Cuil Lodair Culloden Battlesite

On my way north this week I visited the Culloden Battlesite. The site is located just out of Inverness on a windswept, boggy moor. The battle took place on 16 April 1746 and was the last major pitched battle fought on British soil. Bonnie Prince Charlie led the Jacobite forces against British government troops in the final battle of an uprising that had begun the previous year. Having marched all night in cold, wet conditions, the Jacobites were not in the best of conditions by the time the battle began at 12pm, tragically in under an hour over 1500 Jacobites and 50 government troops had been killed and the battle ended.

The site has been sensitively interpreted with a new visitor centre and exhibition opened in December 2007. The centre has a low profile using local stone and timber that allows it to blend in with the surrounding landscape. The centre houses a shop, cafe and exhibition that skillfully weaves the story of both the Jacobite and government sides of the battle and contextualises events with a broader international political landscape. As with much of the Highlands area of Scotland much of the signage and interpretation is bilingual Gaelic/English. The move to provide more prominence for Gaelic throughout the Highlands is supported through schools, cultural groups and some television programs. No doubt the bilingual labels seen here and in many other museums and galleries in the Highlands supports these moves.

The exhibition incorporates audiovisual components including the thoughts of those who took part in the battle retold by actors in Gaelic and English, table top projected moving maps of the events leading up to the battle and the battle itself and a 360 degree full height film of a re-enactment of the battle. Archaeological material from the battlefield is on display and well as contemporary documents artwork and maps and a range of weaponry including guns, swords, cannon and targe (a leather studded shield).

A fantastic handheld multimedia interpretative device triggered by GPS produced by ZolkC is provided as part of the entry fee and provides an enriched experience for visitors walking through the outside site. As well as tours in English, Gaelic and various other languages, the tour also provides a child centered tour and audio description for those with vision impairment.

Glasgow Museums

Earlier this week I caught the train over to Glasgow and catch up with a few museums. To an outsider, the Scottish train system appears far more efficient than what we experience in Australia. Having a much more concentrated population probably helps with this. Edinburgh and Glasgow are only about an hour apart by train and there’s a train between the two departing every 15 minutes, stopping at several key towns in between.

I was met at Glasgow Central station by Chris Jamieson from Glasgow Museums who took me out to Nitshill where Glasgow Resource Centre is located. Although a much larger complex, it reminded me very much of Mitchell in Canberra, where the National Museum, Australian War Memorial and National Archives all have their main stores. This was particularly the case when the train back to town was delayed by 40 minutes due to weather and I was standing there with a number of staff from the Museum huddling together in an attempt to stay warm!

Glasgow Museums are part of Glasgow Life, a Trust set up to manage the recreational facilities of Glasgow Council. The Glasgow Local government area covers 175 km2 and 580,000 people (1.2 million in the greater Glasgow urban area). Glasgow Museums include 8 museums, the resource centre and the open museum program. The Glasgow Museums Resource Centre was built in two stages, the first housing much of the art collections from Kelvingrove and the second taking an incredibly diverse collection from the storage area of the Transport museums (currently being redeveloped at the Riverside Museum). As well as transport and industrial material, the collection includes design, ethnographic, natural science, archaeological, social history and ancient history materials. It’s estimated that there are something close to 1 million objects in the collection and approximately 400 staff across all the Glasgow Museums sites. The storage facility id divided into a series of pods each one housing collections of like materials. The pods are housed within an overall warehouse as buildings within buildings. This system provides an additional buffer between the collection and the outside environment, somewhat like the air pocket within double glazed windows.

The Resource Centre is open for tours which are run regularly either as general interest (highlights) or focused on a particular theme. The curators within Glasgow Museums are being encouraged to develop tours based on topics of interest to them. I was told about one recent tour focused on Shakespeare which highlighted paintings taken from Shakespearean plays, collection items from the Elizabethan era (of Shakespeare's time) and material related to the topics of the plays currently on the school curriculum. Another tour focuses on taxidermy and gives visitors the chance to see the taxidermy areas of the collection. Tours for preschoolers have been developed with one tour that focused on the beach including children lying on beach towels in the store imagining they were at the beach.As well as housing Glasgow Museums collections, the facility provides office facilities for many of the Glasgow Museums staff, conservation labs, exhibition design and production workshops and a learning area.

The Resource Centre is also the home base for the Glasgow Open Museum, a project led by Chris Jamieson. The project aims to bring the museum out to people in Glasgow and uses the collection as a focus. Over a 20 year period the Glasgow Open Museum has worked with people in various parts of Glasgow including setting up within a flat in a tall Housing Commission style block of flats. This provided an opportunity to work with migrant women on a project that started by taking them to look at the Glasgow Collections and selecting objects of interest to them to develop their own art work. The Open Museum collaborates with other groups throughout Glasgow including a foundation that works with refugees who have been victims of torture, a Pakistani community centre providing day services for elderly people, the storytelling networks, and a youth group in a housing trust area.

