Adventures in designing things that aren’t technically logos

By Sarah Barr, Volunteer, Scotland Creates

Our Scotland Creates volunteers are working with curators and other staff from National Museums Scotland to create an exhibition on the theme of Scotland Creates: A Sense of Place.

GREETINGS, FELLOW HUMANS.

So we’re trying to fashion ourselves some sort of logo so that when you come and visit our exhibits you’ll know what’s ours.

Logo. Ok. I’m good at drawing. This’ll be easy. It’ll take five minutes. Yes. Scribble scribble.

I came up with Dolly the Sheep’s face placed over the National Museum crossed punctuation marks, looking like a skull and crossbones. We called it the Dolly Roger. I was a proud little potato.

The Dolly Roger.

Then… Oh. Turns out there are guidelines and things we have to follow.

Lots of them. About fonts and colours and use of museum marks and whatnot.

Ah.

So instead of the Dolly Roger, someone with far more sense than me brought in a clever lady called Eilidh, who also had far more sense than me, from an advertising firm called Frame in Glasgow to have a session with us volunteers about logo design and branding.

Turns out that logos are HARD.

We talked about famous brands and how their logos pop out at us, how simplicity is what we should aim for, and making sure that the logo we come up with really conveys what the heart of the project is all about. So, we grabbed a small forest’s worth of Post-It notes and wrote down words we felt summed up the project and its values, coated a wall with them and gradually whittled them down to a handful of key words.

We then split ourselves up into smaller groups, each group taking a word and trying to come up with some simple, clear images to represent them. The whole group then voted on which images we liked best, which turned out to be:

• A classic house shape with a heart inside it (representing “Home”, as in, home-is-where-the-heart-is… do you see what we did there? Do you? Do you see?)
•  A magnifying glass in various guises (representing “Discovery” which we thought was an important part of identity in Edinburgh)
• Keys, a key, or a keyhole, sometimes dressed up as a thistle (representing a mix of those last two key words. Hah. Key words. Keys. Hah.)

Happy with our ideas for potential motifs, we then had to find a volunteer to put it all together into a logo (Technically, we’re to call it a “visual identity” because the National Museum only has one logo).

Cue some shuffling of feet, and me eventually being stupid and saying “I could give it a go?” or something like that, because I apparently haven’t learned my lesson from my attempt with the Dolly Roger and my brain clearly enjoys torturing me by making me offer to do things I can’t do very well. Huzzah!

So I am working on a handful designs for everyone else to vote on based on the motifs we came up with at the brainstorming session. (I say working; every time I saw my sketchbook and the museum CD called “Identity Guidelines” over the past fortnight I ran away and watched an entire season of Xena:Warrior Princess in the hope that magical little elves will have broken into my flat and done it for me.)

I am so very nearly done though, and will hopefully be done in… ten minutes including procrastinating by writing this blog post. Mostly because I finished Xena. And Game of Thrones. And The X-Files. And somehow haven’t eaten my laptop in a fit of rage at MS Paint and my touchpad, which are as much Adobe Photoshop and a graphics tablet as I am a fairy princess.

And here they are…

‘Home is where the heart is’ motifs.

Key and magnifying glass motifs.

A selection of thistle and keyhole motifs.

Anyway, I hope you like what eventually gets chosen!

Bye for now,

Sarah Barr

 

Japanese Tea Ceremony (Chanoyu)

By Victoria Adams, Assistant Curator East & Central Asia and Middle East & South Asia

Every year the University of Edinburgh holds an Innovative Learning Week, allowing students the opportunity to attend creative and experiential learning events. These open up new perspectives on their studies, inspiring debate and prompting future research.

National Museum of Scotland recently hosted a Japanese tea ceremony for students from the History of Art department, within the serene environment of the Japanese tea house (chashitsu) in the Lady Ivy Wu Looking East gallery.

The ceremony was led by Mio Shapley, a qualified Master in the Urasenke tradition. Hiromi Moffat set the atmosphere by playing the shamisen, a three-stringed Japanese instrument played with a large plectrum (bachi). All four participants in the ceremony wore elegant kimono and hair ornaments.

Mio Shapley preparing Japanese green tea. Photo by Paul Dodds.

