The Wellcome Collection is part of the legacy of Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), a pharmacist and businessman who amassed an amazing collection of medical artefacts. (The other part of his other legacy is the Wellcome Trust, a global charity supporting biomedical research.) Henry Wellcome's collection is best described as the history of medicine and medical thinking in physical form; any object that humans have used to improve their health and cure their illnesses was probably picked up by Henry Wellcome at some point. He also built up a huge collection of books, which now form the basis for the Wellcome Library. Both the library and the museum are open to the public and free to use, though you do have to register to use the library.
The Wellcome Collection also puts on temporary exhibitions, always with a medical or biological theme. The current temporary exhibition is Skin, curated by Javier Moscoso. Technically it's divided into five sections: Objects, the skin as both scientific and artistic object; Marks, the physical marks left on skin by age and disease; Impressions, the sensory qualities of skin; Afterlives, the skin after death; and Skin Lab, contemporary scientific developments and artistic practices that use them. In practice these divisions don't seem all that clear, with plenty of overlap between their contents, but this is a minor complaint.
It's an odd exhibition in some respects. Don't go expecting to learn medical facts – it won't tell you why you have moles or what causes eczema. It's really just about showing skin as a medical and artistic artefact in its own right and as an inspiration for other medical and artistic artefacts. Interestingly, while much of the art focuses on themes of identity and uniqueness, I left feeling that skin doesn't actually reveal as much of a person's identity as we'd like to believe. While it's a good signifier of our physical traits, (our age, our race, our health, our attractiveness), it ultimately revels nothing of our personalities, our memories, interests, desires, hopes and fears. And there seems to be a gap in the exhibition here – while the way we try to inscribe our personality on our skin is briefly touched on, it's left unexplored. There's mention of tattooing, but only as a signifier of inclusion to specific social groups (Maori tribes and South American convicts are the two groups mentioned). What about tattooing as a statement of personal identity? What about piercings? Scarification? Self-harm? There's a couple of exhibits about anti-ageing treatments, but what about make-up and body paint?
This isn't to say that it's a poor exhibition. Far from it; there are some beautiful, haunting, compelling things here, from 18th century anatomical drawings in which cadavers cheerfully peel back their skins for the reader, to Tamsin von Essen's recent series of ceramic jars afflicted with skin conditions. It's a genuinely intriguing mixture of scientific curiousities, social observation and artistic practice, but because it tries to cover all of these points at once it ends up covering none of them in depth. In the end, I felt that it concealed far more about human identity than it revealed.
*The guide contains a short story in addition to information about the exhibition, so you'll have something to read on the tube ride home.
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