We were unusually warmly
welcomed (in that the sun was shining) to Glasgow last week for the 41st
annual MEG conference. Hosted by Glasgow University and organised by Andy
Mills. Glasgow is currently leading a collaborative three-year research project
with Kew and the Smithsonian entitled ‘Situating Pacific Barkcloth Production in Time and Place’, not surprisingly conference delegates were treated to a
plethora of papers about barckcloth, not only from the Pacific but also from
South East Asia and Africa. This year’s theme focused on textiles, attracting a
high attendance to the conference of MEG members old and new and colleagues
from New Zealand, America and Europe. The conference took place in the very
modern Kelvin Hall opposite the imposing Baroque architecture of the
Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. Having been working on the textile
collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) I was excited to hear from
colleagues of research across cloth and costume, having had a glimpse at some
of this research earlier in the week when I was invited to the Museum ofArchaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, to attend a workshop on Kiribati armour.
The programme was packed
and so started promptly with the first session concentrating on costume in the
Americas. Tony Eccles, Royal Albert Memorial Museum Exeter kick started things
with a paper on the tensions of repatriating Crowfoot’s regalia in the
collections at Exeter back to the Blackfoot community in Canada, an unresolved
issue. Steeve Buckridge, Grand Valley State University, Michigan, gave the first
of our many barkcloth focused papers. He had specifically studied lace bark in Jamaica. Lace bark played an important role in the fashions and the role of reclaiming
and asserting femininity of enslaved African women who nurtured and retained
the skill in lace bark production. Buckridge brought to the fore issues of
sustainability, the native lace bark tree is now facing extinction, what is the
future for the tree and how can lace bark production be renewed and utilised by
local people in the Caribbean? Callie Vandewiele, University of Cambridge, then
took us to Guatemala where textiles hold special value. Callie digitally
repatriated textiles in Museum collections from Europe back to Mayan Guatemalan
weavers who through this process are able to regain textile knowledge, patterns
and designs. Pat Allan, Glasgow Museum, spoke of her fieldwork carried out in
the Tigua region of Ecuador from 2011-2015. Glasgow Museum acquired a
collection of wooden masks from this region, a brief departure from the
conference theme of cloth and costume but relevant given the use of these masks
in dance and performance. Given the pace of the conference time for questions
was limited so we took a welcomed coffee break to ponder the morning session
before returning to the second session of the day looking at the work being
done by the Pacific Presences team at the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology (MAA) Cambridge.
The Pacific Presences
Projects lead by Cambridge examines Oceanic art in the context of European
collections. The project is a five-year project funded by the European Research
Council. The first paper presented objects and photographs amassed by the
Charles Templeton Crocker expedition to the Solomon Islands, in particular the
little researched material culture of the Islands of Rennel and Bellona. More
specifically Lucie Carreau spoke about Kongoa, a type of bark cloth garment worn
by men, women and children. Lucie reminded us that when such objects enter
Museum collections they are changed, they become flat pieces of cloth, they are
no longer kongoa, as this status for the object can only be achieved through
the wearer of it and how it is worn depicting the social status and
circumstance of the wearer themselves. Alison Clark along with New
Zealand/Kiribati artists Chris Charteris, Lizzy Leckie and Kaetaeta Watson
introduced ‘The Island Warrior’ and their rethinking and reinterpretation of
Kiribati armour. Both a historical costume from Cambridge and the new reworked
costume made by Chris, Lizzie and Kaetaeta are currently on display at MAA. To
achieve this, it was necessary to research and evaluate historical armour in
collections across the UK and Europe and to apply a multi-disciplinary approach
involving research, conservation and artistic interpretation. Erna Lilje’s
paper focused on fibre skirts from central province, Papua New Guinea and the
dimensions of interconnection in the process of manufacture and production of
these grass skirts. The session was concluded with Nick Thomas’s paper ‘The
Travels of Textiles from Cook’s First Voyage’ and the remarkable discovery of a
barkcloth sample book pre-dating the Shaw sample books of 1787 (such as the one in the PRM"S collections) and how such
sample books exemplify bigger histories and paradoxes surrounding barkcloth.
