Kelham Island Museum: Museum of Tools —

Kelham Island Museum is part of Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust, which gives an idea of the sort of thing going on inside this old iron foundry. I was expecting general local history, cutlery, coffee pots etc. but hadn’t appreciated that those skills also meant that Sheffield made a lot of engineering and hand tools too.

As such, the museum is also host to the extraordinary Hawley Collection. A remarkable assortment of tools and works in progress that show how the tools were made. This means that the tools that made the tools are also presented - leading to a wonderful sort of meta exhibit.

 

The really great thing is that it’s a personal collection turned institutional, and where you’d expect more gaps, and more bias you’re met with sheer quantity of artefacts and a really well presented, coherent exhibit. Both the character of the founder, Ken, and the group of volunteers that man the ‘research room’, (biscuits and enthusiastic tool chat were more noticeable) are firmly felt in the gallery.

 

Elsewhere in the museum is the massive River Don Engine that came to the museum straight from the factory floor where it had been used to make armour plating for nuclear power stations.

 

I also really appreciate any museum that incorporates it’s archives and restoration work into it’s displays – It gives a sense of continuation, activity, and relevance.

 

Howard Grey and Me

So some of you know that I'm in the fortunate position to be helping out Howard Grey: the dad of my friend Camilla who I met at Moving Brands. He's a photographer with a lifetimes work and I'm helping him archive it all. So- lots of scanning, cataloguing, and eventually displaying his work. It ranges from historical journalism type stuff, to portraiture, to model shoots, to fashion, to advertising and corporate work- there's a massive breadth and amount of material and it's a real joy to be able to peruse and dig out gems from someones life's work. Every day is like a treasure hunt. I'm beginning the process of designing and creating a website and blog where you can view the sort-of-archive that it's becoming. (I say sort of because it acts as more of an edited reference for the physical collection/archive which is where high quality prints and scans would be taken from when the need arises.)

This is a nice one I dug out from today. It is from a shoot for the Association of Building Societies. The man shown is a carpet fitter and this was shot at the end of 1969. People that know me will understand that this man's style is what I aspire to, I have a bit of a thing for the Fred Dibnah look.

V&A Archives

I went to the annual open day at the V&A archives at Blythe House in Olympia. There was an interesting thing of refinement: the woman talking to us was an archivist, from the archives department, from the art and design department, from the word and image department, from the V&A. In a similar way the objects were at the bottom of a load of layers: building, room, shelf, box, foam, card, sleeve, paper, then object.

The open book is a conserved version of the book above it. The top book had loads of pictures stuck in with sellotape and this has eroded and died over time so that things are stuck together and the pictures become damaged. The conserved book is easier to navigate and and work from - indeed through the conservation process the images are more accessible and now some of the images have been displayed at the design museum and also the Cold War Modern exhibition - i think it's interesting, because i find it to be another level of context abstraction the images in the fading, old, ledger feel more honest and fit the pictures better than the sterilised conserved version.

There was a story told about how a bed had been offered from Garrick's family. On visiting the item in question the curator also discovered a number of other items which used to belong to Garrick and a collection of letters and documents pertaining to the heritage and acquisition of the bed, including, of note, an unpublished poem. The money to acquire these could not be given by the museum and so they went to the society of Garrick (these guys had money) and they whipped round and got the cash- and also in the process another museum piece was offered- this adds weight to my argument that things attract things- i think this might be worth revisiting.

A tour guide, Guy Baxter, described the archives as 'Some of our treasures'

The archivists seek to record through archiving.

The buildings were built originally as offices and so are not strong enough for the purpose so the archive shelves (which i wasn't allowed to take pictures of!) had to placed over the beam lines of the buildings- i like the idea of a collection dictating a space and also the other way round there's some kind of interesting relationship happening there.