Monthly Archive for May, 2010

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Meet the curator- Min-Jung Kim

Published by Min-Jung Kim 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Photography by Sotha Bourn © Powerhouse Museum

Name: Min-Jung Kim

What is your specialty area? My known speciality is East Asian decorative arts and design within the Museum. I look after the Chinese, Japanese and Korean collections in all mediums including: ceramics, textiles, wood and lacquer, metal, jade, paper etc. However, I would like to say my specialty is facilitating dialogues between Asian communities and the Museum. After all, we care for objects to tell the stories of people!

How long have you been working at the Museum? My first work at the Museum was 12 years ago when I co-curated an exhibition Rapt in colour: Korean textiles and costumes of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910). Following this exhibition, I worked on Earth, Spirit, Fire: Korean masterpieces of the Choson Dynasty in 2000. I went back to academics to study Cultural Studies then started again at the Museum in my current role three years ago.

Favourite object in the collection? If someone asks who your favourite child is amongst all your children, then you probably can’t answer! Still, if I have to, I would probably say “my first child is Shou Lao (Chinese figure of the God of longevity). I regard him as my guardian angel in the Museum. Shou Lao is riding a deer and holding a peach looking at you wishing longevity. It has a fascinating story around it and we still need to hunt down the mystery of the story about how it came to Australia. He takes the role of the first child in the Asian collection very well.”

Then I would probably keep saying proudly, “I love my charming second daughter – the Japanese comb collection. My third child is the collection of Chinese toggles and Japanese netsuke. They are so precious and they are kept in the Museum’s special vault. Chinese toggles, in particular, are very rare and this is known as one of the world’s largest collections. My fourth child is quite a character. He is our Samurai arms and amours collection. My heart goes to my fifth one, a traditional Korean wedding robe. I am pictured here with the first and fifth of my children!”

What piece of research or exhibition are you most proud of in your career at the Museum? I was very excited to find out that our Chinese toggle collection is one of the world’s largest collections of its kind when I was developing an exhibition Chinese belt toggles in 2008. This collection was formed by Hedda and Alastair Morrison in Beijing in the 1940s and donated to the Museum in 1992. People know about Japanese netsuke, but not much of its forebear, Chinese toggles.

My favourite exhibition is Rapt in colour : Korean textiles and costumes of the Chosôn Dynasty. People still talk about the exhibition and how beautiful it was. It also had great stories. Korea has a long tradition of wrapping things with beautiful wrapping cloths and women made the wrapping cloths with left over fabrics from making clothes for her family members. The compositions of colour created by these unknown women were no less innovative and brilliant than how Mondrian is known today.

Australian AIDS memorial quilt project

Published by Nicole Balmer 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Photography Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

Since 2007, a team of industrious Castle Hill volunteers have been documenting the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt. The ‘Quilt’ itself is actually over 100 quilts, each of which is made up of panels remembering individuals who have died from HIV/AIDS since 1982.

The Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project began in 1988 and provided a focus for the expression of community grief as the AIDS epidemic grew and was part of a worldwide movement to promote compassion, education and understanding about AIDS and its human toll. The Museum received the quilt in 2007.

A block from the AIDS quilt. Photography Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

The volunteers work on the quilts out at the Powerhouse Discovery Centre in Castle Hill (the Museum’s off-site storage and collection care facility). The volunteers’ record information about the people remembered on the quilts and about the friends and families who made the panels. Special trays are constructed to move and store the large and heavy quilts. They are packed using archival materials, including ‘pool noodles’ to prevent the fabric lying in sharp folds which may later crack.

Collection Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

The Museum has recently issued a press release seeking to contact panel makers and contributors and request their permissions to make public the documentation and stories on each of the quilts in this valuable and very personal memorial.

To contribute towards the documentation of these quilts, contact Nicky Balmer, Registration Department, Powerhouse Museum on 02 9217 0117 or nicoleb@phm.gov.au.

Where do exhibitions go when they die?

Published by Alison Brennan 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Photography Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

I can’t believe that one of our longest lived exhibitions, Never Done, is finally ………almost done. I am sure that many staff, volunteers and visitors will be saddened by the removal of this old favourite. In 2002 the laundry component of Never Done was removed to make way for the Australian Communities Gallery and now in 2010, 22 years after it was first installed the rest of the exhibition will be dismantled over a two week period in May.

