DIGPREVIEW
With the new year approaching, Museums:Sheffield have announced their exhibitions for 2010...
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Museums:Sheffield's New Program For 2010
Museums:Sheffield have revealed their programme for 2010, which looks set to continue the excellent form of recent exhibitions Comedians: From the 1940s to Now and Can Art Save Us? with a wide range of shows to suit families and art-lovers alike.
The first new exhibition of the decade will be Code:Craft, a suitably forward-thinking collection of works curated by digital arts collective Lovebytes. This show will explore the creative potential fast emerging from the world of programme coding, a realm traditionally considered an unlikely hotbed of artistic talent.
A much more conventional exhibition will take its place in the Millennium Gallery in time for summer, with works from the likes of Turner and William Blake forming the display for Watercolour in Britain: Tradition And Beyond. This quintessentially British tradition will be studied in the context of our national culture, and the exhibition will aim to demonstrate the diversity of the humble medium’s capabilities.
Another celebration of British culture will take place at Graves Gallery in Writers Of Influence: From Shakespeare to JK Rowling. Works from significant 20th century artists such as Man Ray and Henri Cartier Bresson will sit alongside the National Portrait Gallery’s first acquisition, Chandos’ portrait of William Shakespeare in this tribute to the niche genre of literary portraiture.
It’s British culture across the board this summer, in fact, as Weston Park Museum unveil a family exhibition dedicated to our relationship with all things digestible in the suitably titled Food Glorious Food. Curated by Museums Sheffield, this exhibition will feature items from the museum’s own collections alongside loans from the V&A.
DIGREVIEW
Sally Gray was impressed with how Weston Park's latest exhibition caters for everyone's tastes...
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Food Glorious Food
Museums Sheffield, Weston Park until 28 November 2010
There’s a tasty day out to be had at Museums Sheffield Weston Park as a teeming throng of families found out on the recent launch day of new exhibition Food Glorious Food. A smorgasbord of delights was on offer including tastings of crumbly Yorkshire parkin and succulent focaccia, the improbably named Madam Zucchini and her vegetable theatre, some very dextrous sugar spinners and a troop of Morris men who obviously liked their grub. Presiding over these delicacies was the granddame of gastronomy Prue Leith, most recently seen on BBC2’s Great British Menu.
The bunting of the launch is now cleared away but there’s still plenty to savour in the exhibition itself. It examines its subject from all angles – how we grow food, how we cook, how we shop and how we eat it, together and alone, whether it be a majestic Sunday roast or chips in newspaper at the bus stop. The exhibits are built for small inquisitive hands and as well as objects in glass cases there is also plenty of interactive fare. The most compelling of these is a number of audio recordings made of local folk, many of them children, about their culinary memories, likes and dislikes, reaffirming how deep food lies in our social fabric and family histories. Visitors are invited to post their own food memories on a nearby board, I noted one deeply scored missive bearing the words ‘I hate cauliflower forever!’
For a younger audience there is also the opportunity to dress up as a chef, take a big sniff from a cooker that emits multiple kitchen smells and plant some wooden vegetables in the potting shed, but there’s nostalgia for older visitors too. Museums Sheffield have plundered their collection for a host of tinned and packet foods from over the last century and while many of the labels still gleam with the vivid colours of 1950s advertising I dread to think what the contents might taste like! Defunct kitchen devices like bean stringers and steak mincers, which were once an essential component of the modern kitchen, are here displayed as the museum pieces they now are. Going further back there is also a beautiful model kitchen from 1800 on loan from the V&A Museum of Childhood where this exhibition will eventually tour. These relics sit beside new innovations such as a fetching hand-knitted chicken-tuxedo designed to keep featherless rescue battery hens warm.
This exhibition is as warm and welcoming as freshly baked bread and will be gobbled up by all ages, for as Oscar Wilde says and the exhibition reminds us, ‘After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even ones own family.’