Cabinet of Curiosities, Warrington Museum
Cabinets of curiosities are all the rage in museums. Sara Holdsworth visits Warrington to see how the concept has been interpreted there
Cabinet of Curiosities at Warrington Museum seeks to reinvent the earliest museum, the Renaissance Wunderkammer.
All the big hitters, from the Prado to Tate St Ives, are doing it, juxtaposing paintings and sculpture with natural history specimens. The displays reveal the current fascination, shared by artists and curators, with the troublesome relationship between art and science.
Established in 1848, Warrington Museum is one of the earliest purpose-built museums in the UK, with one of the oldest natural history collections, so it is a fitting venue for this theme.
Rather than merely refurbishing its original Bird Room, where faded specimens languished in a sea of 1970s brown hessian, it has achieved something far richer and more imaginative.
A Long Hard Look in the Mirror by artist and taxidermist Polly Morgan, commissioned for the space, sets the tone. A dead baby rabbit and a buoyant orange balloon are separated by a concrete beam.
It is a stark contrast between the lifeless and the living, the past and the future. A label declares that “this curio…links the contemporary and historical, which represents the ideology of the gallery”.
A Heritage Lottery Fund grant has transformed the space. The cases and object installation which, impressively, were largely designed in-house, reference those of the Victorian galleries.
They have a Farrow & Ball colour palette, dark wood and a multitude of specimen cupboards and drawers. The sleek lines, elegant glazing and lighting prevent any sense of pastiche.
Interpretative films
It is good to see the roof lantern restored, with multi-coloured light washes adding a modern twist. But it is a shame that the architects weren’t able to find a better solution for the original stage, which was part of the gallery’s early incarnation as Warrington School of Art.
Its bulk, height and clunky lino surfaces dominate without being practical as a display area. A series of films interpreting the collection are shown above the stage. Although lively in content, the sound quality is lacking and they are visually intrusive.
Weird and wonderful
Appropriate to their Cabinet of Curiosities theme, the displays make a virtue of the sheer eclecticism and strangeness of the collection. Exhibits range widely across the disciplines, from animals and plants to antiquities, art, ethnography, scientific instruments and magic talismans.
Some of the museum’s most precious things are allowed their own space, such as a beautifully restored painted virginal from 1684, which you can see and hear being played on film. In contrast, a mass of small cabinets and drawers at child height, in the larger cases, allow visitors to find a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful.
“A Henry VI groat discovered in a cow’s stomach” nestles against a seal’s flipper made into a wallet.
Labelling is minimal, occasionally revealing stories behind the objects, but often encouraging the viewer’s own response rather than imparting information.
There are some visual pairings of objects that make their own point: Samuel Luke Fildes’ lush Venetian beauty swathed in dramatic red is placed next to Ossie Clark’s romantic 1970s chiffon dress. Both started out as pupils at the school of art, presumably in this very room.
In the centre of the space, the first 10 “honorary curators” have chosen and interpreted objects that relate to their private enthusiasms. This revives a 19th-century tradition in which local amateur specialists curated the collections. The modern version will provide exciting opportunities for Warringtonians to refresh the gallery.
Of the initial group, some meditate on the way that time (and museums) bestow significance. Billy Hutchison’s interpretation of old tools from JT Clarke of Haydock Street, made for industries now defunct, says: “I had a good laugh myself doing this job because a lot of the stuff was like I used when I was an apprentice, so how old am I?”
The most striking displays are the taxidermy collection. With a nod perhaps to artist Mark Dion’s installations, the central fiction is that we are looking into the curators’ study and storeroom of 100 years ago. In the study, complete with archaic typewriter and plate camera, a stuffed wolf stalks across a table.
Mr Edelsten’s dog, which died in 1849, sits on the floor as if waiting for his master. With a touch of anarchic humour, a chimp perches on the desk chair. The label asks us to imagine that early curators Linnaeus Greening and GA Dunlop “are trying to catalogue the natural history collections”, without “the help of a computer database”.
Strange beauty
Wooden crates are piled up, apparently randomly, and the birds and animals occupy every surface, perching on the packing cases as if they have just emerged from them.
Scale is played with, to enjoyably surreal effect: a tiny streaked tenrec peeps out from beneath the vast bulk of a seal. Each specimen carries a luggage label, as if in transit, with only the most basic information handwritten on it.
The general impression is of an aesthetic celebration of all creatures great and small rather than of scientific enquiry. We are told nothing about the animals’ habitat or habits.
There are no direct references to ecological issues or discussion of the barbarities of specimen collecting: no explicit moral point, for instance, is made about the poor “Woolston seal”, which left its Scottish home in 1908 and swam up the Mersey to Warrington, only to be shot, mounted and presented to the museum.
Before the old bird room closed, visitor consultation on the taxidermy collection requested that the animals “look less dead” – quite a tall order. But by emphasising the strangeness and beauty of the specimens and playing up the extreme artificiality of their packing-case setting, Warrington has breathed new life into the traditional diorama.
Those obsessively botanising Victorian clerics would have hated it, but today’s visitors will be seduced.