Sentimentality aside, the removal of such a long standing exhibition has very real challenges for the Registration Department, namely where are we going to put the 953 objects located to this display?

Photography by Kimberley Webber © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved.

When collection objects are put on display their ‘home’ in storage is left free, where possible, for their impending return. As most exhibitions have a relatively short life span of a year or so this is easy enough to do. But the objects in Never Done have been on display for over 22 years and their storage ‘homes’ have been well and truly ‘settled’ by some other object now claiming squatters rights. Yes housing is a bit of an issue in our collection store.

So how do we decide where things are going to go? It is not just a matter of finding a spare 953 spots in the collection store. A bit like how you organise your stuff at home, we have a preferred place for our objects, I mean you are not going to put your toothpaste in the fridge just because there is a space there are you?

If you are unfamiliar with our basement collection store, objects are stored according to a series of classifications. The most obvious is the material makeup of the object; textiles are stored in an area where the temperature is slightly colder than the rest of the store. The textiles are stored according to what can be hung (contemporary clothing) what needs to lay flat in drawers (fragile historic clothing) and what can be stored on shelves in cupboards (shoes).

Some vulnerable objects are stored together, for instance ceramics are always stored on static shelving for safety reasons and paper objects are located to solander boxes inside plan cabinets behind roller shutters to keep the light out. Most other things are stored onto shelving in movable compactus units which are organised by themes, keeping like objects together.

Most of the Never Done objects will be located to the Domestic History area in the basement and as mentioned previously space is a premium down there and we are in the process of undertaking a reshuffle of religion and politics (of course we store the unmentionables together) to make some room and welcome these objects home.

Photography by Nicky Balmer © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved.

Julius Medgyessy has been put in charge of this logistical challenge and he is in the throes of stocktaking the exhibition on site. Aside from checking that all the objects are correctly located before they are moved the stocktake will also help Julius determine the volume of material to be moved to each of our storage areas; he needs to plan what should go out to Castle Hill storage area, what needs to go the textile store and how much space we need in other areas.

A thorough inspection of the area has also brought to light some dismantling challenges, for instance the sink in the kitchen display is made up of three different objects and will need to be dismantled (do we need a conservator or a plumber)?

Photography Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

Curiously some collection objects on open display have been have been glued in place, possibly the only reason they are still there, so we will need to remove these without causing further damage, and finally who is responsible for handling those dusty taxidermy animals strung up around the exhibition?

Photography Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

Technology has changed since Never Done was installed and collection objects are now given barcodes, which link the physical object with its EMu record. As part of the process of removing this display, Julius will need to prepare an object tag and barcode for each object. The barcode will enable staff to electronically update the new location of the object as it is put into storage; onto a shelf, into a drawer or onto a pallet. Using hand held ‘pocket PC’s” the barcode on each object is scanned as is the barcode at the location the object is going (to get an idea of how vast this is there are over 22,000 locations in the Harwood Basement alone) and viola a new home for this collection object.

one down 952 to go…..

Snapshots of an installation

Published by Melanie Pitkin 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Photography by Melanie Pitkin © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved

What’s involved in putting on a display?

On Friday 16th April, a small team of staff from curatorial, conservation, registration and design installed three mannequin displays (two promoting the new Frock Stars exhibition, above, and one in recognition of the late Lady Sonia McMahon); three foyer showcase displays (all continuing the Frock Stars theme of contemporary fashion) and a small display of recent acquisitions of Australian needlework and embroidery. I decided to film the installation to provide our readers’ with an idea of what is involved in this process – from removing objects from the previous display to movement and mounting, positioning, lighting and cleaning. In fact, this installation took us at least 4 hours – but, to save you from re-living the whole experience, I’ve captured it in 6 minutes!

I’ve kept the explanation minimal to open up what we do to your questions. So, ask away – all of the team are on hand to reply!

The fashion foyer showcases will be on display to the public until late May (I’m afraid the Versace one is coming out next week to make way for an exciting archaeology display!) and the Morrissey mannequins will be on display until late August.

Happy Space Anniversaries

Published by Kerrie Dougherty 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Image courtesy of NASA

April was a busy month for milestone anniversaries of space events: so busy in fact that I didn’t have time to write this article and post it until now-on the 49th anniversary of the first US Mercury space mission. At 12.34am (eastern Australian time) on May 6, 1961 American astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. was launched on a short, 15 minute sub-orbital flight in the spacecraft Freedom 7, making him the first American and second person in space. Next year, for the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight, expect to hear a lot more about Shepard’s flight, and that of the first person in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (whose spaceflight anniversary is also in April!). We’ll also be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle. In the meantime, let’s look back at some of the significant space anniversaries that occurred in April 2010…..

