Lots of news!

It’s been a busy busy week, and it’s not over yet! There seems to be lots going on all of a sudden, I’m not sure I can keep up with myself at the moment.

My uni course has started for real this week, and we’ve hit the ground running with an interpretation project: putting on a mini exhibition at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Art Gallery, in a team of 13, in 2 weeks. It’s terrifying, but exciting, and I think we’re doing ok so far. Our exhibition of Drinking Culture in the Late Eighteenth Century will be on display in the Education Room of the gallery from the 14^th October (hopefully), so come and have a look if you’re passing.

As well as uni work, I’m volunteering as a steward at Ilkley Literature Festival which starts tomorrow with Simon Armitage and the world premier of his Stanza Stones poems, which is all very exciting! We had a stewards briefing the other night so now I’m fully up to date on what to do if an author is stuck on a train, a fire breaks out, anyone faints, or someone complains about a squeaky chair! Some of the headline events are sold out, but there are still lots of events with tickets left, so have a look on the website and see if anything takes your fancy. All the fringe events are free and you don’t have to book, so just turn up and see what’s going on.

On top of all that I’ve just started a creative writing evening course at Shipley College, which is really interesting and is giving me the time to sit and write – so if I create anything good I might stick it on here and see what people think.

One last little thing, it’s Light Night in Leeds on Friday 7^th October – I’ve never been before but there looks to be loads of weird and wonderful stuff going on all over the city centre that evening, and I’ve heard good reports from Leeds students who’ve been before, so that’s something else to look forward to!

http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/

http://www.lightnightleeds.co.uk/

Other Trees, Other Hockeys. (and one really big Hockney painting of loads of massive trees!)

I was back at Cartwright Hall today, for the training to be a volunteer tour guide. Hockey’s Bigger Trees Near Warter arrives next week and in conjunction with this, the gallery are running two short tours, Other Hockneys and Other Trees. And a bunch of volunteers, including myself, are going to be your lovely tour guides!

We all met this afternoon to meet each other and be taken on the tours by Claire, the Learning and Outreach Officer for Bradford Museums and Galleries. First we went upstairs to the Connect galleries, which house a really diverse and really interesting collection of artworks, all with some connection to Bradford and its people. There are five ‘stops’ on the Other Hockneys tour, taking in a selection of his work from throughout his career showing his different ways of working and his mastery of many different mediums. Downstairs, past the main gallery where Bigger Trees Near Warter will be in pride of place, is the temporary exhibition Other Trees, where the second tour takes place. This is a selection of works, (painted, carved, weaved and stitched) from the collections of Bradford Museums and Galleries, some of which haven’t been displayed for years. Unsurprisingly, all of the works in this gallery are of, or inspired by, trees. There are some really lovely things in there, and a little mystery in the shape of two carved columns. These columns were donated anonymously, and no-one knows who made them or where they came from. So come along and have a look – we want to know if any Bradfordians  recognise the columns and can tell us their story! We also want to hear from anyone who knows Hockney himself, or has an interesting tale to tell about the artist or his works, and we’ll weave these into our tours as the weeks go on. Hopefully, you can tell us some things, that then we can tell everybody else!

The Other Trees and Other Hockneys tours are running every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, at half past two and three o clock, from next weekend until the end of November. Bigger Trees Near Warter is in residence at Cartwright from 1^st October to 4^th March, and the Other Trees exhibition is on until 26^th February. Come along and see us – and hopefully I’ll have done all my homework and learned all about Hockey and trees by then!

http://www.bradfordmuseums.org/venues/cartwrighthall/index.php

Castle Howard

On Saturday I went on a trip to Castle Howard, with James, who is a good companion for a day out as he both drives and takes photos (two things I am not very good at). I’d been wanting to go to Castle Howard for a while, because it’s mentioned several times in Bill Bryson’s Home, which I read a couple of months ago and really enjoyed. Bryson talked about the landscaped gardens, the follies in the grounds and of course the architecture of the house itself and the famous dome.  And although I had a nice day out, it didn’t quite live up to expectations.

The building is stunning, and the grounds were lovely for a autumnal walk (whilst sneakily eating an apple from the kitchen garden). There was an interesting exhibition about the re-building of a large proportion of the house, including the dome, after a massive fire in 1940. I particularly loved the description of Scarborough schoolgirls, evacuated to Castle Howard during the war, handing books, carpets and paintings out through the windows to save them from the flames. Some of the rooms were never fully restored, at least until first Granada TV and then later BBC films came calling, to film their respective versions of Brideshead Revisited.  The film companies paid to have these interiors fully kitted out in with every period detail – that is every detail that would be visible on camera. The ceilings are exposed, and distinctly modern, while the murals on the walls were painted to suit the tastes of the Catholic (and fictional) Marchmain family, not the Howards.

