A new year, and a nice new show at my local gallery. The
main artist Roo Waterhouse has worked with historic toy collections in Halifax
and Burnley museums and used them to inspire conversations with community
groups. Each of her unframed oils on canvas explores a different toy era and is
displayed alongside selected quotes from participants in her workshops and
museum cases full of toys and games from a variety of eras. There was some fun
to be had spotting items from one’s own youth, I was a particular fan of
Britain’s farm models.
The paintings themselves have a rather eerie atmosphere,
they have flat, smooth surfaces and are painted from a very low ‘toy’s-eye’
viewpoint or perhaps a child lying on their tummy? The perspective comes across
a little oddly perhaps because of this. I couldn’t quite decide whether this
oddness was deliberate or simply because the paintings weren’t well-drawn. They
are certainly strange to look at, moments frozen in time with the toys looking
as if they are actually living things, caught unawares – there are of course no
actual children in any of the paintings. The fun, noise and excitement to be
had from playing is entirely missing, almost as if these are archival records
of a past civilisation now dead and gone.
I wondered if this was as a result of the objects actually being from
museum collections? The title of the show is of course a play on the idea of
museum collections being used to recollect the past
By contrast, the wooden automata by Lisa Slater were
anything but dead. Adults visiting the show (and there were plenty in when I
dropped by) were gleefully turning the little handles making a whole herd of
bristly-maned birch-wood mules chomp and nod and twirl their tails with gay
abandon. A lovely sight, and such fun! Mounted on the wall were some rather
darker objects ranging from a spinning rack of well-used wooden spoons to
shoe-stretchers that played a tune. Even better were the no-doubt Quay
brothers-inspired porcelain dolls’ heads spinning around in their little dark
boxes, eyeless sockets staring at nothing. I really coveted the ‘Opera Singer’
made from reclaimed bits of carved wood turned by magic into a rising and
falling costume.
The design sketches accompanying the centrepiece horse and
rider model showed that the artist is no slouch with a pen either which
impressed me even more. The fact that all the objects can be played with and
are well-made enough to be surviving so far is wonderful too.
The show is on until 6th May 2013
More details www.cravenmuseum.org
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