Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent exhibition at the Science Museum looking at scientific discovery at the Court of Versailles. This was a clearly described show, cleverly laid out and with some stunning objects and paintings. It’s not a period I’ve ever studied but I am increasingly drawn to it. From realising that the three Louis’s of the period ruled for 149 years I was hooked. The show was full of intriguing stories and people and lead to a lot of Googling, both in the show to check links my brain was making and since. I give you Antoine-Augustin Parmentier who argued that potatoes were the answer to famines caused by bread shortages and declared them edible in 1772 or Madame de Genlis, tutor to the royal children who commissioned this model of a chemistry lab. Throw in a stuffed Rhinoceros killed in the Revolution, some wonderful paintings, including a portrait of the first pineapple grown in France, and the knife used to operate on the kings anal fissure, then there was something for everyone! C...

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum on the development of the Covid vaccine. The show was well explained and divided into six clear sections Virus, Design, Trial, Manufacture, Vaccinate and Future. Each section looked back at what work had been done in the past that this research was building on. I discovered a new name of Onesimus, an African in America who showed his owner a technique for inoculation which he had witnessed and benefited from in his homeland. The show was full of iconic objects from recent years some of which seemed to have been donated to the museum. I loved seeing the laptop and mug used by Tess Lambe, co-designer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca, when working from home to develop the vaccine. To think so much came from such simple things. I also liked a display of items from the day the first person got the vaccine in the UK including the clothes worn by the recipient and the nurse plus the syringe used. The show made me appreciate just what an amazing ach...

Imaginative exhibition at the Science Museum looking at what science fiction tells us about our relationship to space and the world around us. This was a stunningly produced show and immersive experience where you are introduced to each section by an supposedly AI concept called ALANN. It introduced some fascinating ideas linking reality and science fiction. However if you were going for a history of sci-fi and lots of objects you might be disappointed. Quite a large proportion of the objects seemed to be replicas although there was an original outfit from Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek and Boris Kharlov’s costume for Frankenstein. I’d have liked a bit more on the evolution of sci-fi rather than the heavy use of it to explain current and future science. There were good interactive experiences and quizzes which were all working even if I had to be shown what one was doing! A good show for sparkling children’s imaginations. Closes 4 May 2023 Reviews Guardian Telegraph

Delightful small exhibition at the Science Museum marking their acquisition of the contents of Stephen Hawking’s Cambridge office. The show consisted of a small recreation of the space plus some of the artefacts and mementos from it. You got a real impression of Hawking’s character and sense of fun and friendship. I loved a black broad from an international conference in 1980 which was covered in equations, jokes and cartoons by the delegates. There was also an invitation for an event to time travellers from the future which Hawking issued after the day of the event which he attended alone t show that time travel wasn’t possible. As well as these fun items there were mementos from his career and a fascinating section of the development of the technology he needed for his speech software. Closes March 2023  

Eye opening exhibition at the Science Museum looking at ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I have to admit it had never struck me that removing CO2 could be a solution to climate change but this show introduced me to many way in which that can be done. I’m not sure how practical some of the ideas were for mass use but it was fascinating to see the innovative approaches being taken. I’m not sure I went round the show the right way but I started with a section on the Carbon XPRIZE, a competition for projects to turn CO2 emissions into usable products, with a prize of $20m for the team what turn the most CO2 into the product with the highest commercial value. On show were crayons, cutlery, sandals and lots more. I was interested in the use of Basaltic rock dust from the construction industry which is spread on field to absorb CO2 from rain water which it turns to a solid which they washes off into the ocean. Also a project to trap the CO2 and store it deep under the...

Disappointing exhibition at the Science Museum looking at how the Greeks sought to understand the world around them. I say disappointing because it was a small show and the subject deserved a lot more space and objects. It was cleverly laid out with the subject areas based on the muses and the first object was a rather beautiful sarcophagus with the nine muses one which was projected a clever AV introduction to the show, however it all felt a bit thin. The picture comes from a section on how Aristotle classified animals and sea creatures and comes from a wonderful selection of platters with accurate sea creatures on them. Another section looked at the idea of the ideal body   and how sculptors generated the proportions for a statute based on multiplications of the smallest joint in the little finger. I was most interested in the section of music and how they studied the mathematics of it. It was interesting to see a pair of pipes which would have been blown simultaneously. ...

