Objects of Invention

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It is always nice when something you have worked on is acknowledged by others, so we are very pleased to hear that our Objects of Invention initiative, which ran during 2013, has been shortlisted from over 230 entries nationally in the Engage Competition, run by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE).

Objects of Invention 2Objects of Invention was developed in partnership with the University’s Department of Engineering Science and funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering‘s Ingenious programme for public engagement. The idea was generated by our lead education officer Chris Parkin as a way to capitalise on the Museum’s remarkable collection of inventive artefacts while enabling young student engineers to gain experience in public engagement.

A total of 18 engineers, mainly graduate students, were involved in the project including a strong contingent of biomedical engineers. After a series of training sessions in methods of public engagement and museum object handling, supported by the Joint Museums’ Volunteers Service, the students devised activities for a family day in March to coincide with National Science and Engineering Week 2013. This event attracted a near-record single day audience of over 2,000 visitors.

This was quickly followed by a schools’ event and two further days for schools in June which together attracted over 160 secondary students from local schools. Activities ranged from experimenting with gyroscopes and Stirling engines, to steam pumps and mobile medical devices.

The winners of the Engage Competition Awards will be announced on Wednesday 11 June at a ceremony at the Natural History Museum, London. The competition forms part of Universities Week, a week-long celebration of public engagement with research that is taking place across the UK from the 9 June.

Fingers crossed on the night – watch this space for further news!

Sophy Rickett: Objects in the Field

Observatory dome collageThe Museum of the History of Science is delighted to present artist Sophy Rickett’s acclaimed body of work, Objects in the Field. Juxtaposed on the Museum’s iconic staircase with historical observatory instruments, the astronomical theme of the installation resonates with a building that was Oxford’s centre for teaching astronomy in the 18th century.

In 2012 Sophy Rickett was awarded one of four prestigious Artist Associate-ships at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. During her fellowship, Rickett produced a substantial new body of work, which consists of a series of photographic prints, found photographs, photographic collages with text, a monitor-based video with sound and a text.

The project’s overall title, Objects in the Field, appropriates the language used by astronomers and astrophysicists that refers to stars as objects and to the sky as the field.

Objects in the Field was made in response to the artist’s encounter with a retired fellow of the Institute of Astronomy, Dr Roderick Willstrop, a highly respected scientist who conducted the first observations that recorded optical pulses (flashes of light) from the Crab pulsar (a relatively young neutron star) in 1968. Another of his achievements was to design and build The Three Mirror Telescope, a camera telescope, in the grounds of the Institute. Operational for 12 years, the telescope produced 125 black and white film negatives before it was modified to capture digital images in 1991.

Astronomical image: Observation 123The exhibition includes several works from the Observations series, where Rickett has appropriated a number of Dr Willstrop’s original negatives, reprinting them by hand using the analogue process and altering them through her own subjective and aesthetic decisions. The resulting works subvert the images’ original scientific purpose and at the same time act as a retrieval, or ‘rescue’ of the archive, in an intriguing and provocative confrontation of scientific and artistic endeavours.

Rickett has also produced a text, where a factual description of her encounter with Dr Willstrop is inflected with more subjective impressions and memories from her childhood connected to optics, seeing, and the fleeting nature of the encounter. A recording of Dr Willstrop reading the text forms the soundtrack to the monitor-based video work Afterword (Grinding a Lens for Kings College Chapel).

Objects in the Field was first shown at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 2013. Several works from the series are currently on show in They Used to Call it the Moon, curated by Alessandro Vincentelli at Baltic 39, Newcastle. Two of the works from the Observations series will be on show in the Discoveries exhibition, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from 27th May – 27th July 2014.

Objects in the Field is supported by the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge and Camilla Grimaldi, London

The Artist Associateship programme at the Institute of Astronomy is conceived and organized by Barry Phipps.

In Print Exhibition Now in the Entrance Gallery

The In Print exhibition, currently in the entrance gallery, is a selection of the interesting prints we’ve come across as part of the Making Prints Public project. This exhibition is one of two print related exhibitions in the museum at the moment, with Comets, Meteors and Fireballs in the basement gallery.

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If you come to see In Print you may be initially surprised by what appears to be holes in the top of the prints in the tall glass cases at the front of the exhibition. This is the first time that the museum has used a magnet-mounting technique (instead of framing the prints). The holes are actually tiny neodymium magnets which we have used to clamp the prints against custom-made steel paper covered mounts. Magnetic strips were also used to hold on display labels.

The Making Prints Public project has been cataloguing, digitising and tweeting the museum’s print collection over 7 months. Many of the prints were taken from R.T. Gunther’s own personal collection, the Hope Portrait Collection, the Gabb collection and the Radcliffe Observatory collection. There were also items donated by John de Monins Johnson (1882–1956), printer, ephemerist, and classical scholar, and by Lewis Evans (1755–1827), mathematician, astronomer and sundial enthusiast.

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A digital version of In Print can be found here. It closes on 11 June 2014