Hunterian Conservation Store and Kelvingrove

On Wednesday we walked to the Hunterian which is one of University of Glasgow’s leading museums - it holds the collection of William Hunter and has 1.5 million objects. A Collections Assistant gave us a tour of the collection store/archives. It contains a large amount of James McNeill Whistler’s work (paintings) and also Charles Rennie Mackintosh (elevation plans and furniture).
I think it is one of the best collection stores I’ve seen - everything is well organised and there is a lot of space and the compactuses are high tech (eg. you push a button and it opens). They also have a high tech barcoding system where you scan an object using an app on the phone and it updates the database.
Their collection includes zoology and entomology, so a lot of taxidermy. We were told of some of the issues they’ve faced in the past, such as pests (moths and carpet beetles) so all the deer heads on the walls had to be placed in the freezer to preserve them from the pests.
We had a workshop on ‘Packing Objects for Movement and Storage’ which I found very informative. I haven’t had any experience packing artefacts in boxes - I’ve only packed documents and building plans into boxes. On the table there was a pile of material which can be used when packing an object - these include Tyvek, cotton tape, plastazote (cell foam) and insect pins. We got given objects to pack using these materials. I had a ‘samian fragment’ of a lion pouncing from the Balmuildy Roman fort. It was essentially a small slab of pottery which I rested on some plastazote, then I created a border of foam around the slab to cushion it and these border pieces were secured with insect pins. Then there was a strip of Tyvek across the top of it with more plastazote, then tissue paper to fill the gap. One of the things to consider is not putting too much pressure on the object but keeping it secure.

After this I went to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The museum had a wide range of items including taxidermy, art, furniture, and objects relating to Scottish history. Some of the paintings I found interesting was one of the Necropolis painted in 1840 (the same view I saw on Wednesday) and also Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of Saint John the Cross’.