Television Infrared Observation Satellite TIROS. Courtesy of NASA

Fifty years ago, as the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union was heating up, two US satellites were launched in April 1960 that were the forerunners of technologies that we take for granted today: TIROS (Television InfraRed Observation Satellite)-1, the world’s first dedicated weather satellite, and Transit 1B (Transit 1A failed to reach orbit), the first navigation satellite. Essentially a television camera in orbit, TIROS -1 was only operational for 78 days, but it proved its worth by detecting and tracking a cyclone in the Pacific Ocean-the first time it had been possible to chart the progress of one of these potentially devastating storms. Although the Transit navigation system was originally developed to provide guidance for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, it was soon opened up to a variety of civilian uses and was the predecessor of the GPS (Global positioning System) satellite network we use for finding our way around today.

Also ‘launched’ in April 1960 was the world’s first SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) experiment, Project Ozma, conducted at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, Virginia, by SETI pioneer Frank Drake. Project Ozma (named for a character from the Oz books by L. Frank Baum) targeted the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in a search for radio signals that might be evidence of intelligent life beyond the Earth. After 150 hours of intermittent listening between April and July, no extraterrestrial signal was detected, but Project Ozma became the prototype for future SETI searches.

Forty five years ago, another important step on shaping today’s world took place, with the April 6, 1965 launch of INTELSAT-1, also known as Early Bird, the first communications satellite operated by the International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation (INTELSAT). INTELSAT was a consortium of countries (including Australia, which would become the sixth largest shareholder) created to develop the first world-wide satellite communications network. INTELSAT’s early success in providing satellite networks paved the way for our modern globally connected culture.

Image courtesy of NASA

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For 5 days in April 1970, the world held its breath in the wake of the Apollo 13 accident, hoping that the crew of three astronauts would make it safely back to Earth following an explosion on board their spacecraft. Although unable to land on the Moon, Apollo 13 was judged a “successful failure”, with the mission rescued from disaster by the courage of the crew and the resourcefulness of NASA’s engineers, scientists and technicians on the ground. The first Earth Day was also held 40 years ago, on April 22, using one of Apollo 11’s pictures of the Earth hanging in the immensity of space as its icon image, to highlight the fragility of our home planet’s environment.

China celebrated the 40th anniversary of the launch of its first satellite, Dong Fang Hong (the East is Red)-1 on April 24, while India launched its first satellite 35 years ago, on April 19, 1975. Built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and launched by the USSR, the Aryabhata satellite was named after a 5th century AD Indian mathematician and astronomer. From modest beginnings, both China and India have grown to become leading spacefaring nations today.

The Hubble against Earth's horizon (1997) Image courtesy of NASA

And finally, on April 24, 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most important scientific instruments of all time. Overcoming initial technical problems with its mirror, Hubble has proved to be vital research tool for astronomers, its discoveries helping to resolve some long-standing questions of astrophysics and revealing new cosmic mysteries to research.

I’ll have my stewed fruit in that nappy please

Published by Lynne McNairn 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Recently I was poking about in the database when I came across a glass dish described as a ‘nappy’. Initially I thought this must be a case of the wrong image attached to the object record (a rare occurrence of course!) but with further searching I found we had quite a few small glass dishes with the description ‘nappy’. Most of these are from the Crown Corning Glassware collection.

Asking about the Registration office and also my older relatives no one was familiar with the term. However, an Internet search revealed the following:

Nappy
Definition: a shallow open serving dish with no rim
Pronunciation: nah-pee
Also Known As: the old term for a small bowl, with or without one or two handles, often used when referring to Depression glass or antique china

Answers.Com gives the derivation as “Probably from dialectal nap, bowl, from Middle English, from Old English hnæp”

This particular ‘nappy’ is press moulded carnival glass from a collection featuring Australian and New Zealand flora and fauna motifs.

Crown Crystal Catalogues in the 1930s and 1940s certainly listed ‘nappy’ as the description for many of its small sweet dishes. However, it is easy to understand why this term has fallen from general use, particularly for an eating bowl!