It’s probably hard to believe but I’ve now been away from everyone at Fulham Palace for about three months, and although I’m enjoying my new environment and the new experiences it offers I have really missed the intimacy of Fulham Palace. I have found that the British Museum is a place in which you can easily get lost both figuratively and literally.
So, what have I been involved with during my past three months at the British Museum?
For the six months that I am based at the British Museum I am working in the department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and once again upon my arrival on my first day I found myself thrown into an exhibition installation. To be precise, the ‘Indigenous Australia’ exhibition which is currently running in the Reading Room space and is definitely worth a visit. The exhibition installation generally involved a lot of cleaning, a little bit of standing around and waiting, rearranging, some more cleaning, more waiting, a little bit of object handling and yet more cleaning. The highlight of this for me was when I was given the chance to place an object on its plinth and no-one moved it or rearranged it in any way (just in case you do visit it’s the feather string necklace with red and green feathers acquired in Broome, Australia, in 1986).
After this I moved over to the first of my department’s storage units in Kensington. Here I joined an ongoing project making handling frames for the larger objects, in this case canoes which were mainly from the Americas. These are now ready to be moved to the new WCEC building at The British Museum, a recent extension to create more offices, gallery space and state of the art object storage rooms. This was something I really enjoyed as I was getting the chance to learn new and useful skills, and the three colleagues I was working with were great fun and happy to take the time to explain things and answer all my questions. During the two weeks that I was working on this project we were able to build five handling frames, including one for a rather tricky American Indian canoe that was over 12ft long and carved out of a single tree trunk giving it a rather prominent natural curve. It was also extremely heavy and required two forklift trucks to manoeuvre it into the handling frame.
More recently over the last few weeks I have been working over at our second storage unit in Hackney, where the majority of my time so far has been spent archiving finds from an archaeological dig at Gorgona Island, Colombia, in 1924. This collection was previously held by another department at the British Museum and has only recently been relocated to the department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. My task was to sort all the registered items into order and update the online records, including photographs of the items and taking new photographs where necessary. I then placed the items into boxes ready for them to be allocated a storage space. As for the unregistered pieces these needed to be sorted into site reference, registered, labelled and then photographed, before going through the same process as those items that had already been registered.
Lastly was a trip to Osterley House to observe a day in the working life of a House Steward. While there I helped prepare the rooms for opening, which mainly consisted of cleaning (museum work mainly falls into two categories: cleaning or getting messy), met many of the volunteers, helped with the end of day shut down and joined one volunteer in the Library for the book cleaning project where I learnt lots of techniques which I hope to transfer back to Fulham Palace.
As you can see I have plenty to keep me busy for now and I look forward to telling you all about my upcoming projects in the very near future.