Chilled to the Bone: a blogger’s view

It’s taken more than a week but I finally found time to nose around the most recently opened exhibition at Brighton Museum, Chilled to the Bone: Ice Age Sussex, upstairs in the Spotlight Gallery.

Probably I hesitated because it’s so flipping cold in real life. But that’s daft, the exhibition is great (and warm!): what a cunning way to bring home some of the grand realities of the ice age, by focusing it closely on the local landscape and history of Sussex.

Chilled to the Bone is full of bones and fossils; smart presenting of the science and makes dense, fascinating use of a relatively small gallery space to get across the sheer bio-diversity and constant shifting of Sussex landmass and coastline during the Ice Age period. It’s also got some cool nuggets on the social history of fossil-hunting and the gradual process by which ‘evolution’ went from being outlandish, revolutionary theory to the proven normality on which so much earthbound science is based.

I particularly like the bears. I’ve been thinking about bears a lot recently; partly since I decided to call my next album The Bear. You know how, once you start thinking about a thing, often you’ll start to see that thing everywhere? I’ve been seeing bears all over the place, all over town. Then the other morning I was up at the Booth Museum and there is a large bear standing right in the doorway. It’s so odd that we’ve made bears ‘cute’ by turning them into soft toys, exaggerating the anthropomorphising of them… but that’s another blog entry. Here in Chilled to the Bone, they’ve actually included a few exhibits and artifacts borrowed from the Booth and there is a huge replica skull of a bear that you can touch, along with some interesting information.

Another big impact of this little exhibition (for me, anyway) was starting to think clearly about the timescales involved in the Ice Age, compared to time frames of human history. For example, compare this stuff to the Ancient Egypt exhibits downstairs. What we think of as “Ancient Egypt” entirely takes place in a window of a few hundred years – and was only a few thousand years ago. When you compare that to an Ice Age, which stretches back hundreds of thousands of years, you can start to comprehend our human scale in comparison with much huger geological timescales.

It’s so hard to think in those terms – which is partly why I imagine people struggle so much with quite simple ideas like evolution or the ‘likelihood’ of natural selection; because it’s so tough to even envision a million years, let alone fathom everything that can occur across a natural environment in that time period.

Anyway, I’m waffling. But Chilled to the Bone is warm, interesting and right by the Café, so I’ll be going back a few more times.

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence

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

Caribous, Canada and the Meaning of Life

Following Brighton Writer Squad‘s visit to Brighton Museum, the young writers were asked to write a piece in response to an object (and another piece in response to a costume).

Jad Stacey (13) wrote a response to the caribou fur in the World Stories: Young Voices Gallery,

There was a Caribou. If you don’t know what a Caribou is, its effectively a Reindeer, but from North America. One day, as the Caribou cariboued across the tundra, a thought came into its head. Now, Caribou’s aren’t really known for being the most intelligent of animals, so this was quite a rare occurrence, especially because of what it was thinking. It was thinking, “What is the meaning of life?” Now, that is quite a question. A question that has been asked quite a bit, with many different answers. But all these philosophers, poets and Pythons in the past had been biased or already had expectations or further still, were being silly. But this Caribou, this furry Canadian reindeer had a far clearer perspective on the matter. But it didn’t have the foggiest idea where to start. Should the it start with the things in its life that it enjoys? Or the things that it wishes to do in life? Or further still should it start with the things that great people do? Then it realised that it was a Caribou, didn’t know about any great people and had no real goals in life.

It then realised that the reason why it had no goals in life was because it had achieved them all. It had lived a long life (for a Caribou), had continued its bloodline and had figured out how life began (you don’t want to know that, its boring). So was that it, achieving your goals? Was that the meaning of life? It was a bit broad and vague but it seemed to fit it so much. Putting “achieving your goals” to another side for know, The Caribou mentally flicked through the other options. To find love? Perhaps, but some creatures feel no need for love. To be happy seemed far too close to achieve your goals and most of its ideas branched onto the “be happy, achieve your goals, be good” train of thought. So maybe that is it? Love peace and happiness? And so The Caribou thought long and hard for many days and nights and at the end of this long, hard thought it came to the answer, Upon discovering the meaning of life it achieved the meaning and was happy.
Then a madman with a shotgun ran at it and shot it, dead.

                                                                     The End.