Chilled to the Bone

How many ice ages have there been in Earth’s past? Would you expect Britain to be hot or cold during an ice age? And just how big is a mammoth or a cave bear? With our latest exhibition – Chilled to the Bone – at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery we answer these questions and more.

The exhibition came about through a desire to show more of our archaeological collections as well as presenting some of our natural history collections held at the Booth to a wider audience in the centre of town. A new gallery called the Spotlight Gallery has been built on the upper floor of the Brighton Museum in the area previously occupied by the Body Gallery. This space has been designed to be a flexible space with large scale display cabinets suitable for a wide variety of collections, and used to showcase objects from the Brighton Museum collections.

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An initial plan for a Piltdown Man exhibition to tie in with the 100^th anniversary of the hoax was discounted due to a lack of material and a clash with a similar exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London. The idea was expanded to include an exhibition on ice ages throughout Earth’s history and on the archaeological discoveries resulting from a Victorian desire to learn more about these stages in our planet’s past, and how humans evolved. This Victorian ‘Bone Rush’ would also include the Piltdown fraud as one of the major events of Sussex archaeology. The exhibition also focuses particularly on the environment of Sussex during the most recent ice age, as well as Sussex archaeology and the search for human origins.

The design and construction of the exhibition was carried out by a small team working with a very limited budget. An additional challenge was that for much of the design stage of the exhibition, the cases were yet to be built. So mock ups were laid out in order to get a general idea of the look of each case and how well things fitted into the space.

The layout of the gallery is such that it was required to be as non-linear as possible as visitors can enter from three different directions, negating a start and end point. As such the intro panel is repeated at both ends of the gallery and each cabinet is built around a theme which should not require the visitor to have read text in a different cabinet before hand.

A welcome addition was an interactive program developed as part of a separate digital project. ‘Chilled to the Bone’ worked as a suitable test bed for the quiz program and allowed us to have a large scale projection and digital interactive that was otherwise out of our budget. The AV section sits alongside an activity wall and handling object to provide an uncluttered and entertaining ‘hands on’ area.

Huge thanks to everyone who worked on the design and installation of the gallery.

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

Cabinets of Curiosities

The collection of the Danish natural scientist, Ole Worm

‘In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright coloured birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape’s head, a cheese, etc.,all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ…’

Spirit house from China, WA505393

The account above forms part of a description made by a German traveller, Georg Christoph Stirn, of the collection of curiosities formed by John Tradescant in South Lambeth, London. It reflects the wide range of objects that could be found in such cabinets, or ‘rooms of wonder’: fine art and decorative art objects, archaeological items, diverse specimens of the natural sciences, religious artefacts and scientific instruments. It also reflects the mix of art and science, myth and reality that could be found crammed into these tightly packed displays.

An African gorilla skull probably used as a charm, WA509249

Guardian figure from the Nicobar islands, WA509307

Through their cabinets European collectors from the 16th century sought to represent the world in miniature. It was a world whose boundaries were rapidly expanding through geographical exploration and scientific experimentation but, nevertheless, a world in which much was still considered strange, marvellous and unknown. Through displays of objects from all fields of knowledge and from around the world, collectors could demonstrate their own knowledge and understanding, thus cabinets of curiosities also served as status symbols.

With the coming of the Enlightenment and the rational values of the 18th century, collecting took on a different purpose as the desire to astound gave way to the need to order and to educate. Collections began to be ordered by taxonomic systems and art and science parted company. Some of the objects from the earlier cabinets formed the basis of modern museums, in which they were displayed in very different ways to before.

A mask used in rituals believed to cure epidemics, from Sri Lanka, WA505831

However, the idea of cabinets of curiosities, with their mix of strangeness and wonder, has continued to fascinate. Artists such as the Surrealists found inspiration in their unexpected juxtapositions and formed their own personal collections in which the everyday was mixed with the unique. Today, museums continue to explore ways of generating the same sense of awe and surprise amongst their visitors as amongst those who encountered these early collections.

Part of the ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ display

A ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery 

‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ was a small, temporary exhibition in the James Green Gallery of World Art at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, on display from July 2005 to March 2006.

The exhibition was an outcome of ongoing documentation and digitisation work to improve public access to the World Art Collection supported by the MLA Designation Challenge Fund.

Curious Objects on Display

Part of the ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ display

Many of the objects on display were taken from the World Art Collection at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and date from the 19th and 20th centuries. The objects were chosen either because they are the types of objects which featured in early cabinets of curiosities, because they reflected the interests of artists like the Surrealists (especially in the different ways of seeing and presenting objects), or because they reveal what donors to the Collection have found fascinating about other cultures.

In their original contexts these objects would not have been considered ‘curious’ by those who made and used them. Only after collection by British people, who rarely recorded the details of an object’s manufacture or use, did they become ‘strange’, ‘exotic’ or ‘curious’. Today we can enjoy these objects for their creative use of indigenous materials and technologies, their visual qualities and the insight they can offer into the lives of other people at other times.

This text was originally published on the Royal Pavilion and Museums’ main website. 

The Reconstruction of a Saxon Man’s Face

Seventh-century Saxon skull and the facial reconstruction carried out by Caroline Wilkinson, HA260108.9

To the right is the face of a man who lived in Brighton 1,400 years ago. Caroline Wilkinson, a facial reconstruction specialist at the Unit of Art in Medicine at Manchester University, has been able to recreate the man’s features by examining the unique shape of his skull.

The man’s skeleton has been part of the Archaeology Collection since 1985. It was found during the emergency evacuation of an Anglo Saxon burial site located in Stafford Road, Brighton. Attention was drawn to the site after builders unearthed a number of grave goods during construction work on a private house. The East Sussex Archaeology Project and Brighton Museum were given three days to record and rescue as much information as they could before the building work continued. This man was discovered lying in his seventh-century grave, clutching an iron knife in his right hand and with a bronze belt buckle at his waist.

Inspired by the Unit of Art in Medicine’s work on facial reconstruction for television history programmes like Meet the Ancestors and Time Team, we decided to reveal the face of this seventh-century Saxon man in a display exploring images of the human body. The project was made possible through the generous sponsorship of American Express.

The Reconstruction

1. Thirty-four key anatomical points are marked on a cast of the skull. 2. The muscles of the face are moulded in clay onto the cast. 3. The completed reconstruction

Caroline Wilkinson established the general form of the man’s face by working from the shape of his skull, while a careful examination of the bone gave her clues about the detail of his features.  For example, a hole in the bone around his mouth shows that he had an abscess above his left front tooth, and would have had a swollen lip. A small divided bone at the base of his nose shows that he had a dent at the tip of his nose. The bones on top of his skull have completely fused together, indicating that the man was in his forties when he died.

Using her knowledge of the formation of facial muscles, Caroline rebuilt the layers of his face in clay on a cast of the original skull. As a guide she marked thirty-four key anatomical points on his face and used a set of average tissue depths for a Caucasian man in his forties. The accuracy of this method of reconstruction had been tested by forensic work done with the police. The same process is occasionally used as a last resort for dealing with unidentified bodies and has a remarkably high success rate.

Caroline covered the Saxon man’s modelled muscles and fat with layers of clay skin. Finally she added his hair and moustache, the style of which were chosen according to portraits of men on Anglo-Saxon coins. A silicone mould of the completed clay head was made. From this a bronze resin cast was produced.

The cast is exhibited alongside the seventh-century skull in the Body Gallery in Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Although we can never be sure exactly what the man looked like, when we see his face in this reconstruction he seems to come to life again.

This text was originally published on the Royal Pavilion and Museums’ main website.