Inside the Museum of London

The Inspiring London space is currently home to a display of photographic work by acclaimed photographer Dorothy Bohm. The display is called Women in Focus and the title is pretty self explanatory. We have lots of great work by Dorothy in the collection and this display gave us a good excuse to use her approach as inspiration for our own creativity.

To do this, we roped in the skills of the talented and wonderfully fizzy artist, Edori Fertig. Not only is Edori an artist in her own right but she also knows Dorothy. They met through her daughter, curator Monica Bohm-Ducen when Edori displayed her work in an exhibition about Jewish female identity called the Rubies and Rebels. So, a good person to introduce us to Dorothy. And also someone it’s great to be around. Edori is part of a collective called the Skip Sisters, so named because they make art from things they collect from skips. It’s so much fun. One thing she makes is oyster card wallets, and it was these we made ourselves on Tuesday.

Layered and layered by participant Cesearea

Edori took us around the exhibition, and showed us that there are some key principals in all of Dorothy’s work. We were encouraged to find these in the work on show in Women in Focus. Firstly, the colour red.

Secondly, the voyeur, or onlooker. This is either a person, or something more subtle like a face on a poster, or within another image. In the photograph below the onlooker is almost hidden. Can you see her?

And finally, layers.

Can you see how these were interpreted and deconstructed in the response work below? That’s the high brow bit. The less high brow bit is how much fun we had making oyster card holders!

London re-envisaged

Making links to when women were fighting to be in focus

The above wallet uses material from our collection relating to the suffragette campaign. Making links to when women were fighting to be in focus, it reads (from right side to left):

Special Note!!

The bearer of this ticket is called a Suffragette
Who tries her best the sexes to reverse
She claims to have a grievance
Which she’s nursing hard, you bet,
What a pity she has NOTHING ELSE to NURSE.

IT ALSO ENTITLES HER TO PASS OUT of her own house and neglect her domestic duties, leaving them to the tender mercies of anyone, while she is trying to get the management of the country INTO HER “CAPABLE HANDS” ? WHEN, HEAVEN HELP US!!

IT ALSO ENTITLES HER, at any moment, to ventilate her grievances, and to turn on HER GAS, but she must not SUFFER-A-JET to escape for more than six hours at a time for fear of asphyxiating her audience.

THIS SEASON TICKET ALSO ENTITLES HER to seize-on every opportunity to NURSE her grievances.

Playing with edges

Made by Sergei

By Geoffrey Harrison, artist-in-residence at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum and Galleries

I’ve been influenced by medicine and anatomy all my life. Both my parents were medical illustrators and my childhood was spent surrounded by specimens of one sort or another.

I’m really lucky to have been able to access the collection at St Bart’s Pathology Museum and have spent many happy hours drawing there. While it began as an important teaching resource, the museum collection is now an artifact documenting medical and pathological procedure, and also, since many of the specimens were collected locally, provides an important social record.

The series of drawings and paintings I’ve been working on is inspired by the anatomical drawings and practice of historical artists who investigated the structural support of the human body, from Leonardo Da Vinci through to Thomas Godart, (whose illustration can be seen at the Pathology Museum).

I’m really interested in the idea that an organism can be self-reflecting or self-creating and so I draw organs or body parts that connect in unexpected ways, or loop back on themselves like a Möbius strip. I happened upon the term ‘Autopoiesis’ meaning ‘self-creation’ (Greek: Auto “self”; and Poiesis “creation or production”), which seemed to really chime with some of the paradoxical intestinal loop drawings I do, and set me off looking for other things to connect up.

I’m really looking forward to running the workshop at the Museum of London late on 31 October. It’s a great way to take a light-hearted look at anatomy and art and I’m hoping to be able to talk to lots of people about my work.

Geoffrey Harrison is the Artist in Residence at St Bart’s Pathology Museum  and will be  running a Halloween card-making sessions, based on his anatomical illustrations, at the Doctors and Dissection late on Halloween at the Museum of London.

Doctors and Dissection late
Museum of London
Wednesday 31 Oct, 7-9.45pm
Book in advance £10 (concs £9, Friends FREE)
Book tickets online or via the box Office on 020 7001 9844.

For more information on Geoffrey Harrison’s work visit his website and to learn more about the St Bart’s Pathology Museum please contact Steve Moore s.moore@qmul.ac.uk or take a look online.