Over lunch delegates were
invited to visit the Hunterian costume lab, take a tour of the Centre for
Textile Conservation and Technical Art History or watch RAI film footage. Given
that over lunch we also had to find time to eat I did not manage to fit in any
of these activities though I would have liked to have visited the costume lab
or conservation centre I also needed to allow my brain some space before the
afternoon sessions commenced.
In the penultimate session
of the day we heard from colleagues working in textile conservation. Dinah Eastop, University of Southampton addressed the role and part conservation plays
in the process of representation and re-representation using case studies from
her recent publication ‘Refashioning and Redress: Conserving and DisplayingDress’ Getty 2016. For us non-conservators the scientific data presented by RangiTe Kanawa, Aotearoa New Zealand, was mind boggling. She explained how an innovative
scientific method analysing the black dye comprising of tannin and mud is being
used to reconnect a number of unprovenanced Maori textiles to their place of
origin. Jeremy Uden, Pitt Rivers Museum University of Oxford and Rachael Lee,Victoria and Albert Museum discussed the redisplay of one of the PRM’s most
significant costumes, a Tahitian Mourners costume acquired by the naturalists
on Captain Cooks second voyage. In 2011 Jeremy was awarded a grant from the
Clothworkers Foundation to investigate and conserve the Cook voyage collection
at the PRM. This led to the redisplay of the collection whereby Rachael Lee as a textile mount maker was recruited to remount the costume as it
had never previously been done so before. The session was concluded with a
paper from Luba D. Nurse, textile conservator and Patricia Te Arapo Wallace,
University of Canterbury, Aotearoa, New Zealand on how improved technology and
resources has led to the reinvestigation and challenged previous understanding
of Maori dogskin cloaks.
The day finished with a
series of work in progress papers, nine in total that covered all areas of
Museum practice, costume as learning and engagement resources, a donor’s view
of donating collections to a Museum from Jenny Balfour-Paul who has lived an extraordinary
life travelling the world in particular making numerous fieldtrips to the
Middle East during her PhD on indigo in the Arab Word. Jenny’s collection of
textiles from the Arab World has since been donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum. We
heard about a number of new acquisitions of textiles at the PRM in Oxford and plans on reinterpreting the textile displays there in the future.
Harriet Hughes treated us to a taste of contemporary African fashion using
traditional fabrics, techniques and methods in innovative cutting edge ways.
Krystyna Deuss discussed the importance of dating Cofradia textiles for dating
Guatemalan weavings in general. Antonia Lovelace and Rosanna Nicholson took us
to Asia with presentations on plans for an exhibition of Himalayan fashion in
Leeds in 2018 whilst Rosanna has been researching Indonesian barkcloth
collected by missionaries Leonard and Margaret Woodward in the collections of
National Museums Scotland (NMS). Sue Giles and Lisa Graves gave us a glimpse of
the idiosyncratic British Empire and Commonwealth Museum collection deposited
at Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives. The film and photographic archive material is
rich in its painting of ex patriate life in the colonies, important political and
historic events and day-to-day activities including transport, law enforcement,
trade etc. in the British Empire and Commonwealth. I am sure it made many of us
look forward to the potential of this collection for research and interpretation
in the future. Racheal Hand finished the session with a look at kappa mu’umu’us
from Hawaii in Museum collections and their meaning and use in Hawaiian dress
and identity today.
