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

Malika Booker, image copyright Naomi Woodis

This is Malika Booker. Amongst many other things, she is a London-based writer and spoken word artist. She is also Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. You can find out more about her here. I’ve admired Malika’s work for a while now so I was thrilled when she agreed to lead a workshop in the Continue Creating programme. She chose the subject of sugar, inspired by the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery and worked with us to each create a piece of writing about sugar. The finished articles are at the bottom of this post.

A good old bag of Taste and Smile

For most people, writing creatively is a little bit scary. We think we won’t be very good at it. We think we’ll expose ourselves. We think others will be better. When we did it at school it wasn’t very good and we haven’t done it since, thank you very much. Although she didn’t tell us, I have a sneaky feeling that Malika knew all of this, so she started us off we three exercises to ease us in. Firstly, we all introduced ourselves and told a little anecdote about our relationship to sugar, accompanied by an action. Stavroulla told us that she took sugar in her coffee, so did an action of someone stirring a cup. A cup, never a mug.

The freewrite rules, being demonstrated by our glamorous assistant Halima

Then we did a freewrite, which is a bit like a stream of consciousness. You have 2 minutes and you just have to write. And keep writing. Anything. Anything at all. Not necessarily clever, or poetic, or even coherent. But you have to write. And you must not worry about things like spelling and punctuation. After two minutes furious writing, we came back together to think about the many ways sugar plays a part in our lives.

Our mind map of sugar

Then, to help the flow of ideas, we had 10 minutes to go a bit mad, making collage with sugar products. We were NOT supposed to eat the sweets…

Brigette making her sweet collage

Once we were all thoroughly sugared up, we went up to the gallery.

The sugar cane panel in London, Sugar and Slavery

Malika asked us to explore the gallery, making notes of things that struck us, before returning downstairs to get more ideas flowing.

Panel in the gallery that lists the number of enslaved Africans on ships

Downstairs, we paired up to tell each other a personal story involving sugar. Richard told Gilly about the time he’d had 8 teeth removed in one go because of his sugar addiction… partially brought on by eating Frosties with tango! Gilly told Richard how she thought unnatural sugar was poisonous. Halima told me a lovely story about her dad, who would cut an apple into four equal parts every night before bed and give each child a piece to demonstrate that everyone was loved equally. This lovely ritual continued right into Halima’s teenage years. Brigitte told Stavroulla about making the annual Christmas cake, where every member of the family had to take it in turns to stir the mix and then prick the cake with sherry and Stav told Brigitte about eating hot apple fritters on market mornings as a child.

London, Sugar and Slavery comment card

The last thing we did was listen to Malika read some beautiful poems by other writers about sugar, taken from the Poetry foundation. One of the poems she read was Sugar Cane, by Alfred Corn. Please take a couple of minutes to read it, it’s not only beautifully written but also unlocks the themes of the gallery in a very relevant way. As Malika read, we sucked on fresh sugar cane, bought from a market in Brixton that morning and chopped into chunks for us by a very nice man.

Fresh sugar cane pre and post chopping

And then we wrote. We had 10 minutes, we had the tools that we had  learnt earlier in the afternoon and we had inspiration. The pieces are below. I wanted you to see them in their authors’ own hands (those who were happy for them to go on the blog) so I have pasted the pictures and typed the words below them. They are all great pieces and well worth a read. Why don’t you have a go at writing one? Grab something sweet, chat to some friends, have bit of a freewrite and see where it takes you.

Richard's story of the banana and chocolate pizza

I recall, as I am sat ensconced in biscuit crumbs around my table. A trip far away beyond the fields of Sevenoaks – where no light pollution prevails and no signal found for my mobile. A remote residential setting for my singing group: streetwise opera a couple of days or more away from society surrounded by folk songs and organic food! What a punishment, not even brown sugar can lift my spirits amongst the withdrawal of my junk food diet. But brief salvation in the form of a pizza making master class. A chance to create a savoury and “SWEET” one. Banana and chocolate is layered all over my pizza, a whole slab of a bar is used – so thick; the chunks don’t even melt fully. At last a chance to drown in my own sweet gorgeous gluttony! (Hand made!!!)

Halima's music teacher who saw melodies as chocolate bars

I remember my primary school music teacher, Mr. Mills, who described different sections in a musical melody as a bar of chocolate. He said, ‘think of it as a giant bar, which is easy to separate, as opposed to a great big slab of chocolate.’ I remember the class understanding straight away. It was a metaphor we can all relate to. We definitely performed better in that class, hitting the highs, the lows and the in-betweens.