By Michael Pollitt of snipelondon.com

1. London is infinite – There are so many people in so many places doing so many things. All of those people and places and things are potential blog posts. And the city is so big and so old that every street, and the history of every decade of every street, is a potential blog post. London is an infinity of interesting things. The hard part is choosing where to begin.

2. London has some great blogs – These other blogs aren’t competition, that’s not the way it works. If you’re talking about something that’s interesting to people, they’ll read you, and if someone else is talking about it, they’ll read them as well. You can even help them out by linking to each other. It’s not dog eat dog, it’s the more the merrier. This is a nice environment for a blog to grow up in.

3. Blog writers and blog readers are creatures of habit – Personally (and blogs are intensely personal things), I find that the more I blog, the more I want to blog. And the more readers read the blog, the more they want to read. Habitual posting will also prevent your blog from joining the Ozymandian ruins of half-finished blogs which litter the outer deserts of the internet.

4. You can make your own rules but it does help to have some – The great opportunity of blogging is that you can say anything, in any way you want. The great danger of blogging is that you can say anything, in any way you want. It helps to make yourself some rules, such as what topics to focus on, what policy to adopt on exclamation marks, and how many biscuits to reward yourself with for each completed post. Once you’ve done that, you can have some fun finding ways to get around them!

5. Blogging is an underrated way of learning – If you’re curious about how the world works, or in Snipe’s case how London works, then writing a blog is a great way of finding out. It’s like doing a degree, except you get to set all the questions and mark your own answers. You also get to meet some interesting people and muck about with words. That makes blogging fun.

Michael Pollitt is on the panel for Behind the Blog, taking place at the Museum of London on 17 October from 7pm. Behind the Blog will be chaired by Dave Hill, Guardian.co.uk London blogger and political commentator. The discussion will explore what blogging means for Londoners.

Joining Michael and Dave is Now.Here.This. blog editor for Time Out, Sonya Barber; Chloe McCloskey, publishing editor of Le Cool, a popular weekly online magazine; and Ian Mansfield, who writes about interesting things to do and that he has done on his blog IanVisits.

Tickets are £7 and available online and via the box office 020 7001 9844

So this month, the Continue Creating massive went down to Spitalfields farm to learn a little bit about street art, from some people who know.

Participants' work. Yep - it's good.

Our workshop leaders know a thing or two about the history and practice of street art. Gary and Josh are street artists themselves. They run tours of street art in and around East London, which I am reliably told by my friend and teammate Jen, are ace. http://www.alternativeldn.co.uk/ Sadly we don’t have any pics of Gary and Josh but take it from me, they were thoroughly nice chaps.

The workshop started off with some history. We learnt about the fact that Street Art usually carries a political message, and was born out of artists’ desire to say  things about the spaces they inhabited. Artists also often wanted to express something about the people and forces that governed those spaces, or tried to. Josh told us that a lot of street artists now seek permission for the work they do (e.g. from the local council) and are also often commissioned to do pieces in public areas by private or public bodies. We asked how much ‘take home’ work by street artists costs and discovered that Banksy’s  most expensive piece sold for $US 1.87 million. Perhaps more interestingly though, some work that you can see on the streets of East London, is made by artists who can command up to £10,000 a piece.

Amy Amy Amy by Andrew

We were also told about the fundamental differences between Street Art and graffiti. Josh told us that Street Art is a recognised art form, in which layering, change and evolution is fundamental. The work is deliberately and proudly transitory with artists responding to, and adding to, the visual noise in any given area. He spoke about the fact that where he works depends on what is already there and that sometimes he doesn’t want to be the first person to infringe on, or paint over, a work by someone he really respects. The issue of respect, he explained, is fundamental to the difference between Street Art and graffiti. Graffiti can be simply a way of tagging when you’ve been somewhere, either to mark territory or simply for the sake of it. Graffiti can consist of one word sprawled across any public area or private property using spray paint or marker pen and some graffiti artists will tag anywhere, giving no thought to what was previously there or the purpose of what they are doing. This is the point of view of a street artist. If you’re a graffiti artist out there with a different view, please get in touch, I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Can you see Capital Arts?

So once we’d learnt our history it was time to get down to business. Everyone worked on their design on paper before hitting the spray cans. Most people created stencils on card with a blade, which was attached to our bit of the assigned wall and sprayed over. We were told that this model of street art developed because it allows the artist to spend a lot of time on the concept and not very long on the execution. So if you wanted to make a statement in a place that you weren’t supposed to you could get it done and get away quickly…

Claudia hard at work

Not only did the rain hold off (a near miracle) but some interesting noise was added to the wall. We’re looking forward to our Street Art spotting tour of East London in the future…

Little Syon in 1820

This week Continue Creating broke from the routine of doing a workshop at Museum of London and took part in the archaelogical dig to find Little Syon. ‘Little Syon’ sat in the grounds of Syon Park, Brentford. The house was built in c. 1592 by George Watson. The house changed hands a number of times and was eventually bought in 1818 by Hugh Percy, 3^rd Duke of Northumberland, and incorporated into Syon Park. It was demolished as part of the landscape renovations commissioned by the Duke but archive records suggest it was still standing in 1820, suggesting a demolition date in the early 1820’s. The excavation is the first time the site’s archaeological will be explored.

Starting to wash the finds

The session started with a very interesting talk from Kath, about the history of the site and what the archaelogists were hoping to find. We learnt about Syon during the Roman period, through the Battle (or skirmish) of Brentford in 1642, right up to the C19th. Then we were taught how to dig. Over the course of 30 minutes, 8 willing volunteers scraped carefully away at the earth in the hope that it might yield some of its secrets.

Stav and Andrew giving it a good scrub

A key part of the archaelogical process is ‘Finds washing’, literally washing what you have found. So with a bowl of clean water, a toothbrush and a gentle hand, the group set to work.

Trying to ignore the wild parakeets flying overhead

The age old dilemma: brick or roof tile?

 Once celan, we could really see what we had found.

In this tray you can see a number of things. There is an oyster shell, which Dan explained was, unlike today, the fast food of Roman times. Then, it was plentiful, cheap and delivered in throw away packaging (the shell!) You can also see pieces of glassware. Kate told us that the clear galss may have formed a vessel that carried ointment/beauty product and the green a wine bottle. The green glass had a sprawling iridescent stain on it, which may not be visible in the photograph, but was caused by soil staining over the years. There are also pieces of brick and roof tile and you can tell where someone had been guilty of shoddy workmanship. A grey seem running through the centre of the piece shows that it was not fired enough. The clay remained grey rather than turning red.

Victorian crockery

Two finds attracted particular attention. The first was this piece of Victorian crockery, probably a serving plate used for day to day eating, rather than special events.

Poppy ware

The second, what Kate referred to as the ’star find’, was this piece of ‘Poppy ware’, so called because of the black dots across it, which look like Poppy seeds. It is Roman, making it over 2,000 years old, and was almost certainly made in Highgate, North London, where the Romans produced a lot of Poppy ware. The Poppy seed pattern is not only decorative but as the circles are slightly raised, helps the user to grip it. This piece was probably part of a bowl.

After the visit, on the mini-bus on back to London Wall , everyone agreed that they had had a great afternoon. A massive thank you to the whole team who made it possible. Andrew did point out though that someone needs to be more careful with their pots because they are all broken!

Following on from our blog posts And he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down… and At the first sign of trouble, find out what else has been happening at Syon Park. 

The existence of Sir Richard Wynn’s house (Little Syon) has been carefully brought back to light through the hard work of Simon Hadleigh-Sparks, a gardener at Syon Park. In his spare time he spends hours in Syon’s archive uncovering the wealth of documentary evidence kept there. Here he tells us how he first stumbled across Sir Richard Wynn’s House: 

Little Syon was a grand private house situated on London Road, that is now within the grounds of Syon Park land, and that has sadly been forgotten about over time. Many locals and Syon workers will not be at all aware of its existence, even though it played an important part of Syon and Brentford history for 226 years. 

I first heard about the house when I was doing some research on the internet, looking-up another project, when I saw the Little Syon painting (see below; image courtesy of London Metropolitan Archives). I took it upon myself to discover what I could about this little known part of Syon’s history.

Painting of Little Syon, courtesy of London Metropolitan Archives

 You will see from this painting that the frontage has a striking resemblance to Syon House (below) which may explain how it came to be known as Little Syon. 

Syon House

What first sparked my interest was of course the name ‘Little Syon’ and also that it was the only section of land not owned by the Syon Dukes for most of the building’s lifetime. It’s a bit of a mystery why the Little Syon site was separate; a possible reason is the land was given to the Nuns when Mary 1st wanted to rebuild the abbey at Syon (which was dissolved under Henry VIII in 1539). The plot was eventually rejoined with the parkland in 1818 AD, but the house itself was demolished shortly afterwards. 