Sara Holdsworth, a former head of programmes at Manchester Art Gallery, is a museum and gallery consultant
All the big hitters, from the Prado to Tate St Ives, are doing it, juxtaposing paintings and sculpture with natural history specimens. The displays reveal the current fascination, shared by artists and curators, with the troublesome relationship between art and science.
Established in 1848, Warrington Museum is one of the earliest purpose-built museums in the UK, with one of the oldest natural history collections, so it is a fitting venue for this theme.
Rather than merely refurbishing its original Bird Room, where faded specimens languished in a sea of 1970s brown hessian, it has achieved something far richer and more imaginative.
A Long Hard Look in the Mirror by artist and taxidermist Polly Morgan, commissioned for the space, sets the tone. A dead baby rabbit and a buoyant orange balloon are separated by a concrete beam.
It is a stark contrast between the lifeless and the living, the past and the future. A label declares that “this curio…links the contemporary and historical, which represents the ideology of the gallery”.
A Heritage Lottery Fund grant has transformed the space. The cases and object installation which, impressively, were largely designed in-house, reference those of the Victorian galleries.
They have a Farrow & Ball colour palette, dark wood and a multitude of specimen cupboards and drawers. The sleek lines, elegant glazing and lighting prevent any sense of pastiche.
Interpretative films
It is good to see the roof lantern restored, with multi-coloured light washes adding a modern twist. But it is a shame that the architects weren’t able to find a better solution for the original stage, which was part of the gallery’s early incarnation as Warrington School of Art.
Its bulk, height and clunky lino surfaces dominate without being practical as a display area. A series of films interpreting the collection are shown above the stage. Although lively in content, the sound quality is lacking and they are visually intrusive.
Weird and wonderful
Appropriate to their Cabinet of Curiosities theme, the displays make a virtue of the sheer eclecticism and strangeness of the collection. Exhibits range widely across the disciplines, from animals and plants to antiquities, art, ethnography, scientific instruments and magic talismans.
Some of the museum’s most precious things are allowed their own space, such as a beautifully restored painted virginal from 1684, which you can see and hear being played on film. In contrast, a mass of small cabinets and drawers at child height, in the larger cases, allow visitors to find a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful.
“A Henry VI groat discovered in a cow’s stomach” nestles against a seal’s flipper made into a wallet.
Labelling is minimal, occasionally revealing stories behind the objects, but often encouraging the viewer’s own response rather than imparting information.
There are some visual pairings of objects that make their own point: Samuel Luke Fildes’ lush Venetian beauty swathed in dramatic red is placed next to Ossie Clark’s romantic 1970s chiffon dress. Both started out as pupils at the school of art, presumably in this very room.
In the centre of the space, the first 10 “honorary curators” have chosen and interpreted objects that relate to their private enthusiasms. This revives a 19th-century tradition in which local amateur specialists curated the collections. The modern version will provide exciting opportunities for Warringtonians to refresh the gallery.
Of the initial group, some meditate on the way that time (and museums) bestow significance. Billy Hutchison’s interpretation of old tools from JT Clarke of Haydock Street, made for industries now defunct, says: “I had a good laugh myself doing this job because a lot of the stuff was like I used when I was an apprentice, so how old am I?”
The most striking displays are the taxidermy collection. With a nod perhaps to artist Mark Dion’s installations, the central fiction is that we are looking into the curators’ study and storeroom of 100 years ago. In the study, complete with archaic typewriter and plate camera, a stuffed wolf stalks across a table.
Mr Edelsten’s dog, which died in 1849, sits on the floor as if waiting for his master. With a touch of anarchic humour, a chimp perches on the desk chair. The label asks us to imagine that early curators Linnaeus Greening and GA Dunlop “are trying to catalogue the natural history collections”, without “the help of a computer database”.
Strange beauty
Wooden crates are piled up, apparently randomly, and the birds and animals occupy every surface, perching on the packing cases as if they have just emerged from them.
Scale is played with, to enjoyably surreal effect: a tiny streaked tenrec peeps out from beneath the vast bulk of a seal. Each specimen carries a luggage label, as if in transit, with only the most basic information handwritten on it.
The general impression is of an aesthetic celebration of all creatures great and small rather than of scientific enquiry. We are told nothing about the animals’ habitat or habits.
There are no direct references to ecological issues or discussion of the barbarities of specimen collecting: no explicit moral point, for instance, is made about the poor “Woolston seal”, which left its Scottish home in 1908 and swam up the Mersey to Warrington, only to be shot, mounted and presented to the museum.
Before the old bird room closed, visitor consultation on the taxidermy collection requested that the animals “look less dead” – quite a tall order. But by emphasising the strangeness and beauty of the specimens and playing up the extreme artificiality of their packing-case setting, Warrington has breathed new life into the traditional diorama.
Those obsessively botanising Victorian clerics would have hated it, but today’s visitors will be seduced.
Sara Holdsworth, a former head of programmes at Manchester Art Gallery, is a museum and gallery consultant
Project data
- Cost £672,500
- Main funder Heritage Lottery Fund
- Architect Buttress Fuller Alsop Williams