National Museums Liverpool Blog - Tuesday, June 14, 2011

This week photographic artist Marta Soul captured a couple embracing in the sculpture gallery at the Walker Art Gallery.

The Spanish photographer used two models to stage the photograph for a body of work she is creating for an exhibition in LA at the Kopeikin Gallery.

Soul has staged a series of romantic interludes starring the same woman stealing a kiss with different men in various lush settings – the Walker Art Gallery on this occasion. This series of work is called Idilios which means love affair or romance in Spanish.

It’s not often you see a man in a dinner suit walking around the sculpture gallery but for the purposes of this photo both models had their finery on. Ironically it drew quite a crowd and visitors were taking pictures of the photographer taking her photographs.

Marta Soul said: “All the settings for my collection of recent photographs are based on experiencing vivid emotions, so the sculpture gallery at the Walker Art Gallery is ideal for my work.”

 

A beautiful and striking sculpture of a huge dandelion by Liverpool-born artist Paul Morrison has gone on display at the Walker Art Gallery.

The sculpture Topocline is painted entirely black and is positioned on the first floor of the Walker Art Gallery, as if it has grown out from beneath the wooden floorboards. Made of aluminium and galvanised steel it stands at nearly 3 metres high (9ft approx) and weighs 500kg (over 78 stone).

The sculpture is typical of the out-of-scale plant forms found in Morrison’s work. He is best known for his monochromatic botanical landscapes that are both familiar and foreign. Familiar because his subjects such as trees and flora are immediately recognisable, and foreign because he can cause a simple dandelion to become threatening due to its size and lack of colour.

Topocline has been gifted by Eric and Jean Cass through the Contemporary Art Society and will be an important addition to the contemporary art collection at the Walker Art Gallery. Curator of British art, Dr. Laura MacCulloch stands next to the towering sculpture

 

I’ve just given a tour of the Ancient Egypt gallery at World Museum for a group of 30 Egyptology enthusiasts from the University of the Third Age. They were impressed with our display of animal mummies but were shocked to hear of a grizzly tale involving cat mummies being scattered over the fields of Liverpool. On 10th February 1890 an estimated 180,000 mummified cats, weighing 19.5 tons, were sold at auction at the docks in Liverpool. Almost all were crushed and spread on fields like manure but a few were saved and remain in World Museum. They were discovered the previous year at Speos Artemidos in Middle Egypt, when a farmer fell through a hole into a catacomb completely filled with cat mummies.

 

As a sign of devotion to the cat goddess Bastet ancient Egyptians would dedicate cat mummies as votives in temples. This became a wide-spread practice during the 1st Millennium BC and by providing cats with decent burials pilgrims were seeking the favour of Bastet through piety. Such was Bastet’s popularity that we now know of over twenty cat cemeteries for her cult in Egypt. Cat donations from these mass burials are now in museum collections but most were destroyed in the 19th century for use as fertilizer in Egypt and places like Liverpool.  

Where has the sun gone?! Everytime I get my sunglasses out, it seems to get colder and start to rain!

Luckily it is Knitting in Public Day on Saturday (11 June), so I'm hoping that some of the World Museum staff taking part might make me something nice and warm! If you'd like to join them for a bit of furious needle action, then pop in from 2.30pm - there's more information in our 'what's on' listings.

It also turns out we have some interesting knitted accessories in our costume collections. The stockings in this photo are made from undyed knitted silk and were made sometime between 1775-1800.

At that time, if men were going to be the height of fashion they had to have good legs, including nicely shaped calves. If you didn't have attractive legs you could have a pair of stockings made, padded with lambswool. These gave even the skinniest legs muscles in all the right places. It was a bit like wearing a padded bra today!

Not many pairs of these sorts of stockings have survived to today. In fact, this is probably the only surviving pair in a British museum, making them pretty special.

Would knitted stockings shrink in the rain? I wouldn't like to find out...