Tea has been drunk ceremonially in Japan since at least the 8^th century, although the basis of the existing tea ceremony probably dates from the 16th century. The highly symbolic ritual follows prescribed actions and gestures, demonstrative of purity and balance.

Traditionally the ceremony takes place within a tea house; a deliberately simple room usually set within an apparently uncultivated garden. It has no furnishings beyond the traditional tatami straw matting on the floor. A small sliding door requires the guest to bow humbly and enter on their knees, before symbolically closing the door to the outside world behind them. The room often contains an alcove used to display a naturalistic flower arrangement, and a hanging scroll with either a painting or calligraphy appropriate to the season or occasion. At the start of our ceremony, one of the students was asked to arrange seasonal foliage in a vase, and place it in the alcove.

A student arranging foliage before the ceremony. Photo by Paul Dodds.

Essential equipment for traditional tea preparation includes: the tea bowl (chawan) for drinking; the tea whisk (chasen) carved from a single piece of bamboo; the tea scoop (chashaku) and tea caddy (usuchaki or cha-ire), together with a cloth for wiping the bowl clean (chakin). Also necessary are a kettle (kama) and brazier (furo), and a long bamboo ladle (hishaku) for scooping boiling water from the kettle to the tea bowl. Additional items include storage containers made of natural materials such as wood or bamboo, and cloths for ritual cleaning and handling of hot items. All utensils are chosen with consideration for quality and aesthetics; some may be antique, passed down through generations. All are handled with great care and respect.

Mio Shapley pouring hot water for Japanese green tea. Photo by Paul Dodds.

The tea ceremony is highly spiritual and closely linked to Zen Buddhism. It is conducted in silence, and the calm, deliberate movements create a meditative atmosphere. The central tenets of the ceremony are harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity; participants also endeavour to cultivate a greater awareness of themselves, as part of their personal progression towards spiritual enlightenment.

Following the silent demonstration, a student was invited to prepare a second bowl of tea, whilst the first bowl was passed between her colleagues, accompanied by various traditional sweets (wagashi).

A University of Edinburgh student learns the etiquette of the Japanese tea ceremony. Photo by Paul Dodds.

University of Edinburgh students try Japanese green tea. Photo by Paul Dodds.

We would like to thank Mio and her colleagues for offering us a short glimpse into an ancient cultural tradition. This gave us all a moment to pause, reflect, savour, connect with each other, and then carry within us back into the pleasures and distractions of the everyday world.

 

Ilana Halperin: myth-making molluscs and cool corals

By Bryony Bond, Contemporary Art Consultant

Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin has been researching and developing ideas for a contemporary art exhibition inspired by National Museums Scotland’s collections. The exhibition, The Library, is open from 24 May-29 September 2013. Over the past few months, she’s been looking through National Museums Scotland’s collections, finding out about minerals, fossils, molluscs and rocks and uncovering some fascinating stories. In this series of blog posts, we share some of the fantastic things she’s found.

Artist Ilana Halperin has come across some incredible discoveries during her research at National Museums Scotland, but these have got to be some of the strangest. Who knew that snails were sculptors and molluscs were the real makers of the Golden Fleece?

“While at National Museums Scotland I’ve been branching out into other areas beyond geology and mineralogy: I’ve been spending time with corals and molluscs and the curators who look after those collections. I’ve been looking at some lovely things in those departments, such as carrier shells. As these molluscs grow their shells, they also pick up bits of rocks, coral or other shells and attach them to their own. So their shells become these crazy, fabulous sculptures.

Coral specimens in the National Museums Collection Centre.

Hexacorallia (coral).

Tubipora musica (organ pipe coral).

Xenophora conchyliophora (Atlantic carrier shell).

“I’ve also been looking at golden sea threads, which are rumoured to be the substance that the Golden Fleece was composed of. The threads are made by a particular bivalve to tether itself to a substrate, like an anchor. At various points these threads have been harvested and woven together. National Museums Scotland has a really beautiful pair of gloves and a matching scarf all woven from this thread!”

Gloves and scarf made from golden sea threads.

You can visit Ilana’s website here.

