Tag Archives for exhibitions

NatSCA Digital Digest – September 2024

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Welcome to the September edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

GCG 51st Winter Seminar and AGM – Call for Abstracts Now Open

The Geological Curators Group have announced the details for their Winter Seminar Reciprocal Relationships: how can partnerships help us and our collections develop?  and AGM taking place at Oxford University Museum of Natural History 11 – 13th November 2024. The dates include an evening icebreaker, presentations, workshops, AGM, conference dinner and a field trip.

The deadline for abstracts is October 14th 2024. Please follow the link for further details: https://www.geocurator.org/events/180-agm51 .

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Making a Green Gallery – A Leeds Story

By Sara Merritt, Audience Development Officer at Leeds Museums & Galleries.

Us: We want to retro-fit a permanent gallery! As sustainably as possible! With £40k! In two months! And we want to keep the space open to visitors!

Them: Umm, are you sure that’s a good…

Us: Great! We’ll get cracking.

2022 saw us undertake the retro-fit of our permanent Life on Earth gallery at Leeds City Museum, with the aim of making it as sustainable as possible. The gallery required an overhaul to meet current visitor expectations, with innovative design ideas and production methods to reflect our greater understanding of climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and Britain’s colonial history.

Our objectives were threefold and carefully considered:

  • To manage and deliver a sustainable retro-fit with the addition of creating a carbon calculator to measure our C02 output
  • To ensure the interpretation was relevant, and that we had a strong idea of our target audience to attract visitors who were already engaged in making climate-positive changes.
  • To identify robust materials and production methods which would stand up to visitors pulling, prodding, and everything in between.

We were used to working with greener materials for temporary exhibitions and knew the implications around material availability, longevity of eco materials, and higher associated costs. We therefore needed to keep the project resource light and put our efforts into the interpretation, rather than dramatic object moves. We took the bones of what we had, large cases and great objects, and retold the story with the emphasis on using our objects to inspire our visitors to live more sustainably.

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Divorced or Separated? Naming the Specimens on Display at the Zoologisches and Palaontologisches Museum, Zurich.

Written by Richard Crawford, who has just completed a PhD thesis at the University of the Arts London, entitled ‘Re-presenting taxidermy, Contemporary Art interventions in Natural History Museums’.

Do people read labels in museums? If they do, what do they learn about the object on view? It has been the custom to use labels to give factual names to the things on display in scientific museum displays, but Art curators have taken a different approach and put titles to works that suggest a particular reading of the artwork. These may be suggested by the artist. A good example of this style of labelling is Damien Hirst’s ‘Mother and Child divided’, an artwork that used preserved specimens.

For this work, Damien Hirst famously sawed a cow and a calf in half and exhibited the separate halves in tanks filled with formaldehyde, which he placed apart with sufficient space for a viewer to walk between the two halves of each animal carcass so that they could observe the internal organs of both cow and calf. When it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1995, it helped win him the Turner Prize. The title was ironic. Hirst’s work critiques romantic depictions of the animal as part of harmonious natural order, a place in which mothers protect and nurture their young according to supposedly universal maternal instincts. In place of natural harmony, he presented the viewer with the disjuncture and division brought about by human intervention that brought early death to these two animals, destined for the meat market.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – February 2024

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Collections Moves Team Leader at the Natural History Museum.

Welcome to the February edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

The Society for the History of Natural History (SHNH) Early Career Researcher Symposium – Registration open

The Early Career Researcher Symposium is an event dedicated expressly to showcase research into the history of natural history being done by doctoral and early career researchers across the globe.

This online event will be on Thursday 22 February 2024. Registration is free but required. You can find the programme along with more information here.

The SHNH have a range of other events happening throughout the year including a joint seminar with the Animal History Group, a visit to the University Herbarium at Winterbourne House and Gardens, as well as their Annual Conference. Note that their AGM will be held online and separate from the conference to ensure as many members as possible can attend.

Geological Curators Group 50 Year Anniversary – Call for Abstracts

The Geological Curators Group 50 Year Anniversary will be held from the 17th – 18th of May 2024 at the University of Leicester.

Day 1: Presentations on the theme of past, present and future of geological collections at the University of Leicester. Reception at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, followed by an evening meal.
Day 2: Presentations and tours at British Geological Survey Nottingham and Charnwood Forest Geopark

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to events@geocurator.org and state whether it is for a poster or platform presentation. Abstract deadline is 1st March 2024. Presenters will be invited to submit papers for a special golden anniversary issue of Geological Curator.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – January 2024

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Assistant Curator of Entomology, National Museums Scotland.

Welcome to the January edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

Wishing a Happy New Year to all our readers!

Digital Digest is a monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

NatSCA 2024 – Submission Reminder

There’s still time to submit for the 2024 NatSCA Annual Conference! The Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association will be held on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th April 2024, in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Papers can be presented in any of several formats: A 20-minute presentation (consisting of a 15-minute talk followed by 5 minutes of Q&A) or a 5-minute lightning talk. Talks can be presented in person or by submission of a pre-recorded presentation, with the option of an in-person or live stream Q&A (via Zoom).

Deadline for submission: 5pm GMT Friday 19th January. More info and submission forms here.

Museums and Galleries History Group 2024 Symposium

A one-day symposium held at the University of Leeds and online. Microhistory aims to direct attention towards marginal(ized) voices and perspectives and emphasizes the agency of the ‘ordinary’. This symposium will explore the relationships between large historical narratives and individual case studies and their use in disrupting established grand historical narratives, countering oversimplification.

The symposium will be held on January 26th. More information and registration here.

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