Interesting temporary display at the Science Museum looking at Britain’s unmanned rocket, Skylark. I hadn’t know anything about this and was fascinated by this display. The rocket was designed for scientific experiments and began flying in 1957. It operated out of the Millard Space Science Laboratory and its work included taking ultraviolet images of the cosmos. I was surprised at how small it was and that each one only flew for 10 minutes and yet there were nearly 450 flights in all. I loved a video of people who worked on the project sharing their memories of it. My father worked at a scientific establishment in the 1950s and they reminded me of him and his friends and the stories they told. It also pointed out that, as it only stopped flying in 2005, many of the current astro-scientists started their careers using it as part of their phds. Closing date unknown. 

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the history of code makers and breakers and how they came together in the UK to form GCHQ. This show was based on the collection of GCHQ and told the story clearly and told some interesting stories but felt a bit dry in places. The organisation was formed after the First World War bringing together naval and army code breakers. The most interesting section was on Bletchley Park and the code breaking work in the Second World War. It not only looked at the technical work but also at life there. I also loved the recreation of a 1950s house to tell the story of the spy couple, Helen and Peter Kroger, which included some of their equipment like the camera in a talc tin shown here. There was a great display of secure phones including Margaret Thatcher’s briefcase and one of the Queen’s red phones. It pointed out that the Queen is GCHQ’s longest standing individual customer. It was also interesting to see the less heroic...

Intriguing exhibition at the Science Museum organised by the Royal Photographic Society of prize winning science photographs. The show had some lovely quotes around the walls on science and looking including from Proust “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new lands but in seeing with new eyes”. A lot of these pictures illustrated this by taking pictures from new angles or using photographic techniques to show something which couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. There were some astonishing images such as the attached by Norm Baker of a collection of gall stones and Kym Cox’ picture of a close up of a soap bubble. I also loved Viktor Sykora’s close up of a stage beetle. My only criticism was why the room was so cold when I went! It would have been nice to linger a bit longer over some of the images but you had to keep moving to keep warm. Closes 5 January 2020

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at how artists and scientists explore new ideas. I’d been looking for an exhibition like this for a while with the art of the Enlightenment at the heart of it. The show told 20 stories over four themes to highlight interactions between scientists and artists and how they inspired each other both then and over the centuries since. From the first large picture by Joseph Wright of Derby I was hooked. The first section looked at sociable science and explained the ideas of the Enlightenment via the Wright of Derby picture. It also had a fascinating section on the invention of artificial dyes in the Victorian era and the reaction against them from artists and designers. All art types were covered so a section on the invention of artificial fibres used the film “The Man in the White Suit” as its artistic example. It also looked at how Polaroid partnered with Ansel Adams to promote its cameras. My favourite section, Troubled H...

Interesting exhibition at the Science Museum looking at India’s long tradition of scientific and innovative thinking. The show was divided cleverly into three key areas, observation, calculation and innovation. Within each of these it then looked at historic and contemporary achievements using some fascinating examples. I loved seeing Everest’s theodolite as I have helped to organise an exhibition at work (RICS) which includes a model of the theodolite so it was wonderful to see the real thing. There was also a lovely drawing of Everest at work. I was also fascinated by a scrap of manuscript which includes the first recorded use of zero as a number. Our numbering system of a repetition of the repetition of the numbers 1 to 9 and zero comes from India. Closes on 22 April 2018 Reviews Times  

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at photography in India. The show uses three pivotal dates to tell the story, the Indian Mutiny in 1857, independence and partition in 1947 and contemporary work. My favourite section was the one on the Mutiny as it looked at the birth of photography in India and used that to tell the story. I was fascinated in how quickly after the events that the demand for photographs of the main sites appeared and the idea of ruins tourism. It reminded me of the how the same things happened in Paris after the Commune. The show was full of snippets of fascinating stories such as that of photographers Robert and Harriett Tytler who not only photographed the site of the Mutiny but were responsible for selling the contents of the Red Fort buying a crown and two thrones themselves which they later sold to Queen Victoria. Also Helen Messinger Murdoch who, at the aged of 51, started a tour to photography the world and was an early pioneer o...

Interesting display at the Science Museum looking at the life of Valentine Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space. Tereshkova spent three days in space in 1963 when she was 26 and is still the only woman to have done a solo space flight. The show looked not just at the flight but also her life after as an international representative of the USSR. There were some lovely personal objects like her parachute suit and a seagull broach she wore as her call sign had been seagull. The display was only a small room but the space was used well with a good video being played on a big screen over one of the display cases and a wonderful large portrait of Tereshkova by Amir Mazitov hung low down and taking up a whole wall. It felt like she’d entered our space and was sitting with us. Closes on 17 September 2017.