In contrast to this, the dome, which floats majestically above the main hall of the house, was recreated as to be all but indistinguishable from the original, to the untrained eye. A Canadian artist was commissioned to create an exact copy of Pellegrini’s The Fall of Phaeton which had adorned the underside of the dome – in any other context he would be a forger, but here he is seen as a conservator. The Hall is stunning, but once you become away that it is not ‘real’, not the original eighteenth century building and artworks, it starts to feel a bit strange. Throughout history these huge country houses have been adapted and updated by succeeding generations, but by the 1960s when the dome was rebuilt, this house was not updated in a modern style, but reproduced exactly as it was in its golden age. The stately home was no longer, despite the smattering of framed family snapshots that are around today, a home in the real sense of the world. It was not financially viable, in the post war period, for one family to live here, funding a grand lifestyle off of their land and their name. The home had become a historical monument, and it would have been considered sacrilege to add a 1960s extension instead of restoring the dome.

Today, the house is basically a museum, but one that constantly gives the impression of trying very hard not to be a museum. There is no information on the rooms, their functions, or the people who lived there. The hundreds of artworks are unlabelled, which is frustrating and makes them quite boring, actually, when you don’t know who painted them, who sat for them, which generation Howards collected them and why. Perhaps if I hadn’t been too cheap to buy a guidebook my visit would have been more informative and interesting, but for £13 for an adult ticket I don’t think a few labels on the paintings is too much to ask!

Getting hammered at Cartwright Hall

I was at Cartwright Hall in Bradford today, for a meeting about being a tour guide for the giant Hockney work, Bigger Trees Near Warter, which is soon to be installed in pride of place on the ground floor. But it’s not there yet, and while the gallery staff are busy preparing for the paintings arrival (it’s a bit of a diva apparently and demands its own micro climate!) the main exhibition space downstairs is screened off. But, if you go inside and turn right you’ll find an exhibition that is very different, and I think incredibly beautiful.

Marcus Levine’s ‘Hammered’ is a collection of his nail sculptures. This sounds a bit industrial and dull, but in fact they are lovely. The majority of the pieces are pictures, but instead of using a more traditional medium Levine creates his art by hammering nails into a plain white background, creating images of the human body, a rose, ballet shoes and a cat! Others are more abstract, and I was fascinated with how a pattern made using something as proverbially hard as nails could look so ethereal, as though it could be blown away as easily as a dandelion clock. These sculptures beg you to run your fingers across them, which is welcomed by the gallery and the artist. I almost expected the brow and lashes of ‘The Eye of the Artist’ to be soft to stroke,  but of course when you get up close the nails revert to being individual pieces of hard metal, cold to the touch.

The level of detail that Levine creates is stunning, in ‘Petra, Study 2’ the woman’s hair cascades down in distinct waves, and her spine and ribs are delicately highlighted by the nails themselves and the shadows they cast. My personal favourite in the exhibition was ‘Tamas, Study 3’, a gorgeous, strong, male nude depicted using 15,100 separate nails.  The contrast between the smooth curves of the human body and the rigid spikes of the nails used to create the picture is really striking – Levine seems to revel in this contrast, choosing to show soft, delicate subjects such as a rose, and a pair of ballet shoes.

Levine’s sculptures would be works of art if they were simply sketched in pencil or charcoal, but the added dimension and tactility that the use of nails gives them lifts them off the page, both literally and figuratively!

You can see Levine in action at www.youtube.com/user/levineArt , and keep up to date with what’s going on at Cartwright Hall at www.bradfordmuseums.org .

Hello World!

So, here we are. Welcome to my cabinet of curiosities! I hope we'll get to know one another quite well, over time. I'm a bit of a history geek - may as well get it out there in the open now, you'll work it out soon enough- and since I'd love to spend my life turning other people in history geeks too, I'm starting an MA in Museum Studies next week so I can (hopefully) become a curator and share the history love. It's not just about the history though - the course includes art galleries so I'm on a bit of a mission to learn about art and to appreciate it more than just 'ooh thats pretty, where's the cafe?' So, since I spent a lot of time visiting museums and galleries, as well as volunteering and doing work placements, it seems like a good idea to share some of what I see. The inspiring, the beautiful, the downright confusing... the Tate Modern springs to mind here! And I might throw in a bit of literature, and theatre, and generally what's going on in Yorkshire's cultural scene (which is more than you might think!)