The Glasgow Open Museum provides small travelling exhibitions to libraries, health centres and shopping centres and has permanent displays in a children's centre, a mosque, and two mini community museums. They also have a loan service where groups can borrow resources including free standing exhibitions, handling kits, Reminiscence kits and tabletop displays.

The Gardener's Ark is the outcome of a two year project with a residential group from Leverndale Hospital and is an active rehabilitation project. The Open Museum worked with hospital residents, staff and community workers to develop independent living skills with a group of adult learners. The group were interested in gardening and visited to museum to look at artworks including still life paintings. They then created their own still life settings using vegetables they had grown and objects from the collection which were then photographed by the museum photographer who assisted with settings and lighting. The learners were then interested in a painting of a herring boat from the collection, which led to the construction of a boat filled with pots of flowers. The boat has been on display at different sites around Glasgow including Leverndale Hospital, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, the People's Palace Winter Gardens and the Hidden Gardens at Tramways. It is to have a permanent home in the grounds of Leverndale Hospital from this November.

6 times Antony Gormley, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

As the sun was out on Saturday morning I decided to walk along the waters of Leith, the river that runs through Edinburgh in search of a series of Antony Gormley sculptures- 6 Times. The cast iron sculptures of a human figure are located in 6 places from the Leith Docks along the waters of Leith with the final one (well actually the first one, but last on my journey) at the entry gate of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Four of the works are located within the river, gathering the detritus of the river as its waters flow by them.

The work has been commissioned by the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art and were a delightful introduction to their collection. Following the walk I visited the Gallery and its sister organisation, Dean Gallery across the road. The Scottish Gallery of Modern Art is celebrating 50 years since its founding with a wonderful exhibition exploring the collection ranging through Picasso and Kandinsky to Ron Mueck and Damien Hirst. The exhibition currently showcases the work of Robert Therrien and Gilbert and George in a joint project with the Tate Modern known as ARTIST ROOMS.

I was also intrigued by the work of the the Boyle Family- Barra Project World series 1992-2010. This is a project shared by Mark Boyle, his partner Joan Hill and their now adult children Sebastian and Georgia. The works draw on the family themselves and the world they live within and includes 2 metre tall prints of SEM scans of Boyle family hair, textural reproductions of tidemarks and a wonderful darkened room with lapping water projected onto a tabletop.



Update: An interview with Antony Gormley has just been added to the ABC's Art Nation program website, to view it please go to Antony Gormley interview

Recognised collections and the Perth Museum and Art Gallery

Museums Galleries Scotland manage a program that identifies and recognises collections of national significance to the people of Scotland that are held outside the national museums and galleries of Scotland. The Recognition process is extremely thorough and involves the organisation that owns the collection submitting a thorough report outlining not only why it is of national significance but why the theme of the collection is of importance to the people of Scotland. This is then assessed by experts and MGS staff and if it is felt to be an eligible collection it is submitted to an assessment panel who will then make the final decision.

To date there are 37 Recognised collections across Scotland ranging from archaeological material, through mining to the national football collection. Once a collection is recognised the organisation that owns it is able to apply for special funding to assist with the care, display and promotion of the collection.

One such collection is held by the Perth Museums and Art Gallery, located about an hour by train from Edinburgh. Perth is a beautiful town and I visited on a fairly rainy day- nothing like Perth in Western Australia. The museum is located in a purpose built 1930s building but the collection goes back to 1786 with the establishment of the Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perth, followed by the Perthshire Society of Natural Science in 1867. The collection has an incredibly broad scope and includes an enormous oil painting and watercolour collection, decorative arts (with a focus on local glassmakers and silversmiths), ethnography (including Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori material from the early nineteenth century), a strong costume collection, natural science specimens (including some fairly recent road kills) and social history.

In the 1993 Perth suffered a major flood which included much of the collection area (493,000 gallons of water entered the building). When I was walking by the river the wall reminded me a little of the walls that have been installed around Murwillumbah for similar reasons. Within the museum, there was much work done in the collection areas to improve storage and reduce the number of opportunities for water to enter the building (including special seals on doorways including the lift).

As the space in the building is quite tight, the museum and gallery have been given funds through the recognition scheme to install numerous compactus units to increase the amount of collection they are able to store on site.

A large collection of works by Scottish colourist artist John Duncan Fergusson was acquired by the museum and gallery in 1990. An old water tower was refurbished to house the collection and opened in 1993 as the Fergusson Gallery. In 2010 a large collection of work by his partner, the dancer and choreographer Margaret Morris was donated to the gallery. Her collection includes paintings, costume and set designs, costume and an extensive photographic collection. Some of this was on display when I visited as it's the 100th anniversary of the Margaret Morris dance movement.

During my visit we discussed the value of being a recognised collection to the museum and gallery. It was felt that this status was really helpful not only by providing access to specific funding but because it helped the museum and gallery to highlight the significance of the collection to the council. A civic reception was held when the museum and gallery received Recognition and this status is highlighted on the museum and gallery's website.