 

Ilana Halperin: the artist in the museum’s store

By Bryony Bond, Contemporary Art Consultant

Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin has been researching and developing ideas for a contemporary art exhibition inspired by National Museums Scotland’s collections. The exhibition, The Library, is open from 24 May-29 September 2013. Over the past few months, she’s been looking through National Museums Scotland’s collections, finding out about minerals, fossils, molluscs and rocks and uncovering some fascinating stories. In this series of blog posts, we share some of the fantastic things she’s found.

Born in New York, USA, in 1973, Ilana Halperin was fascinated by geology and museums at an early age.

“As a child, one of the main places that I went exploring and adventuring was the American Museum of Natural History, specifically the Harry Frank Guggenheim Hall of Minerals. In 1976 the Hall had just been redeveloped and reopened. It had been built to mimic the interior of a cave and all of the rocks and minerals were spot lit. So, even before I started carving stone there was an unadulterated, primary experience of being in this beautiful space where all these beautiful, incredible mysterious things were glittering in the dark.

“In the Hall you could explore and discover things, clamber over huge chunks of copper and jasper. The Hall was actually designed to make you want to climb all over it; the Museum wanted children and adults to interact with the geology. In an article I found about the reopening of the Hall, they even said they wanted people, ‘to touch these specimens, put their arms around them, fall in love with them.’ OK, very 1970s, but I guess you could say that I’m a case study for a success story. Because that incredible feeling of encountering these rocks and minerals, and having access to them like that, definitely had a huge impact on my development as a human being.”

In 1998 Ilana moved to Scotland to study at the Glasgow School of Art, and since then she’s gone on to make exhibitions in museums and galleries all over the world. While she’s working at National Museums Scotland, she’s also making a permanent display of geology for Shrewsbury Museum – not many artists get invited to do that! So why does Ilana like working with museums?

Ilana Halperin, installation view of STEINE, Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Berlin, Germany, 2012.

“I encounter ideas or objects I haven’t come across before, because every collection is completely different. You never know what you’re going to find out about, and what totally unexpected routes you might take. Certain objects, and conversations with the people who know about the collections, can open up a whole new world, or a completely new way of thinking about things.

“For example, at Manchester Museum I came across a cave cast, which was an object formed in a cave, and by a cave, over a period of one year. That object sparked off a whole new direction in my work, within my thinking about time and our relationship to geology. Then in Berlin, I was introduced to a collection of body stones, gall stones and kidney stones, and this was a huge revelation that the body could produce geology. I wasn’t aware of that until I was put into contact with that particular collection.”

Ilana Halperin, Physical Geology (new land mass/fast time), 2009, still from Super 8 film, 3 min 48 sec.

Ilana Halperin, Physical Geology (new land mass/fast time), 2009, still from Super 8 film, 3 min 48 sec.

You can visit Ilana’s website here.

 

Keeping your spirits up with wartime favourites

A guest post by Emma Kaye-Hudson and Elizabeth Morrissey, aka The Blitz Sisters

The Blitz Sisters will be performing Second World War songs at Wartime Experience on Sunday 12 May 2012 at National Museum of Flight, East Fortune. Book your tickets in advance here.

We are a 1940s singing duo who met at university whilst studying for performing arts. After graduating we decided to create some work together and after realising that what we both enjoyed most was singing, we created The Blitz Sisters! That was two years ago now and we have loved every minute.

The Blitz Sisters will be appearing on Sunday 12 May at Wartime Experience, National Museum of Flight, East Fortune.

All our songs are from the 1940s and 1950s, however we have also arranged a few modern songs to fit the sound of the era, so there is something there to suit everyone.

The Blitz Sisters will be appearing on Sunday 12 May at Wartime Experience, National Museum of Flight, East Fortune.

Before a show we try and get a good night’s sleep and then have a honey and hot water in the morning to help look after our voices.

At the Wartime Experience you can expect to hear songs from artists such as Vera Lynn, George Formby and The Andrews Sisters. We are really looking forward to returning to Scotland after a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe last August and we hope you have a great day!

 

When dads rocked the Museum

A guest post by David Marshall of playgroup Dads Rock

We congregated in our masses on a lovely sunny and warm April Saturday morning outside the National Museum of Scotland. Our kids and dads (30 kids and 25 dads) were all eager to get into the building to commence our morning of mask making, dinosaurs, stories and singing.