Even now very little is known of the building and its history but I am honoured that my research and discoveries to date are being used by the Museum of London team and my initial research has been the driving force behind the archaeological project for this year. 

I have done most of my research online and looking through the Duke of Northumberland’s archives and records held here at Syon. It is a treasure trove of information from which I hope to discover more (for example this map of the house, below).

Map of the house © the Collections and Archives Department at Alnwick Castle

I also hope to obtain some more info from the Duke’s Alnwick Castle archives, as they now hold a large amount of Syon’s records. Plus the results of excavation are invaluable! 

Researching Little Syon has only fuelled my interest in Syon Park and the unknown aspects of its history. I will continue to explore and research the parkland, and look forward to my future discoveries! 

Simon Hadleigh-Sparks

Bookings are now open for our 2012 summer training excavation at Syon Park, Hounslow. More information and booking details can be found on our website: www.museumoflondon.org.uk/syon. Kath Creed, one of our key event organisers, explains how progress has been going so far.

Back in March we hired a mechanical digger to open three trial trenches in the area of hoped for remains of Sir Richard Wynn’s house in Syon Park. Our first issue quickly arose when we realised that the remains weren’t quite where we thought they might be!

 We were hoping they would be here:

A lovely open grassed patch with lots of space for open area trenches.

Instead we quickly realised they were over a fence and here:

In a reasonably recent plantation of new trees!

Well, it’s widely known that the best archaeology is always in the most inconvenient place. Luckily our digger fit perfectly in between the rows, and Topher (Syon’s Head Gardener) explained to us that because the trees are young (and don’t have big root systems yet) he could move a few for us to fit in our trenches. Hurrah!

Over the last few weeks in between pouring over the carefully timed, actioned packed programme for our Pleasure Garden Ball, our Adult Events team have been enjoying themselves preparing for what has become our annual Valentine’s Day Late event.

They have mulled over serious quandaries such has how many people will want to decorate and wear their own masquerade mask? How can we help spark some new romances on the night? And just how many bars do we need?

Last year’s Valentine Late – part of the Adult Events informal learning programme – saw the Museum full with visitors, who learnt seductive Latin dance steps and sampled a new age aphrodisiac.

This year we’ve decided to mark the special day Georgian style, by hosting a Pleasure Garden Ball with a modern twist.

So what makes this year’s Late worth a visit? Well…where to start? There’ll be 18th century music and dance lessons, masterfully overseen by Lady Georgianna and the Covent Garden Minuet Company; pop-up theatrical performances courtesy of The Mask of Joy; love/lust poetry with the good people of Write Queer London; intriguing talks about Georgian fashion, playbills and pleasure; historic Valentine cards on show and the chance to meet that special someone in speed dating sessions hosted by cabaret darling Steve Nice, in the shadows of the majestically gilded Georgian Lord Mayor’s Coach. Oh, and there will be two bars…

One vital part of any 18th century ball in the public imagination is masquerade masks. We anticipate that some of you will come along with your own elaborate facial attire probably similar to those in this image from our collections online resource linked to here.

But just in case you don’t have a spare one of those…we’ll be encouraging visitors to design and don their own mask at the Museum. Therefore over the last month the desks in the Adult Events team office have been cluttered with glitter, sequins, feathers and different shaped mask templates. A couple of weeks ago the team had a bit of a craft afternoon and made up some pretty lurid and shocking sample masks…

It was quickly established that craft may not be the team’s forte and so the help of the Museum’s wonderful Design team was sought. They came up with some much more fitting and elegant – masks that visitors can decorate and spend the evening with their face beautifully concealed, and chose to be whoever they want to be this Valentine’s!

So in the build up to Tuesday night the Adults event team will be cutting 800 or so identically sized pieces of elastic for the masks – never a dull moment!

To book tickets to attend Tuesday’s Pleasure Garden Ball visit the Museum’s website here.

Vauxhall, 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson

Pleasure gardens competed for visitors, vying with each other to offer evermore exciting entertainments. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens offered a wide variety of entertainment, including lion-tamers, trampoline clowns, fortune tellers, ventriloquists, monkeys, dogs, jugglers, horses who danced to a waltz and fire walkers.

Tournaire's Equestrians, Vauxhall Gardens, 1846

Costumes from the Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum of London’s pleasure gardens