Curiosity- Overspill. Part 1.
What is it about exhibitions at Turner Contemporary? The latest one Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing and I are made for each other. As with the Munoz figures that I have warbled on about in these pages, Curiosity has quietly pervaded my brain like a happy virus, one of the best things about it is that in mixing everything up and questioning categories it validates some of my weirder work for example: To Augment.
On my second visit yesterday, looking closely at previously missed African dolls, I realised that they had come from Quex Park Natural History Museum, and collected by Antoinette Powell-Cotton daughter of the Major responsible for the collection. Q P is situated half a mile from my childhood home. The first visit aged ten piqued a lifelong interest in natural history, anthropology and of course taxidermy, as QP is stuffed to the gunnels with stuffed animals. It is where I learned the importance of context and understood that the Victorians saw the taxidermy of a limited number of wild animals for education and display as a better option than trying to bring back and keep live animals with the huge loss of life that would entail.
By the age of sixteen as frequent visitor, always drawing the exhibits I was given a pass that enabled me to go in free, I still have it. Years later I was approached by a group of local supporters and commissioned to make a portrait of Antoinette Powell-Cotton, (daughter of Major Powell-Cotton founder of the museum) known to all as Miss Toni. I was so excited to meet her here is an extract of an article written at the time:
“Miss Toni took me on a tour of her small stately home to find a suitable place to paint the portrait. I found the large rooms too formal, and eventually settled in the nursery where the scale was decidedly more human. We then had to select what Miss Toni was going to wear and opened up her cupboards full of formal clothes. I urged her to choose something she felt comfortable in and that best represented her, she shyly admitted to liking best, a beautiful yellow African robe, she came alive in it.
We spent several pleasant hours in the nursery on small chairs and she told me about her incredible life. She had travelled around Africa with her father collecting specimens and becam an archaeologist of note. In WW1 when the estate was turned into a Red Cross hospital, she nursed wounded soldiers, laid out amongst the stuffed animals. It was one of the recuperating soldiers, also an artist, who painted the first back drop that gave the idea for the diaromas for which QP is famous.
Unfortunately the portrait was never finished due to Miss Toni’s failing health and this pastel sketch is all that remains.”
In retrospect I can see that Miss Toni was in some ways an anachronism and out of kilter in the latter part of her life, as could be said of Quex Park. But oh how lucky I am I to have the memory of those conversations. Curiosity has re-framed and re-awakened my feelings of nostalgia and curiosity; I think it’s time I went back.