Outside the National Museum of Scotland.

We were welcomed by Alison Rae, Family Learning Officer, who has been amazing with the logistical arrangement with the run up to our visit, and today she didn’t disappoint. Alison and the Enabler team ensured we all moved to the Learning Centre and around the Museum with ease.

Once we had dropped off our buggies and all other child related “artefacts” we moved both in groups and in pairs around the Museum. The kids, in fact, led their dads around the Museum! Some explored the craft table set up in the Grand Gallery with a multitude of masks and various art/craft accessories at hand, and some, like my three-year-old daughter, lead me straight to the Earth in Space section, followed by what I can only explain as a kids’ haven, the Imagine gallery (weird mirrors and some lovely snug type spaces for those who would like a read).

Left: Mask-making in the Grand Gallery. Right: Reading a story in the Imagine gallery.

Before long, once the masks were all made and paraded around the Museum with pride, all of the small feet were wearying slightly so we retired up to the Learning Centre for a deserved lunchtime snack.

Then… it was into the usual Dads Rock session… oh yes… this was our time to give something back to National Museums Scotland for having us. Our resident storyteller and co-founder Thomas Lynch told two amazing stories, which we were all enthralled by (I think some parents more than the kids). Then it was time for me, David Marshall, fellow co-founder to get my trusted axe of wood and six metal strings out for a rendition of all of our favourite children’s rhymes and tunes, not forgetting our penultimate house rocker, Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’, which happened to draw in a large crowd who were spectating from afar, surely wondering what was going on. Well, I can answer that: 55 dads and their wonderful kids had an amazing morning to remember at National Museum of Scotland. We came, we conquered, and we ROCKED!!

Storytelling in the Learning Centre.

Rocking out to the Dads Rock anthem.

Dads Rock run free playgroups for dads and their kids (0-5) in Scotland.  It is a fun, positive and rocking place to come together, play and learn. There are currently two groups in Edinburgh and one starting in Fife and they hope to expand westward soon.

For more information email dads.rock@yahoo.co.uk or visit our blog or Facebook page and follow us on Twitter @DadsRockEdin.

 

Travelling north: loaning objects for the John Rae exhibition in Stromness

By Ross Irving, Assistant Curator Oceania, Americas and Africa

This year will mark the bi-centenary of the birth of Arctic explorer and collector Dr John Rae, who was born on 30 September 1813. The John Rae 200 celebrations, organised by the Orkney Natural History Society, include an international conference, community events and an exhibition in Stromness Museum.

Poster for the John Rae 200 celebrations.

This exhibition was created in partnership with National Museums Scotland and contains important objects from both collections, focusing on John Rae’s relationship with the indigenous communities he encountered on his journeys.

Born and raised in Orkney, Rae learned how to live on the land and survive as part of a remote community. His legendary physical fitness as well as his love and knowledge of the land undoubtedly contributed to his success as an explorer. This exhibition focuses on his early career in the 1840s-50s, when he was largely engaged with the Hudson Bay Company and in searches to discover the fate of the Franklin Expedition.

Objects on display include Cree/Metis, Arctic and Northwest Coast material collected by John Rae alongside material collected by others to contextualise Rae’s collection and give a fuller sense of the peoples he encountered.

Woman’s comb of walrus ivory, Inuit, collected by John Rae, likely 1848 or 1851. On loan courtesy of the University of Edinburgh Collections.

Model canoe of birchbark, Mi’kmaq, collected by John Rae, possibly 1860s. On loan courtesy of the University of Edinburgh Collections.

The team at National Museums Scotland, including loans, conservation and curatorial staff, worked closely with the Orkney Natural History Society to arrange the exhibition.

After months of hard work the exhibition opening loomed and a date was set for installation. As intrepid explorers ourselves, Conservator Charles Stable and I set off northwards one frosty Sunday morning, with over six hours of driving ahead of us.  The collections were securely packed into crates by our conservation team, using layers of plastazote and tyvek cushions. With the long drive as well as the notoriously turbulent ferry crossing ahead, it was especially important that the objects were well packed.

Objects for the Rae exhibition securely packed up.