Having had our intellectual
appetites well and truly fed by the end of the first day it was time to turn
attention to feeding our stomachs! We were treated to a conference reception at
the impressive Huntarian Museum a short walk up the hill through the historic
University of Glasgow campus to the commanding building in which the Museum is
housed. The exhibition gallery where we had drinks displayed some of the
ethnographic collections including in a showcase which ran down the centre of
the room displaying the Huntarian’s coconut armour from Kiribati which we had
heard about earlier in the day from the Pacific Presences team. It was good
after having had a day of lectures to reconnect and contextualise the material
we all regularly theorise about and analyse with the materiality of the
artefacts, a reminder of our privileged role as Museum professionals. The
conference dinner was at one of Glasgow’s finest curry houses Mother India
where we indulged in voluminous Indian dishes, many of us going home with doggy
bags at the end of the night!
Weary eyed I arrived for
the second day of the conference which promised to be as stimulating as the first.
The first session was focused on exhibiting and speaking through costume with
the first paper of the day presented by Mark Elliot, MAA. Mark has recently
curated the exhibition ‘Another India: Explorations and Expressions of Indigenous South Asia’ which is currently showing at MAA. Having a large
collection of material in the PRM collections from the Naga Hills I was
particularly interested in hearing from Mark of the challenges in displaying indigenous
Indian communities. Mark suggested that as curators in putting together
exhibitions we are the authors of curatorial fiction reappropriating material
culture to make new cultural images. For the exhibition, Mark made the
curatorial decision to reconstruct a Naga headdress from individual parts, not
all of which belonged together but in doing so he was able to construct the
most accurate representation of the headdress, another layer of human agency.
This act has now become part of the object’s individual history and biography
and those component parts that constitute the whole. Mark’s paper gave much
food for thought with regards to curatorial practice. Our next speaker, Vanessavon Gliszcynski got the audience very excited with the talk of multi-disciplinary
techniques bringing an exhibition about textile and cloth alive. Her exhibition
‘The Common Thread’ currently running in Frankfurt looked at textile technique
as a means of interpreting textile collections. Working with contemporary artists
and composers the exhibition incorporated art and music inviting
visitors to experience fabric in a new and direct way. The exhibition created a
new textile vocabulary, ‘the warp and weft of thinking’ and engaged with the
cognitive challenges textile production presents making analogies for weaving
with geometry, abstraction and musical thinking. A dynamic and innovate
approach to displaying and interpreting textiles. I was very intrigued by Vanessa’s
approach and made a note to purchase the exhibition book ‘The Common Thread,the Warp and Weft of Thinking’ for the Museum library. We then heard of the
struggles of a local authority Museum trying to apply diverse and contemporary
narratives to permanent displays. Rebecca Arnott introduced us Julius Brenchly,
donor of the ethnography collections of Maidstone Museum. His position as a
local Maidstone gentleman explorer privileges his role in the interpretation of
world culture in the permanent galleries at Maidstone Museum. Through the use
of talks and tours for public engagement it is possible to present other
narratives and contemporary issues in the interpretation of the displays. Lindy Richardson, Edinburgh College of Art and Sarah Worden, National Museum Scotland
provided us with a very animated presentation on a recent project using African commemorative cloth as a teaching aid for textile students in Scotland. In Africa,
the cloths are used as political promotional tools particularly during local
elections. The students created their own versions bringing attention to
contemporary issues that concerned them today including the rise of celebrity
culture, the threat to Scottish wildlife and the plight of Syrian refugees.
Sarah hopes to acquire an example of the student’s cloth for the collections at
NMH complementing the historical collections of African commemorative cloth and
enhancing understanding of the role these cloths play in African cultural
traditions.
After coffee, we held the
MEG AGM for which some members stayed. The AGM saw Antonia Lovelace hand over
the reins as chair to long standing MEG member Sue Giles. The current committee
thanked Antonia for her hard work and contribution to MEG over the past three
years as chair. Antonia ceremoniously presented Sue with the MEG Chain of Office, a beaded necklace which all MEG chairs add a sort of talisman to at the
end of their service. I did not see what it was that Antonia had added but will
be sure to make a note to ask her. There was hint that the venue for next year’s
conference could be the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. The Museum has
recently installed new Pacific displays and is currently working on
redisplaying collections from Africa. The AGM finished early allowing for a
slightly longer lunch and some time to reflect on the morning session and look
forward to the afternoon.
