Grant Museum of Zoology

Entry: Free

I hadn't heard of the Grant Museum of Zoology until quite recently, when I learnt that it was reopening in March after a period of refurbishment. I went along yesterday, surprised that there was still a collection of skeletons in London that I hadn't seen.

The Grant Museum was founded at University College London in 1827. Last year it closed for an eight month period in order to move to new premises in the university's Rockefeller Building on University Street. Apparently it's “the only remaining university zoological museum in London”, so presumably there used to be more of these amazing places.

I don't think I can rave about it enough after my brief visit. There are hundreds of cabinets and shelves and draws, all stuffed with skeletons and taxidermy and specimens preserved in jars. It's just one big room crammed with tributes to humainty's need to understand and categorise everything. Everywhere there's something to marvel at: owls in bell-jars; a complete quagga skeleton; a jar full of moles.

While I was allowed to take photographs provided I turned the flash off, I did tell the curator that I wasn't going to put them online. Possibly I should have pleaded the case for sharing a couple of them, because it's a shame to not be able to illustrate this post.

Anyway, if you're in London on a weekday afternoon with no money and an enquiring mind then this is somewhere you should definitely make time to visit.

Final term

I'm about to embark on my final term of the course. This term will see me working on my final project, which will be exhibited at the Morley College Gallery from 7th July to the 14th July. There will be 16 of us exhibiting this year – considerably more than the previous year – so it's not clear yet how much space we'll each have available to us.

I'm terrified, of course. I'm afraid of not having anything ready in time, and I'm possibly more afraid of not having anything good ready in time. Sadly, my classmates are all very talented individuals, many of whom already have strong ideas about what they want to say and do in this show.

My final project will, I think, stem from my work on skeletons last term. The title I'm using for my current research is “inner workings exposed” and I'm focusing on the human body, particularly its moving parts. I do feel confident that whatever form my final work takes, it should invite interaction. Viewers should be able to touch it, and ideally they'll need to undo parts and open it out in order to see everything.

One of my classmates suggested I check out Brian Dettmer's artwork, specifically the piece “Gray's Anatomy”, when I brought these ideas up in a class discussion last term. After finding it out online I realised that it had actually been included in the Skin exhibition at the Wellcome Collection last year. Dettmer can talk about his work much better than I can, so here's a presentation he gave for Atlanta Pecha Kucha in 2009.

Brian Dettmer - Remixed Media from Alfredo Aponte on Vimeo.

I'm still puzzled about how he carves the books though. He says in the video that he seals the book and then carves into it without knowing what he'll find. Presumably he can't glue the pages together because then he wouldn't be able to remove individual layers, but how he seals the books isn't revealed. I'd be very interested to see him working on one of these so I can get my head around the process.

Body Conscious at The Approach

Entry: Free

The Approach is a tiny gallery about a 10 minute walk from Bethnal Green tube station. It's above a pub - The Approach Tavern - which you have to go through to get to the gallery. Curiously, the gallery's website doesn't mention this quite important fact at all, meaning you can spend several puzzled minutes walking up and down the street if you don't already know where it is.

Welcome to City 17

I usually post my personal (i.e. non-college) knitting projects on Ravelry, where I can also be found as Shwazzy, but I think some non-Ravellers would enjoy this as well.

Metrozone

I saw this on io9 yesterday.

And did a double-take, because I saw this in the real world last week. It was painted in Leake Street, although I think it's already been painted over.

It turns out that it's part of an advertising campaign to promote Simon Morden's Metrozone trilogy, the first instalment of which, Equations of Life, comes out this week in the UK. The three graffiti pieces are designed to reflect the (very cool) book covers.

I have slightly mixed feelings about this. I think the io9 commentator who wrote “When a company does it, it's called advertising. When anyone else does it, it's called vandalism.” expresses some of my ambivalence pretty well. On the one hand, it's a cool and original idea, but on the other hand, part of the reason I like grafitti is the fact that it's not trying to sell me something.

Of course, unlike most adverts, this has already disappeared beneath somebody else's artwork.

A plot summary-heavy review of Equations of Life can be found on io9 here.