Update 13/06/2011: Have a look at some photos of our Knitting in Public event on Flickr. There are also some photos of Anglo Saxon weaving demonstrations from last week

Next year to mark the 100th anniversary of RMS Titanic’s sinking, Merseyside Maritime Museum will host a special exhibition exploring the ship through the lives of the Liverpool people at the heart of her tragic story. Titanic and Liverpool: the untold story will open in March 2012.

The exhibition will feature a lot of previously unseen material from our archives. Curator of maritime history Ian Murphy would also like to hear from you if you have any local stories about the Titanic to add;

"Liverpool people and businesses helped to shape the fortune and fate of Titanic. Does someone in your family have a Liverpool link to the world’s most famous ocean liner? Merseyside Maritime Museum would like to hear from anyone with more information on some of the local people who played a part in Titanic’s story. Please send us your Titanic story using this contact form."

Egyptologist Glenn Janes made his final visit to the museum stores last week after cataloguing about 800 shabti funerary figures. He will be working with all the information he has gathered over the summer and then we'll meet again to discuss publishing parts of the collection. The shabti in this photograph is a close-up of a shabti for a man called Horwedja, a priest of the goddess Neith. He wears a lappet wig and a beard. In his crossed hands he holds agricultural tools: an adze, a hoe and the string of the seed-basket that hangs over the shoulder. If Horwedja was called upon to do work in the afterlife this shabti would have came to life and done the work for him. Horwedja died in about 380-343 BC and was buried in a tomb at a place called Hawara. His name is written in hieroglyphs on the first row of text. You can see 46 shabtis in the Ancient Egypt gallery at World Musuem and you can find out more about shabti figures on Glenn Jane’s website.

I think this story illustrates how timing and quick-thinking can create major shifts in events. 

In wartime things move very quickly and often with momentous consequences. I have often wondered what would have happened if war leaders had made different decisions. So often the individual plays a key part in the drama.

 

The controversial sinking of a British liner just hours after start of the Second World War and the foundering of a German U-boat submarine are strangely linked.

 

Secrets revealed by a machine captured before the U-boat sank resulted in remarkable discoveries that boosted British intelligence and helped win the war.

 

One man was a key player in both these incidents.

 

The passenger liner Athenia was sunk on 3 September 1939 only eight hours after Britain declared war on Germany. Ninety-three passengers and 19 crew died.

 

The U-30 attacked the unarmed passenger ship without warning, contrary to both international law and the strict instructions of U-boat command.

 

The commander – Kapitanleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp - had wrongly assumed he was attacking an armed auxiliary cruiser. His death less than two years later coincided with a great breakthrough in the Allied war effort – the breaking of the Enigma codes.

 

It was Royal Navy escort ships that captured the machine, achieving a crucial victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.

 

The skilful attack off Greenland on 8 May 1941 cost Lemp his life and the destruction of submarine U-110. The rush to escape the sinking craft allowed a boarding party from HMS Bulldog to capture her code books and Enigma encoding machine.

 

This gave British code breakers at Bletchley Park their first chance to break the complicated U-boat codes. The Royal Navy gained vital information regarding U-boat positions and tactics by using the U-110 Enigma machine to read German naval messages,

 

Lemp initially left the submarine with the rest of the crew after setting scuttling charges.  One account says he swam back when he realised the charges were not exploding.

 

He may have drowned or been shot by the boarding party. The official British explanation is that he drowned himself after realising his failure. Perhaps he realised too late that he should have thrown the Enigma machine and code books overboard before leaving.

 

There are displays at Merseyside Maritime Museum about the Athenia and the U-110. An oil painting by K W Radcliffe shows the submarine’s dramatic capture.

 

Commander Roger Winn is pictured  - he and his staff used information gleaned by code breakers at the Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room in London.

 

A WREN (Women’s Royal Naval Service) wireless telegraphist is seen in training (pictured).

 

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 and bookshops.

As part of the Look11 photography festival there has just been a big weekend of Magnum events at the International Slavery Museum. The Magnum Professional Practice course attracted photographers from across the country for two intense days of inspiring talks.

