be displayed in an exhibition in the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery from March – August 2011.

The project is 8 weeks long and so far, participants have taken part in quizzes in the museum’s galleries, had a guided session in the Docklands archive, spent time investigating and exploring the role of public art with Francis Marshall (Senior Curator of Paintings Prints and Drawings) and have honed their creative ideas in the ‘Ideas Surgery’.

This week saw the first week in the Mac suite, down at the Stephen Lawrence Centre. Proposals are being finalised and ideas are beginning to shape up.

Here’s a sneak preview of some of the ideas in the making:

Drawing inpiration from East London scupture

A reflective metal sail entitled 'Free'

Drawing inspiration from Banksy

How do you represent Dockers?

The plinth as a sugar cube pyramid, on which children can eat their lunch

Keep your eyes peeled for another update at the end of the project in December!

Another month, another creative session for the Continue Creating Crew. This month, we created of clay moulds, in which we set plaster of paris casts. Drawing inspiration from the fascinating variety of military and educational medals in the Learning Collection, we came up with our own beauties!

Gold finger!

Last week saw the second Continue Creating workshop for 2010. This is part of the Inclusion Programme and past participants of all projects are invited back to a workshop every month. It’s social, fun and a way of maintaining a relationship between the Museum and our friends. May’s workshop saw us making C19th style Jumpin’ Jack puppets. Sadly, I can’t seem to upload all the images so here are two of the stars. As you can see, they have a contemporary twist!