We made good time on the way up, feeling fortunate that the difficult conditions caused by snow a few days earlier had cleared. Thankfully the ferry crossing was almost smooth, getting us into Stromness on time at 8pm. Stromness Museum was only a short drive away, through the narrow winding streets (thank goodness we didn’t meet a car coming in the other direction), where we were greeted by Honorary Curator Janette Park, husband John (the local butcher, who kindly agreed to help us lift crates!) and Technical Manager Bart.

The morning revealed the spectacular views from our accommodation over to the island of Hoy and along the coast up the Mainland. Stromness Museum was only a ten minute walk away and with such fantastic scenery one of the nicest commutes I have ever had.

Spectacular views of Hoy.

Stromness Museum.

At Stromness Museum, Exhibition Curator Tom Muir and committee member Bryce Wilson were on hand to help with installation. With around 30 objects to install we hoped to be finished in one day.

Each object was unpacked and checked against a condition report written by our conservation team. This is done to make sure that nothing was damaged in transit, and also gives us a reference point to ensure that any change to an object’s condition while on display can be identified. After each object was checked it was placed in position under Tom’s direction.

As with all the best laid plans, we inevitably had to make a few changes on the day. After putting our heads together and doing a bit of re-arranging we managed to fit everything in. A few last minute (and very creative) mounting solutions helped to really show the objects off.

Display of Inuit material with items from the Stromness Museum’s collection.

Display of Northwest Coast material and a leister (on the bottom shelf) John Rae made himself to demonstrate his lectures.

Charles preparing a mount.

Installation in progress (from left: Charles, Bryce, Janette and Tom).

Cree/Metis bag collected by Rae and Cree/Metis coat collected by Andrew Graham.

On Tuesday we moved the empty crates into storage. Janette Park gave Charles and me a tour of Stromness Museum which surveyed its wonderful natural history, maritime and ethnographic collections. This also left some time for some sightseeing. The Orkney Islands are rich with sites of archaeological and historical significance, so one afternoon was definitely not enough!

Ring of Brodgar, one of the many sights of Orkney.

We also had time to visit the memorial to John Rae in St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall. This memorial is prominently positioned within the cathedral, sitting opposite a memorial to William Balfour Baikie, a fellow Orcadian and explorer.

Memorial to John Rae in St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall. Photo by Rebecca Marr.

It is a touching tribute to an individual whose achievements were not fully recognised during his lifetime. It is hoped that 2013 will be a moment in which to re-evaluate the legacy of John Rae, his role in Arctic collecting as well as his historical significance in Arctic exploration.

To find out more about Rae’s bi-centenary,visit the John Rae 200 website. You can also download a pdf file detailing the bi-centenary events.

 

Getting into the Viking spirit: bread making

By Elaine Macintyre, Digital Media Content Manager

The Vikings! exhibition at National Museum of Scotland gives an amazingly rounded picture of life in the Viking Age – not just the raiding and seafaring, the axes and helmets (WITHOUT horns), but life back home on the farm as well. Various fascinating artefacts help uncover what Viking Age people wore, how they ran their households and, of course, what they ate.

On display in one case are some charred, grey, unappetising-looking nuggets that actually transpire to be Viking bread, found in a grave in Birka in Sweden – nourishment for the afterlife, presumably. Yum.

Viking bread in the exhibition. Probably a bit stale.

Experts in Sweden have analysed the samples and come up with a recipe for making Viking bread. Given that my husband is a bit of a dab hand in the kitchen, we thought we’d give it a go. The tenuous link to Digital Media is that you can download the recipe from the National Museums Scotland website here.

The ‘official’ ingredients are:

About 150 g barley flour
About 50 g wholemeal flour
2 tsp crushed flax seeds
About 100 ml water
2 tsp lard or butter
A pinch of salt

Our version of the Viking bread ingredients.

We cheated slightly by using a barleycorn flour that mixes ground barley with wheat flakes, as this was the best we could find in the wholefood shop! We also used goosefat in place of butter or lard but as people in the Viking Age would have reared geese (as well as chickens, pigs, cows and sheep) we figured that was probably fairly authentic. You can buy ground flax seeds in wholefood shops and some big supermarkets – they’re also useful for gluten free baking, and are a great way of upping the omega 3 content of bread, cereal, porridge, etc. (Just so you know…)

Here’s how we got on making the Viking bread.