Fabulous installation at the Science Museum by Giles Walker to compliment the current robots exhibition. You are ushered into a dark room with twelve life sized figures made from scrap round a table which come to life and discuss forgiveness, guilt and judgment. The table also resembles a boat as the head of the table has a wheel and there is a child figure as a mast. Is it a play on a ship of fools? Towards the end of the 15 minute show the figure head figure which faces away from the table reads out the last meal requests from prisoners on death row. This was quite an eerie experience with the combination of the dark and the creaking noise of the models.   At first people stood still and watched but then they gradually got more confident and walked round the table as if to listen to different figures. I couldn’t always hear what the figures were saying as the speech was quite mumbled but it didn’t matter too much and certain phrases reappeared like a chorus. ...

Atmospheric exhibition at the Science Museum of photographs by Anderson & Low of the museum’s ship collection in its protective dust sheets. The close perspective on these pictures along with the smoky finish made the models feel like ships emerging from the mist. They had a Turner like quality and the mistiness made you look more closely at the detail of the hulls and rigging. I liked the ones in battle formation. It was a nice touch to add interesting quotes on the walls but otherwise just leave the pictures to speak for themselves. I loved the Proust quote “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Closes on 25 June 2017 Review Evening Standard      

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the history and future of robots. The show defined robots as mechanical humans and seeing that helps as at times I felt it was more about automatons rather than my idea of robots which have a degree of learned behaviour about them. I was amazed that the show started in the Medieval and Renaissance periods by looking at the church’s use of clockwork machines to explain the heavens and the human body. I loved a delightful mini-monk which could walk across the table. The next section looked at the role of automation in the Industrial Revolution followed by a section on robots in the imagination. This was full of iconic references in popular culture including a replica of Maria from Metropolis, a robot boxing toy I remembered from my childhood and T-800 from Terminator Salvation. A big central display focused on how robots have been built moving from early examples from the 1950s to up to date work. It discussed the ...

Newly designed gallery at the Science Museum designed by Zaha Hadid. This is a striking space with a wonderful installation in the middle based on the air displacement of the plane which hangs in the centre of it. The structure is a beautiful flowing shape made of a stretched canvas with a thick metal edge. The whole thing is lit in a purple light. It leaves two spaces one of which has the plane in it and a video about the new design. The other is currently empty with benches round it which I hope will be used for gallery talks. I loved the fact the shapes also played out on the design on the floor and in the ceiling lights throughout the gallery. The display space in the rest of the gallery is also good with nice themed displays on the role of the maths in society linking the old and new within each section. These link well to the installation and weave around it.   Reviews Times Telegraph Evening Standard  

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at how the wounded were treated in the First World War and the innovations that were driven by the lessons learnt. I thought I had a good knowledge of the First World War but I learned so much from this exhibition. The first section looked at the chain of evacuation of the injured from the battlefield with displays on each stage from treatment on the front line, though dressing and clearing stations to hospitals and the journey home. There was a wonderful model of a hospital train and I found the front line stretcher moving. I also loved the Red Cross dogs collar. I hadn’t realised the dogs went out onto the battle field and sniffed   to find men who were still alive. They then pulled a piece of clothing off the wounded and took it back as a sign of life. The next section looked at the technological breakthroughs including Marie Curie bringing   x-rays to the front line, a new splint which was developed as ...

Super exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the life and work of one of the inventors of photography, Fox Talbot. It was fascinating to see his sketch book from Italy where he used a type of camera obscurer to compose the images and started to think about how you might capture the image directly onto paper rather than drawing it. The section on about his house, Lacock Abbey, and the images it appeared in was really interesting and I particularly   like the pictures of the lattice windows and the rocking horse, Firefoot.   It was wonderful that a large picture of Holyrood House by Fox Talobot’s great rival Daguerre. I’d never seen a painting by him and it was all about light and shade. There was a large section on the various books he published with originals of the photographs used as well as looking at how they were used in the books. I was most intrigued by his valet and assistant Nicolaas Henneman who set up a print workshop in Reading to mass produc...

Interesting exhibition at the Science Museum of the winner and shortlists works in the Wellcome Image Awards. The commentary says the awards aim to showcase the best in science image making and they include ordinary photos, digital photos, clinical photography and painted and drawn illustrations. Each picture had a good commentary with them giving a explanation of what was being shown and details of the methods used to produce the picture. I loved a picture of moth scales by Mark R Smith where the colour was created from light on the scales, the scales themselves where not actually coloured. Also a stunning picture of an allergic reaction to a henna tattoo by Nocola Kelley which showed the skin raised and blistered and yet covered by a beautiful intricate pattern. Closes on 19 June 2016