Brigitte's ballad to the unknown numbers

It was 1788 but no English ship’s captain knew how many African human cargo it carried across the Great water to England

But to the islands still being fought over by French & Dutch and & English monarchies

It was 1789 but no record of the number of the ship’s human cargo from Africa, which sailed from Africa to the islands

It was 1790 and still the numbers remained unknown – the destination, mainly Jamaica

It was 1791, more rules, fewer rules but now a ship has memory and as it sets sail to Jamaica with 283 or were these 1000 and 283?

It was 1791 and as islands are captured not just Jamaica but other islands come into focus 131 but at once 394 (or maybe 2394) and in St. Vincent

Even St Eustatius with 216 or was that 21,600 received – the makings of the labour to create a sugar loaf, nipped at the head or hot chocolate

My synopsis of the afternoon

I can tell you about poisons

And teeth

And sherry

I can tell you about conversazione

and riflessione.

Of Trinidad

And stabbing at a swamp

Of shards and nippers

And equally divided apples.

I can tell you about figs and dates

Natural

Fresh or dried

I can tell you’ve had your hair tied

I can tell you about Frosties and tango

And the sweetness of Pineapple

Rum and

Mango.

I can tell you about whips

About sweets that are not for eating

And of the people who eat them anyway

I can tell you of seven souls, in one

room, on one day, sharing their sweetness.

And finally... Malika's masterpiece

There is a sweet agony in claiming you

blocks of white crystal, grown of brown

like God’s soil. There is a sweetness

about you that shape pure china. So

fragile, (so white), so delicate to be

sipped, little finger extended & what

about when auntie caught you, ‘a

little bit of sugar,’ they said. I searched

her skin every morning to see if her brown

skin became grains of you, not seeing

the price of you, how you break the organs

in the body like china, ceramic crashing

on to the wooden floor, you shatter the kidney

& bloat stomachs, you paint big toes

a purple splash of gangrene.

Did we not  heed how your parents ‘cane’ danced

green to the breezes wind, a field of

swaying care free bodies, but their

leaves would leave vicious cuts on

tender skin

How you cut us so deep sugar

darling yet we crave your

syrup taste like innocents walking

into a knife’s blade.

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!

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.

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

As Jimmy Somerville sang many years ago, there’s more to love than boy meets girl. Which is one of the reasons I chose to edit a short story collection called ‘Boys and Girls’. The book contains stories of young lesbian and gay love, and what better time to celebrate love in all its many varieties than on Valentine’s Day?

For Valentine’s @ Late I’ll be joined by several contributors to the book, including Stonewall Award-winning author Stella Duffy

Former Write Queer London winner Keith Jarrett

Paul Burston (centre) Keith Jarr (far right)

Performance poet Sophia Blackwell

And writer Joe Storey-Scott

There’ll be tales of teenage crushes, unrequited love and secret longings across crowded bars and classrooms. And hopefully there’ll be a few laughs too. Love is a funny old business, and if you can’t look back and laugh at your younger love-struck self, then you probably need to lighten up a bit.

Valentine Late
Come to the Museum of London for our spectacular annual Valentine late. Alongside open galleries and a Valentine themed bar, try out some seductive Latin dance moves as Stardustball lead starters classes in the Cha Cha Cha and Rumba. Make vintage Valentine cards at a paper-cutting workshop; enjoy short storyreadings in the Pleasure Gardens by London’s most up-and-coming gay authors; join curators at an object-handling table to find out about risqué ‘x-rated’ objects from the Museum’s storerooms; and sample some sensational aphrodisiac love philters by London’s most creative catering duo Bompas & Parr, recently featured on Heston Blumenthal’s Feast.
Minimum age: 18
Fee £6 (concs £4.5): advanced booking required. Buy tickets here
In partnership with Polari
Dates and times
Monday, 14 February, 18.30 – 22.00

Late:Create is an exciting monthly workshop where members get creative using our collections for inspiration.

This month milliner Isabel Benavides facilitated some divine fashion creations suitable for the most stylish of you out there.  I was impressed that such hats could be made in a two hour workshop!

Isabel tells us more about the session:

‘I was invited to make hats with the participants at my very first Late Create on 6 November. Before we began creating our gorgeous pieces, we talked about the museum’s hat collection and how it is stored. In particular we focused on the teaching resources of a milliner who taught hat making in London during the 1950s and 60s.

I showed participants a few quick folding and curling techniques using sinamey (a straw-like fabric made from banana plant fibres) to get everyone started. Then everyone began to design and make their own fascinators using a range of materials including feathers, sinamey, veiling, ribbons and beads.

The results were impressive and all the designs ideas were really unique and original. We finished off the session by taking photos of the completed pieces. And then, of course, I had the chance to try on a few…!!’

Click on this link to have a look at some of the great hats.

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1st Thursday of every month and is for people who are currently out of work.  Future workshops include creative writing and sculpture.  The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk