National Museums Liverpool Blog - Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Bodice of one of the glass dresses. It reads; 'Light reflecting materials were thought to be able to ward off evil and preserve fertility'.

There is no doubt that Lady GaGa would give her bejewelled right arm to wear one of these sparkling dresses or corsets. But she'd be in for a shock if she tried! In 'Dare to Wear: Glass Dresses by Diana Dias-Leão' the dresses are made from glass and the corsets are made from real barbed-wire, entwined with beads or flowers. Diana told me that people have asked about buying these dresses and corsets to wear, but she has to tell them that they are purely 'couture sculpture'. She makes all her creations at home rather than in a studio and once injured herself while working on a corset - she only realised when she looked down and saw the blood. Fashion can definitely be deadly!

Each dress is unique and they seem to have their own identity - an idea that Diana is keen for visitors to take on board themselves. She wants to use the dresses to show people that it is not the image, but the person that is most important. Getting a sense of your own identity must surely be part of that. I'm sure many artists have a strong connection with their work, but it was interesting to hear Diana referring to her corsets and dresses as 'she' and 'her'. It seems these pieces have so much personality they have almost taken on a life of their own!

Diana's attention to detail in getting her message across is also interesting. Not only do you get a sense of the danger of judging people by their appearance alone, you also see evidence of Diana's views about people often being treated simply as 'pieces of meat'. Instead of using conventional materials for hanging her corsets, she has used immaculate metal meat hooks and chains. This isn't gruesome, but is instead quite a subtle touch that seems to fit in seamlessly with the display of shimmering glass.

This is a truly original display so do head down to the Craft and Design gallery on the ground floor of the Walker Art Gallery to have a look for yourself. The display will run from 27 March to 30 September 2011 and is free.

You can look at more photos of Diana's dresses on Flickr and also come to a free gallery talk by curator Alayna Ellis - more information in our what's on listings.

To complement John Thomson's photographs in the China: Through the lens exhibition, and after the vibrant colours of previous highlights from the Liverpool's Chinatown: Through the lens Flickr competition, this week I've chosen an interesting black and white image by Aidan McManus (adebⓞnd), which has both a geometric beauty of its own and a strong human element.

Through the Window © adebⓞnd / Aidan McManus

The structure of the photo is simple, bold and effective: the lines and rectangles give a sense of harmony and balance, as though the viewer has zoomed in on a Piet Mondrian painting. The various shades of grey and black and the two bright white smudges of light give the photo an almost abstract quality, but, despite occupying only a small part of the image, the girl intently and patiently watching the New Year's celebrations below is the actual focal point of the picture. 

This human element is further enhanced by the marks scribbled and smeared in the steamed-up glass, the sense of now-absent fingers and hands  - save for a solitary artist at the far right - chaotically clearing a view to the street below a reflection of the excited activity of the New Year parade. See the photo in a large size.

To celebrate our photography exhibition China: Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-72 at the Merseyside Maritime Museum we want you to submit your photos of Liverpool's Chinatown to our Flickr pool - our favourite photo submitted by 24 May will win a banquet for two at Yuet Ben, with two runners-up winning exhibition catalogues. Find out more on the competition page.

The other week I travelled to Paris with some antiquities which World Museum are loaning to the Louvre for their temporary exhibition, 'Meroë, Empire on the Nile', which opens on 26th March. This is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Meroë, capital of a great empire on the Nile, situated in northern Sudan. The royal capital of Meroë is famed for the pyramids of the kings and queens who dominated the region between 270 BC and AD 350.

World Museum has about 500 artefacts from Meroë which are from the excavations of Professor John Garstang from 1909 to 1914. John Garstang was Professor of Methods and Practice of Archaeology at Liverpool University (1907-41) and he made the first systematic investigation and examination on a large scale of the city of Meroë and its surroundings. Garstang discovered a number of temples, palaces and public buildings. The Lady Lever Art Gallery also has a small collection of antiquities from Meroë as William Hesketh Lever helped to finance Garstang's excavations.

The exhibition comprises for the most part loans from the Museum of Khartoum and from the British Museum in London, the World Museum and Garstang Museum of Archaeology in Liverpool, and institutions in Munich, Berlin and Leiden. It's open till the 6th September 2010 and is well a visit if you are interested in Egyptology and African archaeology. It's a rare chance to see these separate collections brought together to tell the fascinating story of this ancient African empire. Some of the curators at the Louvre excavate at Meroë and a video on the gallery reveals how work is still going on at this ancient city.

The wreck of the Conway. Image courtesy of the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo.

It was 1954 and I was an excited six-year-old on the coach with my parents and brother heading for two weeks’ holiday in an ancient cottage at Llanddona, Anglesey.

As we moved slowly over the Menai Bridge, everyone instinctively looked down. There, on the seaweed covered rocks, was a wrecked galleon just like something out of the hit film of that year, Long John Silver.

The rip-roaring yarn starred Robert “Jim Lad” Newton as the one-legged rogue. The wreck was HMS Conway and the remarkable sight remains vivid - I remember particularly her dark hull and yellow gun ports.

Last year marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of HMS Conway where thousands of cadets trained to be Merchant Navy officers between 1859 and 1974.

The Mercantile Marine Service Association set up the school after the Admiralty offered the Conway, a frigate used as a coastguard ship. She sailed from the naval base at Devonport, Plymouth, to the River Mersey where she moored off Rock Ferry. The school was opened on 1 August 1859.

The original was replaced after two years by the larger HMS Winchester which was renamed Conway. In 1876 there was another swap to accommodate growing numbers of cadets when the former HMS Nile became the final Conway.

A traditional wooden warship, the Nile was a 92-gun second rate ship of the line launched in 1839. She was converted to screw propulsion in 1854.

HMS Conway was a popular sight moored on the Mersey for decades. However, in 1941 Liverpool became a prime target for German bombers and Conway was moved to the Menai Straights off Anglesey to avoid the Blitz.

In 1953 it was decided to take her back to Liverpool for a refit. Sadly, the lovely old ship ran aground near the Menai Suspension Bridge and broke her back. She lay there for three years before being destroyed by fire.

From 1953 the Conway flourished as a stone frigate or shore establishment at Plas Newydd, Anglesey.

Its eventual closure followed the decline of Britain’s Merchant Fleet and on 11 July 1974 the last 85 cadets laid up the colours in Liverpool Cathedral.

Conway’s huge anchor can be seen outside the entrance to Merseyside Maritime Museum.

Famous Conway cadets included Poet Laureate John Masefield, Captain Matthew Webb, the first person to swim the English Channel, and Sir Arthur Rostron the captain of the Carpathia who rescued the Titanic survivors.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents, bookshops or from the Mersey Shop website (£1 p&p UK).

It's time to peer back into the mists of time again in our series of blogs celebrating World Museum's 150th anniversary...

On 16 March 2004, during building work on a new entrance and atrium, a traffic warden threatened to give a parking ticket to the crane moving exhibits at the front of the museum in William Brown Street!

Two, two-metre black stone statues of the Egyptian Goddesses Sekhmet were taken from display in the museum’s current entrance and craned down the street to the new entrance. The operation was followed by a photographer from the Liverpool Echo, and he photographed parking attendants as they threatened to fine the crane driver. On 17 March the story appeared in the Echo under the headline ‘Warden tries to book crane as it moves museum statues’. On the next day the story was picked up by the Scotsman, Daily Mirror, Daily Express and several regional papers. The Sun ran a picture story and the news went round the world to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The final story from the archives for this week looks back to 19 March 1857. On this day, the curator of the museum went to a meeting of the Liverpool’s Library and Museum Committee to ask for permission to buy some tanks to start up an aquarium in the museum. The minutes of the meeting recorded his request; 'The curator was authorised to order three additional Aquariums at the cost of £14.50’. It was only the second public aquarium in the world - the first was in London Zoo. In October the curator reported that the installation of aquarium tanks had led to an increase in the number of visits to the museum. The archives reveal that;

'During the year, several Aquaria, both salt and fresh water, have been established in the Museum, and have proved of very great interest to the visitors; indeed there is good reason to suppose that it is mainly to the new additions to the Museum that the number of visitors has been so much in advance of previous years.'

Our aquarium is still incredibly popular today. You can watch a video of Rachel Ball (our Aquarium Curator) showing us behind the scenes at the aquarium here.

Our fishy friends at the museum

Liverpool landing stage, 1937 from the Stewart Bale collection

If you can think of an amusing (and clean, don't forget) caption for this photo from the fantastic Stewart Bale collection then post it as a comment by the end of the day on Wednesday 31 March 2010. The funniest and most original caption will win a copy of the fantastic hardback book 'The Liner: retrospective and renaissance' (2005) by Philip Dawson.

Why not take a closer look at the photo using zoomify.

Photo opp for the conservation of historic wedding dresses

It is a bridezilla's heaven over at our decorative arts department at the moment. Some gorgeous wedding garments from National Museums Liverpool's collection are undergoing expert conservation work ahead of a new exhibition opening this summer at Sudley House.

The exhibition Hitched: Wedding Clothes and Customs runs from 23 July 2010 - 20 February 2011 and explores the history of marriage in the UK and the customs surrounding it, from Victorian times to the present day.

Our curator of costume and textiles Pauline Rushton tells us a bit more about the conservation work required for this kind of exhibition:

Some of the dresses featured in Hitched are more than 150 years old and quite fragile, so it's important that we carry out this conservation work to help them look their best for the exhibition. They have to be carefully cleaned and even re-stitched in some cases to make them strong enough for mounting and display. After conservation, the dresses are mounted on mannequins that are padded out to their individual shapes, and that can be quite tricky and time-consuming. Before they go on display in the gallery the conservator will steam some of them to lift creases out of the silk and make their trimmings stand out. It can be a time consuming job but very satisfying when the end result looks right.

Dancer, Fen Fen at the International Slavery Museum's 'Celebrating Women' event

Our Head of Communities, Claire Benjamin, tells us more about the 'Celebrating Women' event:

"Following the news that the first woman ever in Oscar history has won the directing award, I thought it quite fitting to highlight further female achievement at the International Slavery Museum.

Last week we marked International Women's Day with 'Celebrating Women', an event during which we unveiled three new plaques on the Black Achievers Wall. Aretha Franklin, Diane Nash and Andrea Levy now have pride of place on the wall, joining a growing list of esteemed great Black achievers.
 
A plaque for Aretha Franklin, who achieved a total of 45 'Top 40' hits, is now on display near by Barack Obama’s plaque, who she sang for at his presidential inauguration ceremony in 2009. She is joined by Andrea Levy, award winning British author whose book 'Small Island' was the centre of the biggest mass-reading initiative ever taken place in Britain back in 2007.

Diane Nash is the third new plaque. I had the great pleasure of meeting Diane at last year’s Slavery Remembrance Day memorial lecture, where she delivered an amazing lecture on her life during the non violent student sit-ins in '60s America, and her continuing fight for human and civil rights. I promised Diane that I would read out the following during the unveiling:

"I believe there was no invention of the 20th century more significant than Mohandas Gandhi’s social invention of a way to wage war without killing and maiming fellow human beings.  His invention, nonviolence (agapic energy), uses power generated by love rather than power generated by violent weapons.  Gandhi’s movement was a model for the American Civil Rights Movement and the American Civil Right Movement of the 1960s left to the world a legacy that we can use now and into this young century.  Nonviolence (agapic energy) provides us an opportunity to evolve into an improved species."
 
Inspiring words indeed, though it is perhaps interesting to consider that she is less known than her male counterparts from that period in American history. Her non-violence message gives food for thought in a time where war and conflict appears to be on the increase and human rights are being violated the world over.

The event was also an opportunity for the museum to look at the darker side of women's history, exploring the sexualisation and violation of women's liberty today. Artist Rachel Wilberforce talked about her display 'Missing', currently on display at the International Slavery Museum. The photographs of urban and suburban Britain depict sex-trafficking and prostitution through the interior and exteriors of brothels and massage parlours, exposing us to modern day forms of slavery.

We also heard from Nadja Middleton, a representative of the Olive Morris Collective, who talked passionately about the work of Olive Morris, an inspiring community leader and grass roots activist from Brixton. She achieved so much, in a life that was tragically cut short, which certainly made us wonder, 'what more could she have done?' if she were still with us today.
 
The evening was brought to a graceful end by dancer Fen-Fen (pictured above), who beautifully performed a piece depicting women's liberation in China.

A fabulous collective experience, for all the women, and men, in the audience that night.

After a couple of entries bustling with activity, for this week's highlight from the Liverpool's Chinatown: Through the lens Flickr competition I've chosen an image almost completely devoid of people: this 2009 photo of Liverpool's iconic Chinese arch, added to the pool by Mark McGowan.

Foggy Chinese arch © Mark McGowan

Taken just before the Chinese New Year celebrations, there is a sense of expectation and mystery to the image, the sunlight just glinting off the brilliant gold of the arch and the viewer imagining the crowds that will be filling the ghostly streets.

The different architectural styles contrast but compliment each other; there are no absolutely horizontal or vertical lines, but various angular perspectives which draw the eye in different directions. At once the viewer is invited in through the arch by the receding buildings and flags of Nelson Street, but at the same time to the top of the image: neither the square pillars of the arch nor the round pillars of the Black-E Centre to the left are straightforwardly vertical, both tapering up towards the shrouded sun and pulling the viewer's gaze with them. The result is a constant shifting of perspectives, never settling, like an MC Escher print. See the photo in a large size.

To celebrate our photography exhibition China: Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-72 at the Merseyside Maritime Museum we want you to submit your photos of Liverpool's Chinatown to our Flickr pool - our favourite photo submitted by 24 May will win a banquet for two at Yuet Ben, with two runners-up winning exhibition catalogues. Find out more on the competition page.

Museum staff met Linford Christie at the ceremony

Rush has been developed in response to concerns from teachers and youth leaders about the growing impact of drugs misuse on young Merseyside people and their families. Young people observe a commissioned theatre piece presenting an account of a girl who faces choices relating to experimenting with ecstasy and are then given the opportunity to question characters in the play which opens up discussions around the topic of drug use and its consequences.

A simulated drugs box is used to raise awareness of what different drugs looks like and their likely effects, while 'booze goggles' illustrate the effect of alcohol on perception and decision making. 

Since it was launched 15 years ago almost 30,000 young people have taken part in Rush, including groups from Merseyside schools and organisations working with hard to reach young people such as Progress Sports and Shaw Trust.

Linford Christie said: “It’s an honour to be part of such a great initiative. All of the winners this evening are champions in their own right and Rush is an inspiration to others, both young and old.”

Kids Count Chairman, Richard Stephenson, said: “The judges were all incredibly impressed with the nomination we received for Rush.  We know how important it is for young people to be educated about drugs and the dangers they pose. Working with young people from across Merseyside, Rush has helped thousands to understand more about drugs and given them the confidence to make their own choices and to avoid peer pressure and bad decisions when it comes to drug use.  We are delighted to name them the winners."

The Kids Count Inspiration Awards recognises those individuals, young and old, and organisations that have been responsible for inspiring young people in their communities. A record number of nominations were received this year for individuals and groups who are addressing issues that affect the lives of children by creating initiatives that are grounded in practicality and realism, make a positive difference, and afford greater freedom to young people to determine their own futures.