Rewarding Creativity

I love working with the many Art & Design students who use our collections to inspire their work. For most, visiting our Study Room is their first experience of working with an archive, and helping them to make connections between our collections and their own creative practice is both a pleasure and a privilege.

MoDA's Arthur Silver Award was set up specifically to encourage final year Middlesex Art & Design students to engage with our collections in this way. We'll shortly be announcing the winner of this year's Award, so it seems like a good time to catch up with our two previous winners.

Model from  Elena's catwalk show, 2009

BA Fashion student Elena Picone won the Award when it was first launched in 2009. She chose to create a menswear collection inspired by floral chintzes she discovered at MoDA. Two years after graduating she is an Assistant Designer for a new menswear brand, and had this to say about the Award:

"There is so much inspiration to gain at MoDA...The Arthur Silver Award is so important to not only challenge and drive students but to make them aware of the abundance of inspiration which is right under their noses!"

BA Applied Print student Annie Skipper was our winner in 2010. Annie used John Aldridge’s ‘Moss’ wallpaper from MoDA’s collections to inspire complex naturalistic patterns. The patterns she created were used to adorn a huge carved log seat and accompanying furniture in a range of mediums and textures. Having won the £1000 prize, Annie hoped to be able to buy her own printing screens and equipment to enable her to continue working post-graduation.

2010 Winner of the Arthur Silver Award,
Annie Skipper

So who will win this year's award?.....Watch this space!

The week of the Chelsea Flower Show seems a good time to tell you about our forthcoming exhibition, Petal Power.  While today's gardeners cope with water shortages, the floral designs from MoDA's Silver Studio collection are blooming as brightly as they did when first created in the 1930s.

design for a dress silk, by Mrs McPherson 

for the Silver Studio,  1928 (SD1454)

The exhibition will look at the work of the first generation of female designers, working for the Silver Studio, who were able to forge careers as designers of fashion fabrics.

Petal Power will be on show at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace in October.
More details about the great things we'll have on show will be posted here soon!

Time for tea in Sheffield

This unusual tea set is made of ceramic and has faceted chrome covers that sit on top. It was bought in 1951 in Wood Green, North London, as a gift for a silver wedding anniversary and was used constantly (as opposed being kept 'for best'), until the early 2000s.  It graced MoDA's galleries for a number of years, but now the exhibition has closed in preparation for MoDA's move and re-launch, and the tea set is off to pastures new.

We are pleased to announce that the tea set has been transferred to Museums Sheffield. They plan to feature it in an exhibition celebrating the centenary of stainless steel in 2013. Their craft and design department are also interested in using the set for an exhibition on 1950s design.

We're so happy to see the tea set go to a good home, and that it will be seen by many more museum visitors in the future. It's also fascinating to see the different stories an object can tell; the history of ordinary interiors at MoDA, and the histories of technology and design at Museums Sheffield.

A fond farewell to the fabulously thirties fireplace

The tiled fireplace in MoDA's galleries has always been one of my favorite pieces in the museum. It's such a fun and striking design, and so unmistakably 1930s! It was set off a treat by the lino it stood on, also in the autumnal colours that were so popular in the 30s.

image copyright LDA

But today was the day to bid a fond farewell, as we returned the fireplace to its owner, the Geffrye Museum. I take comfort from the fact it's had a very full life, being displayed in the Geffrye Museum's 1930s room set for a number of years before it was loaned to MoDA. The fate of many such fireplaces was undoubtedly a sledgehammer as homeowners removed them in favour of something more up to date.

Today of course we took a rather more careful approach. Professional art movers Momart came to pack and transport the fireplace, and they did a fabulous job, arriving with custom made crates to fit each piece, and an impressively large lorry.

The electric fire that was displayed with the fireplace was also due to be returned to the Geffrye Museum, so first it was lifted off and packed up.



















Then the upright portion of the fireplace was loosened, and the guys lifted it into its crate. It turned out that it was hollow at the back, so not as heavy as we'd feared.


























Finally it was the turn of the fireplace's base to be lifted into its crate. It was packed out with foam to support its awkward shape before the sides and lid were screwed on.




















Organisation and planning paid off, and the whole thing only took half a day, including the packing of some smaller objects being returned to the Geffrye Museum, and the Easiwork cabinet that is being returned to Enfield Museums.

We'd like to say a big thanks to the guys at Momart for doing such a fabulous job, and of course to the Geffrye Museum for lending us such a wonderful object for so long.

Goodbye to the Kitchen Cabinet

Relocating to Colindale means that we're having to say goodbye to the 1929 'Easiwork' kitchen cabinet. The 'Easiwork' cabinet was on loan from Enfield Museum Service, and it will be returning there next week.

The cabinet formed part of our main exhibition for the past eleven years, and was always a major talking point. For older visitors it would often spark memories of childhood, the phrase "we used to have one of those in our house" being said on a regular basis.

(image copyright LDA)

School children were fascinated by the set of matching green tins designed to store dry goods. Although some of the names printed on the tins were familiar (coffee, rice), others certainly were not. I lost count of the number of times I overheard people saying "what's sago?". For those of you who are interested, it's a starch extracted from the sago palm, which would have been used in baking and some puddings. So now you know!

So why are people drawn to this object? What is at the heart of it's fascination and appeal? Partly I think it's the clever and compact design; we might not necessarily want to use sago or tapioca anymore, but the need for space-saving, multi-functional design in our homes has never gone away, particularly where our kitchens are concerned.

It may also be linked with our current fascination (some might say obsession), with the idea of the kitchen as the 'heart of the home'. We love the romanticised idea of 'homemaking', with all its associations of baking, homecrafts, and rosy-cheeked mothers in gingham pinnies whipping up batches of delicious buns at a moments notice. The 'Easiwork' cabinet, with it's built-in flour sifter and 'Delightful Dinner Menus' seemed to embody this notion, even if the reality of the average 1920s kitchen was rather different. It was always impossible to look at the cabinet without imagining the women who would have used it, and the families who would have enjoyed (or not) the food prepared on its white porcelain worktop.