Session 6 was entitled ‘Reassessing
and Revitalising Collections’, Sarah Worden continued on the theme of African
cloth having recently been in Uganda where the traditional medium of barkcloth
is being revitalised by fashion designers. Having been proclaimed in 2005 by
UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage of humanity there are opportunities for
apprentices in Uganda to train in barkcloth production. Sarah asked how do we
go about collecting and documenting this changing role of barkcloth in Ugandan
cultural identity, perhaps a question we should be asking more of all of our
textiles collections which are being reinvigorated and repurposed at their place
of origin. Contemporary collecting plays an important role in diversifying and
updating our historical collections, Rachel Heminway Hurst, Royal Pavilion andMuseum Brighton explored the challenges in assembling contemporary collections
in her paper ‘Fashioning Africa’. With a HLF collecting cultures grant Brighton
Museum aims to make a collection of African fashion and textiles from
1960-2005. They have employed a methodology using a collecting panel consisting
of African diaspora and academic specialists to advise and solicit acquisition.
This methodology has proven successful in informing a collection which enhances
the existing African costume textiles. If anything, we heard that the failings
are with the collecting cultures grant which does not enable travel abroad. Mark Nesbitt, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and
Brittany Curtis talked of the collections from the voyage of the HMS Galatea.
Of the 82 objects brought back from this voyage only 30 have been located
within Museum collections to date. Interestingly we often concentrate on the
acquisition of material and get fixated with what enters Museum collections and
its history prior to acquisition. The objects history once it enters the Museum
does get researched but Museum practice was once more fluid with a common network
of exchange and transfer among curators and collections. In MEG style, the
paper perpetuated the ‘Lost and Found’ nature of ethnographic collections. Louise Wilkie rounded up the session with news of a continuation of project funding to
work on collections at Aberdeen making the collection there very much ‘open for
research’.
It was only apt that the
last session of the 2017 conference should be focused on barkcloth and
introduced with a paper by anthropologist Adrienne Keapler, curator of Oceanic
Ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute and
Co-investigator on the barkcloth project based in Glasgow. Adrienne reminded us
that the strengths of our collections relies on good documentation. However, in
the absence of documentation methodologies can be applied in the identification
of barkcloth if components and combinations of cultural signatures can be found.
As a non barkcloth expert I was interested to learn any tricks of the trade and
found Adrienne’s lecture useful but also couldn’t help to think that the
ability to identify barkcloth as described must also rely on an expertise
gained from years of study, research and knowledge accumulation. Andy Mills
provided us with one of the most imaginative analogies of the day in his
discussion of the fractal and partible nature of barkcloth comparing its division and distribution to having an apple, slices of apple, a fruit salad or apple juice.
Tensions exist among the Polynesian diaspora over the subdivision and
distribution of barkcloth, however the very nature of the cloth undermines such
tensions. Patricia Te Arapo Wallace examined two unusual 18th
century Maori cloaks and the engagement of contemporary weavers to better
understand their construction and gain new knowledge and understanding
acknowledging that historic collections provide evidence of techniques no
longer practiced. The closing paper of the conference came from Antje Denner,
NMS and Racheal Hand, MAA and their endeavour to shed light on the Polynesian
barkcloth in the holdings of the NMS. By matching pieces with sample books and
pieces of cloth in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland it is
hoped that the histories of these cloth and individual Museum histories of collecting,
distributing and assemblage can be answered.
This drew to a close the
2017 conference, I had a plane to catch and so had to leave whilst questions
and discussions for the afternoon session panel continued. As always, I left
the annual MEG conference feeling content that as those who work with ethnographic collections we continue
to be innovative, critical and questioning of our actions as curators,
researchers, conservators. I knew that the conference focus around costume and
cloth would arouse interesting discourse and I certainly wasn’t left disappointed.
Faye Belsey
Assistant Curator, Pitt
Rivers Museum.
