MEG Conference – Powell-Cotton Museum, Kent, 20/21 April
Nature and Culture in Museums
The Powell-Cotton Museum has long embraced in its displays the duality of nature and culture, natural and man-made, animals and objects. This was emphasised during conference organiser and Head of Collections at the Powell-Cotton Museum Inbal Livne’s welcoming speech. The first day of the conference was held in Gallery 1, an inspiring gallery, finished in 1939 with wall-to-wall dioramas displaying the animals of north and west African and India, speakers had a hard job competing with the visual stimulus of the gallery but often what was being spoken was directly being reinforced by the displays. This was particularly useful for Jude Philips (Macleay Museum, Sydney University Museums) talk on the Macleay Museum’s recent exhibition ‘Stuffed, stitched and studied’. When Jude’s power point presentation struggled to get working Jude was able to use the displays as her visual prompts to illustrate her talk. After a stirling effort of Powell-Cotton Museum staff the power point was up and running and Jude was able to share images of the exhibition with the group including quirky artist photographic portraits of taxidermed specimens emphasising taxidermy as a human endeavour and the anthropomorphical attributes we assign to them.
Our first speaker, Paolo Viscardi (Horniman Museum) was the
first of other speakers to talk of the role of collaboration between
anthropologists and natural historians, referencing the early cabinets of curiosities or ‘wunderkammer’, encyclopaedic collections where categorical
distinctions and boundaries between disciplines; art, geology, archaeology,
ethnology and natural history were yet to be made. This was also alluded to by
Alison Clark (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) in
her presentation ‘All the World for Sale:
Nature and Culture at Gerrard and Sons’, taxidermist and art dealer whose
sales room often included zoology specimens alongside ethnographic collections.
Alison also reminded us that ethnographic collections are made up from
composite objects, made up from animal parts as well as other organic
materials. Collecting practices during the 19th century reflected in
publications such as ‘hints to travellers’ encouraged this multidisciplinary approach and resulted in collections
including a diverse range of objects exploring the natural and man made world,
nature and culture. Jenny Walklate was the third speaker to reference
‘wunderkammer’ in her presentation ‘Swifts
in the Tower of the House of God: The Reciprocal Framing of Nature and Culture
in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’ and the complex
relationship the building reflects between science and faith. Jenny finished
her presentation with an insightful auto-ethnography of her personal
reflections on how the Victorian aesthetic of the museum impacts upon
contemporary personal interpretations of the natural world.
A long and very tasty lunch gave delegates the first
opportunity to look around the Museum galleries and gardens including the much
anticipated newly opened Gallery 6. The subject of an ACE funded project ‘Securing the Future of Our Past’ the
gallery has been re-designed to encourage every visitor to be a researcher,
introducing Percy Powell-Cotton's expeditions on which he amassed his collections.
The gallery also puts the Museum’s handling collection at its centre, a
combination of natural history and ethnographic objects for visitors to
experience first hand. The modern design of Gallery 6 contrasted with the more
traditional displays in the rest of the Museum but highlighted the Museum’s
potential.
The end of day one saw interesting presentations from
Caroline Cornish (Royal Holloway) and Mark Nesbitt (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
on ‘Seeds of Industry and Empire:
Revitalising Economic Botany Collections’. I was not overly familiar with
the concept of ‘economic botany’ defined by Caroline and Mark simply as ‘plants
transformed into items of use to human beings’ These collections were
established and displayed in colonised countries, modelled on the oldest such
collection, the Kew Museum of Economic Botany. The end of empire marked the end
of these collections and many were dispersed and put into storage. Caroline and
Mark, through the course of their project on the subject have been re-discovering
these collections and exploring their relevance today.
Lastly, the day was finished on an entertaining note with a look at the
role of animals and Museum displays and marketing campaigns in Antonia
Lovelace’s presentation ‘Comparing the
meerkat and falling for ‘Digital’ monkey – How trending animal totems playfully
impact on our relationship with real animals and Museum displays’ Antonia
has had to present a case for acquiring some of these popular characters into
the collections at Leeds City Museum, a collection that already includes toys. Her
paper asked ‘is there a place for these objects in contemporary collecting?
The day’s sessions finished at 5.00pm allowing more time for
exploration of the galleries, a drinks reception and a short talk from Chris
Spring of the British Museum on the temporary touring exhibition ‘Social Fabric: African Textiles Today’.
Delegates enjoyed top-notch catering of a delicious three-course meal provided
by the Powell-Cotton’s in house caterers.
Day two of the conference was opened by Anita Herle
(Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), Tony Eccles (Royal AlbertMemorial Museum Exeter) and Alison Brown (University of Aberdeen) and their
paper ‘Storied Landscapes: Enlivening
Blackfoot Collections in UK Museums’ and the work all three are doing
through their respective institutions extending networks between Blackfoot people and
UK collections and how for Blackfoot people landscape and sites of encounter
contribute to a fuller understanding of Blackfoot historic collections.
The interdisciplinary aspect of the conference theme ‘Nature and Culture’ was metamorphasied
by interventionist artist Alana Jelinek by cleverly using the science of ecology as a metaphor for the art world. Alana reinstated and emphasised the
reoccurring themes of the conference; that the dichotomy between nature and
culture may not exist, there is no clear divide between what is human and what
is not human. Alana proposed using the science of ecology to understand the
complex interactions between the range of cultural practices at play in the art
world.
As well as the more thematic papers on ‘Nature and Culture’, the conference as usual offered a plethora of
interesting ‘work in progress’ papers for colleagues to share and up-date
members on current projects in the sector often reflecting current trends and
practice in ethnography more generally. Included in this was an update from Len
Pole on the ‘Uniques’project: getting to
know more about ethnographic collections in Kent and Sussex’, Alison Petch
on progress being made on researching Spencer and Gillen collections outside of
Australia, Heather Donoghue on cataloguing the Cooke Daniels collections at the
British Museum before she embarks on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Clare Wintle’s potential project exploring ethnographic museums at the end of empire,
1945-1980, a period often thought of as the ‘dark ages of museum ethnography’,
but how far is this theory true, in what ways were museums in the UK
contributing to wider political, economic and social change during the middle
years of the twentieth century? Catherine Harvey spoke about a recent
significant acquisition for Hasting’s Museum of North American material from
Colin Taylor and the challenges faced by small local museums during difficult
economic times in advocating world culture collections. Alison Brown concluded
the work on progress papers having just returned from Russia having, through an
AHRC funded project facilitated the loan of a mammoth ivory model of ysyakh
from the British Museum to the National Museum of the Arts, Yakutiia.
A selection of papers from the conference will be available in the next
issue of the Journal of Museum Ethnography (JME) (available from April 2016).
Faye Belsey
Assistant Curator
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