Are you a history fan? An art enthusiast? Then this is a must! ArtSpace’s latest exhibition ‘Half Remembered’, at Charnwood Museum 20th September to 8th November, combines these interests and also opens a window on the Leicestershire Museum Collections.
Artists spent an afternoon visiting the Museum Collections Resources Centre and each chose an item that they felt would inspire them to create new work. The result is an exhibition that makes the visitor stop and ponder the circumstances and times which produced the object, and the viewer can also follow the course of the artist’s creative thinking in producing a completely new work.
The items chosen vary widely: natural history objects including beetles; the Plesiosaur fossil, the ‘Barrow kipper’, which is in Charnwood Museum itself; a Bronze Age axe; a Zenobia Loughborough perfume bottle; a sundial clock; an old painting of Charnwood; a hand-sewn sampler, a lace pillow, and lace trimming on an 1850s evening dress.
A number of artists were inspired by clothing which included a 1914 wedding dress and a liberty bodice from the Market Harborough firm Symington.
The new artwork that members produced is often surprising. Nick Rapson, whose object was a lace-making pillow from a period before the lace machines and Luddite riots in Loughborough, created a beautiful necklace of silver, enamel and hematite with a lace pattern. Erica Middleton is a ceramicist as well as a painter. Her collection choice was the lace and rich brocade in an evening dress. Her ceramics, which echo womanly forms, have decorative elements based on lace.
Alison Folland, who chose the liberty bodice, made a bodice using a vintage poetry book. The ribbons and lacings layer words, creating new poetry and word combinations. Beryl Miles and Mary Byrne chose the 1914 wedding dress. Beryl was initially inspired by the subtle colour palette and the complex abstract shapes, but when she discovered the bride had died only three years after her wedding, the works became more of a tribute. Mary too was moved by the story of the bride’s tragic life and even did some research on her. She made paintings of a figure wearing the dress which are more ‘laments’ than traditional bride portraits.
Liz Macfarlane was inspired by collections of pressed flowers and notes from the1920s to make her own collection of objects and pressed flowers in collages. Marion Reid used the collection’s extensive examples of plants, shells, insects and creatures from the local area to create a concertina book that can be used as a portable cabinet of curiosities.
Pam Everard abstracted design elements of the Heyricke Sun Clock to make a painting about time itself. Gill Hugman Perkins’s painting incorporates the shape of the Bronze Age axe. Anna Michalska, inspired by Zenobia perfume bottles, created work which evokes the memory of the scents and powders on her grandmother’s dressing table.
There is something here for everyone to enjoy as well as an insight into the Museum Collections. The Leicestershire Museum Collections Resources Centre can be visited by appointment. Tel: 0116 3053720.
ArtSpace Loughborough ‘Half Remembered’, 20th Sep to 8th Nov 2025.
Charnwood Museum, Queen’s Park, Granby Street, Loughborough LE11 3DU
Tel: 01509 233754. www.charnwoodmuseum.co.uk
Open: Wed-Sat 10am–4pm; Sun 1–4pm. ADMISSION FREE