Magnum photographer Ian Berry, whose Living Apart exhibition is currently at the museum, arrived early on Friday evening for a free 'in conversation' event with National Museums Liverpool's director of art galleries Reyahn King. It was a fascinating discussion, as Reyahn describes here:

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The Living Apart exhibition of Ian's photos of South Africa really moves me. My parents were in the African National Congress and I grew up with South Africans in exile in and out of our home. I felt like I knew the place because I knew the people and it's the people – not the beautiful scenery or the famous animals – but the real heart of the country, its people, that Ian's images capture. There's a pavement dance (shown here) which captures the ability to find joy and express it in art in the hardest of circumstances. There's the dignity of a boy whose house has been burnt down in Lesotho. The determination of those burning their passes, demonstrating at funerals, stocially getting on with their lives. It's as if Ian's camera has a heart of its own that documents the moment of subtle tension or even outright violence but does so always with compassion. Ian calls this honest observation, rather than political mission, and in all the images shown you can see his integrity as a photographer.

On Friday night Ian came up for an 'In conversation' event. His description of photographing as people fell down in the grass beside him, shot in the back by the South African police at Sharpeville created a horrified, transfixed hush in the 60 or so of us listening. Ian himself was matter of fact, telling us how glad he was that his images could be used as proof that people were innocent victims in the following trial of – not the police – but those shot at! I said that it seemed like a brave thing to do – not to run away, but just to lie down in the grass and take photos. Ian was dismissive – just being professional, doing a job.

There were some great questions from the audience too. Remember Liverpool was in the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement in the UK and the exhibition includes the 'Liverpool 8 Against Apartheid' banner that people of Toxteth (L8) used in their marches. Several questions from photographers about technique – why black and white for the images of South Africa? (Answer: Ian’s personal preference – he uses colour for professional assignments when required but prefers the quality of black and white). Does he use film now? (No, digital Leicas). An intriguing question asking if Ian had seen similar racial tensions on beaches in Rio de Janeiro. How would he feel if his work was presented as art? He said he didn’t have a problem with it – but he made no claims – his skill as a photographer was about capturing the moment, making it interesting, showing people in one part of the world what was going on in another part of the world. Ian commented too that there was decreasing call for a photographer like himself. The appetite for documentary photography of world events and places is being replaced by celebrity. What a shame. 

Here's Caitlin Allan, one of our most recent volunteers, talking about her work experience in the Decorative Arts Department...

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My name is Caitlin and I have had my work experience at National Museums Liverpool for two weeks. In the first week I visited the Lady Lever Art Gallery for the first time. I was shown around the gallery and learned a lot about the story of the gallery and its collections. I was then asked to choose three pieces from the gallery that really caught my eye and to do some research on them and write up my findings.

I assisted in buying a few modern accessories for an upcoming exhibition ‘The Finishing Touch’, which were to be used in the dressing up section of the exhibition. When I saw them displayed in the exhibition I felt very proud that I was involved in choosing them.

In the second week I photographed accessories related to the forthcoming 'Costume Drama' exhibition due to open at Sudley House in July. I thought this was really enjoyable because photography is one of my favourite hobbies and also gave me more experience in handling clothing. 

I have thoroughly enjoyed the past few weeks and my view of art galleries have changed dramatically. I never knew how interesting they could be! I feel very privileged that I was allowed to have a really interesting placement for my work experience.

Last night Mike Stubbs, director of FACT, announced Marcus Soukup as the winner of the Liverpool Art Prize. The video and sound artist was chosen from a shortlist of four by a panel of judges drawn from across the city’s arts scene.

As well as winning a £2,000 prize Soukup will also display his work at the Walker Art Gallery next year. Curator of British art at the Walker Art Gallery, Dr Laura MacCulloch will be collaborating with him on his display, she said 'I am thrilled that I will be working with Markus over the next few months to organise the first display of his work at the Walker Art Gallery.'