First, mix the dry ingredients together.

Next, add the water.

Mix the ingredients into a dough, then knead on a floured board.

Roll the dough into a ball.

Put the dough in a covered bowl and leave it somewhere warm to prove for a couple of hours. We put ours in the cupboard under the stairs, where the boiler is. The dough will expand a little bit, but not much as it doesn’t have yeast in it.

Roll out the dough and shape into a rough circle.

We fried our bread in a dry heavy frying pan, but you can also bake it in the oven if you prefer.

Bake the dough until it turns a nice burnt brown colour, a bit like a naan bread.

Serve with a hearty, warming stew.

So after all that effort, was it tasty? Well, yes: stodgy (as my gran would put it, it fair clags to your ribs), warming and perfect to accompany a stew on a cold evening!

 

Behind the scenes at the National Museums Collection Centre

By Carenza Murray, Work Experience Student with Collections Services

Hello everyone!

I’ve been the work experience placement at the wonderful National Museums Collections Centre in Granton for the last surprisingly short five days. For four days I’ve been based in the Collections Centre but on Tuesday I was in the National Museum of Scotland itself. If you - yes, you! – haven’t been yet, then you should go: the Museum is amazing in size and structure, and magnificent in its collection content, as, including the reserve collections, they have over four million objects and counting, in case you were wondering.

Monday

After arriving at the National Museums Collections Centre on a rather cold and dreary morning, what struck me at first was the very friendly and warm welcome from the staff at the Collections Centre. I thought it would be full of people who were going to be depressed and stocked up on way too much caffeine, but no, there was a surprisingly happy atmosphere for a Monday morning and some genuinely nice people too!

I was given the tour of the Collections Centre buildings (only five currently contain collections, as some of the older buildings are being demolished to make way for a shiny new storage building) and I was startled by the sheer size of the site. I’m not exaggerating when I write that it’s huge. When I first walked into Building 14 (the first building in the tour of the site), I was overwhelmed by the vast size of it; the buildings were all like the TARDIS.  I was quite unresponsive throughout the rest of the tour because I was speechless!

From whale bones to frogs pickled in jars the Collections Centre has it all.

In the afternoon, I learned how to handle the artefacts with the care that they require. I found it amazing how close conservators get to objects. I was able to see these objects from a conservator’s point of view, so with that came an almost overwhelming sense of responsibility. After that I knew that my work experience week was never going to be ordinary.

1, 2, 3 Lift! A lesson in object handling, and packing practising on an office chair,
before getting close to real objects.

Tuesday

Tuesday entailed a different venue to explore: the Museum itself on Chambers Street.

I was given a tour of this site: mind-blowing isn’t it? It’s hard to take in the actual age of some of the objects: when I was shown the Early People section of the Museum it was very difficult to think that the objects on display are over thousands, if not millions, of years old.

From the terrific T-Rex to the amazing amethyst geode, the range of collections of the Museum are spectacular.

On Tuesday afternoon, I was taken to the Loans and Collections Development departments, where I learned how objects are loaned and transported to and from the Museum, such as the current Vikings! exhibition, which is mostly on loan from the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. I was also shown the ADLIB database, which contains information on most of the objects in the collection and their whereabouts. I found this very intriguing, especially the amount of work the system actually requires. You need to enter information about each component part of an object individually, for example, a teapot and its lid have separate object records.

Wednesday

Half way through the week, Wednesday involved looking at artefact conservation and paper and textile conservation back at Collections Centre HQ.

In the morning with the artefact conservators, I looked at how to conserve objects and the various different methods which can be used. It was incredible how varied their work can be. One day they’ll be working on some taxidermy, the next day they could be working on some objects made entirely of glass. It also struck me how precise you have to be in this work: a mistake could mean that an irreplaceable object is damaged beyond repair.

