St Agnes Museum’s Paintings are now part of the BBC’s digitalized national collection.
St Agnes Museum’s Paintings on BBC
Author: St Agnes Museum
Dem bones, Dem bones, Dem dry bones!
On a hot late summer’s day, three years after we had gathered to bury the jawbones and vertebra of the Fin Whale recovered by Roger Radcliffe and a team of helpers from a cove close to Porthtowan Beach in February 2010, almost the same group met in a St Agnes field to exhume the bones, thanks to the generosity of Ben Lockley of B Lockley Groundworks and his mini digger.
Fortunately we remembered accurately where the five metre long, immensely heavy jawbones had been buried, and after a few anxious moments, their outline became visible in the excavated trench, stained a mahogany brown due to their contact with the soil and the three tonnes of horse manure whose microbes, it had been hoped, would cleanse the bones’ interiors. The bones were carefully lifted from the trench and laid on the grass to be washed off.
Gwen Clay paintings
Some of you will remember Gwen Clay, a very well known and loved local artist, and a founding member of St Agnes Art Group, who lived at Wheal Friendly in St Agnes. Following her death last year, her family have generously offered us the loan of some of her oil paintings for an exhibition should we wish.
A new kind of visit
The usual school visit to our Museum involves a guided look around the collection, sometimes with a theme in mind, and a chance to do the ever-popular Cuckoo Hunt. But on Thursday 16th May St Agnes Year 2 came with a different purpose in mind.
This term’s project is to set up their own class museum and they were anxious to get some tips from the experts! They came armed with some searching questions which Liz and Carol did their best to answer, trying to avoid the subject of dinosaurs, although the grand old Leatherback Turtle made a good stand-in!
They were even invited into the inner-sanctum of “Peter’s Room”, the Curator’s office and artefact store, to see how precious and fragile pieces are stored in acid-free conditions, and were impressed to hear of the thousands of objects carefully catalogued of which only a small number can be displayed at any one time.
Both children and staff went away bursting with ideas for their own museum and have promised to invite our education officers to their grand opening! It was a very good example of St Agnes Museum’s valuable role in the local community.
Voyage of the Mystery
In February St Agnes Museum’s Education team was invited to form a partnership with the National Maritime Museum Cornwall who had obtained funding to run their “Cornish Voices” living history programme alongside smaller (and in our case, small!) museums in Cornwall.
After much planning, Year 1 of St Agnes Primary School visited the Museum on the morning of 30 April to study our maritime collection, including the voyages of the Lady Agnes, the much shorter voyages of our Pond Yacht, our harbour model and our Coastguard display, where the rocket used to fire the Breeches Buoy was especially popular!
In the afternoon, Y1 saw the performance of the “Voyage of the Mystery” (a voyage re-enacted by Pete Goss in 2008/9) in the School Hall. It was particularly appropriate for them as the “Voyage of the Mystery” is part of their History curriculum.
In the morning the same performance had been given to Reception and Year 2.
The whole day, subsidised by the Arts Council, was free for St Agnes School pupils and we are very grateful to Debbie Rogers, Education Officer at the NMMC, for organising such a fantastic opportunity.