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

Olympic Display

References to the Olympics seem to be everywhere at the moment, some cropping up in the unlikeliest places! Searching recently for an exhibition catalogue from the 1950s, I discovered details of an Olympic Games Philatelic Exhibition held here at Brighton Museum in October 1959. Present at the Museum Opening Ceremony, among other dignitaries, was Count Vittorio Zoppi, the Italian Ambassador in London, representing the host nation for the Games to be held the following year in Rome.

Official souvenir catalogue

The collection on display belonged to Ernie Trory, a local man who was a member of the British Olympic Association and of the Brighton and Hove Philatelic Society. According to the exhibition catalogue, his idea was born soon after the London Games in 1948, and he quickly built up a significant collection of stamps, postmarks, postal stationery, seals and vignettes dating back to 1894, when the International Olympic Committee was established. Trory wrote an award-winning book, A Philatelic History of the Olympic Games, and won worldwide recognition – and many medals – for this fascinating collection, which included a set of commemorative stamps issued for the Games in Athens in 1896.

A keen local historian, Trory had previously published A Postal History of Brighton, 1673 – 1783. In our technological age, it is difficult to imagine a time when the post didn’t just appear on a daily basis, but Trory described the early, unsuccessful attempts to move mail from one place to another. His research also tells us that the earliest postal services to and from the town, were advertised in the London Gazette on 24 May 1686; they amounted to deliveries to Sussex towns, including Brighton, leaving London on Monday nights, and returning from the same places on Tuesdays.

Trory himself was a committed communist who joined the Party in 1931, at the age of 18. He took part in a hunger march from Brighton to London in 1932 (described in his book Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Orgainser) and visited Moscow in 1936. He founded a publishing company, Crabtree Press, and in 1946 wrote The Sacred Band: A Contribution to the Social History of Brighton, which he dedicated to ‘those members of the [trade union] movement who regularly attend their branch meetings’.

The sacred band

Politics and philately were not his only interests, however. He swam in the sea throughout the year, often enjoying a dip on his birthday in January. A Pathe news clip captures one such occasion in 1954; watched by crowds of men and women in their winter coats and hats, Trory and a group of similarly hardy Brighton swimmers run down a snowy beach to the water, enjoy an invigorating swim, and then return for a celebratory slice of cake.

And, perhaps even more unexpectedly, he discovered in middle age an aptitude for weight-lifting. Entering his first competition at the age of 50, Trory won many veteran awards and continued lifting weights into his seventies. Baron de Coubertin would certainly have been impressed.

Kate Elms, Brighton History Centre

Getting ready for Dreams of Here…

Fiona Redford at Tom Hammick’s studio

Our new Dreams of Here exhibition opens in Brighton Museum this Saturday. As part of the preparation for the exhibition, all three of the featured artists were filmed in their studios. Fiona Redford, Exhibitions Support Officer, gives a behind the scenes view of the filming process. 

Aside from all the paperwork that is involved with getting an exhibition together, I also get to do some more interesting things too.

Nicola Coleby (Keeper of Exhibitions), Jenny Lund (Curator of Fine Art) and I went to visit the Dreams of Here artists at their studios whilst Paul from Junk TV filmed them for their gallery films.

It was a lovely day when we went to see Andrzej Jackowski and Tom Hammick and although I had to take my life in my hands and let Nicola drive, we arrived at Andrzej’s studio safely and in good time.

Andrzej has his studio at the bottom of his lovely garden. It has recently been converted from a garage and was still a bit chilly and new. However after a reviving cup of tea and meeting the family retriever and whippet I was more than happy to settle down in an old arm chair at the back of the studio and attempt to take pictures of the interview that was being filmed.

Nicola Coleby in discussion with Andrzej Jackowski

They’ve started. Nicola and Andrzej are in deep conversation about inner and outer worlds, Paul is expertly capturing their every word and I’m sat there like a lemon with two digital cameras, neither of which seem to have enough battery life or memory between them to take more than a short film and a few snapshots!

Paul saved the day by taking a couple of decent pictures for me on his rather smart camera.

After lunch, we went off to Tom’s. We got a bit lost in the winding lanes of the East Sussex country side but arrived mid afternoon to find Tom’s children and their friends adding the finishing touches (i.e. glitter) to the home made family Christmas cards.

Another beautiful garden with another artist’s studio in it! Tom’s studio is different from Andrzej’s. It’s quite a bit bigger, and he has obviously been working in it for a much longer time.

During Tom’s interview I hovered by the door, taking in the atmosphere.

His studio walls are lined with sketch books and the tables are covered in large areas of colourful peaked swirls of paint and inks. Hand operated print presses stand silent in the adjacent room like sleeping giants.

Filming Tom Hammick, December 2011

I couldn’t go to Julian Bell’s studio for the recording session so Jenny went with Nicola instead. (You can tell because there are more photos of that day and they are far better than mine!)

I did however go to Julian’s studio recently to pick up the paintings and bring them back to the Museum. Phil and I drove over in the van. There was more snow in Lewes than in Brighton so on the way, the Downs looked very pretty.

Julian’s studio is very different to Tom and Andrzej’s. It is cavernous and industrial.

Julian Bell in his studio

Julian optimistically put out a small electric heater for us, but I still wrapped the works wearing fingerless gloves!

So we now have all of Julian’s works, all of Andrzej’s drawings and most of Tom’s in now. Not long to go until we start to hang them (the works that is – not the artists).

Till next time….

Fiona Redford
Exhibitions Support Officer

You can view more photos from these sessions on Flickr.