The afternoon entailed learning about the conservation of Paper and Textiles. The fragility of these objects is unbelievable, how they survived centuries of different owners and conditions is something I can’t understand. I made a padded hanger (which I think I made rather clumsily). These help to conserve clothing. They stop any acid within the wooden hangers from damaging the textile, and also support the costume seams. I was able to use my hanger on a piece of clothing, (after three attempts with different outfits) we found it fitted into a beautiful pink dress covered in small flowers which had a great level of detail and accuracy.

Third time lucky; the padded hanger fits!

Thursday

Thursday’s tasks included some work in the Analytical Research labs and a look at the conservation of different works of Engineering.

I was very excited about Thursday morning as Analytical Research is in some ways similar to what I want to do when I’m older: forensic anthropology. It didn’t disappoint. With the Analytical Scientist, I looked at different ways to analyse objects to find out many different things. It was a great insight into the way we understand objects.

Engineering conservation was very interesting in the afternoon. I was shown around another section of storage in which there were contraptions of all kinds. It was great to see that many of the items in storage still actually function. Some of the objects come into the Collection Centre in pieces, and some of the time the engineers have to guess what they would have looked like, which requires a great deal of patience. They then rebuild the object, and to see the finished piece is amazing. It’s rare to get the chance to see behind the scenes at Granton, so keep an eye out for any opportunities that come up, like Doors Open Day last year.

Cars and carriages in the National Museums Collection Centre.

Friday

My fifth and final day at the National Museums Collections Centre included a look at ways that objects from the collections are photographed.

I saw the range of objects that photography has to work around and I can tell you now, it’s not a walk in the park! Glass particularly is difficult. The photographers have to work around so many different objects and take photographs with a great deal of care. They also have to work with many different camera angles, and work with a high level of accuracy. It was very intriguing, but I don’t have a very high level of patience so I found it quite trying to get the perfect angle for an object.

So that’s it for my round up of my week here at Granton. It was a great experience and an unmissable opportunity. It was good to work with such great people and I am so lucky to have gotten the chance to work here.

Thanks for reading!

Hopefully, this blog gets your ‘seal’ of approval!

(What? Was that too cheesy for you?)

 

Running like clockwork: a day with Engineering Conservation

By James Gulland, Support Assistant, Facilities Management

The ‘Across the floor’ programme at National Museums Scotland encourages staff to spend a day with another department, to find out more about what that department does and learn from their working practices.

Having worked in maintenance engineering for over thirty years, I was keen to learn more about Engineering Conservation. Coming from a manufacturing background, I was interested in finding out more about the difference between our working environments.

Working as a support assistant I am regularly involved in transporting artefacts and objects, so I looked upon this as an opportunity to further my knowledge of Collections Services. I have a particular interest in clocks and was delighted to find out I would be working with the Tod Head lighthouse, which is clockwork driven.

This first-order dioptric flashing light was presented to the Museum by the Northern Lighthouse Board and is being reassembled at the National Museums Collection Centre. It was designed by Messrs Stevenson, civil engineers, of Edinburgh, with the optics constructed by Henry-Lapaute of Paris. The optics are very different from any others we have in the National Museums Scotland collection, such as those from Eilean Glas and Inchkeith and the Tay leading light, made by the Chance Brothers of Birmingham, or Sule Skerry’s optics, which were made by Barbier et Bernard of Paris.

Working alongside Darren Cox at the Collection Centre, I was occupied cleaning and identifying various parts of the clockwork mechanism in preparation for reassembly. I found it really interesting that a lighthouse lamp could be clockwork driven, although the fact that it had to be wound up every half an hour seems impractical!

Working on the Tod Head lighthouse mechanism.

I also spent time working on a pendulum clock movement. Darren dismantled the movement, pointing out the various parts and explaining their function. I was then given the task of assembling the clock movement. After successfully achieving this, I then proceeded to dismantle and assemble the clock once more to familiarise myself with this practice.

Working on a pendulum clock.

I thoroughly enjoyed my Across the floor day with Engineering Conservation and appreciated the insight into their work. After this experience, I would welcome the opportunity to work directly with the Engineering Conservation team in the future.

Interested in the workings of clocks and lighthouse mechanisms? See the Ritchie clock, Millennium Clock and Midsummer Chronophage and two lighthouses lenses from our collection in the Grand Gallery and Discoveries gallery at National Museum of Scotland.