Visiting the Wellcome collection was a great insight into the collections of a great eccentric, Henry Wellcome.
The exhibition we mainly had in mind to view was 'Identity' which is an exploration of 9 unrelated individuals (two of which are twins) throughout 8 separate rooms. We thought that exploring unusual lives would help us in our character development. The exhibition was interesting and I felt that I learnt a lot from it, including the notion that 1 in 8 people start as twins in the womb and this explains the sense of loss that many feel in life. It is small factoids such as this which can be potentially developed into interesting aspects of the project.
The exhibition as a whole, however, did not prove to be as useful as we had hoped. However interesting, it focused less on personalities and other character defining features and was more interesting in the historical and the factual. Fair enough for a museum I suppose, but not exactly what we were after!
The permanent collection, 'Medicine Man' was extremely interesting. It was a complete jumble of curiosities, you could really feel the erratic nature of an eccentric collector through the exhibit. We all thoroughly enjoyed the weird objects on display that varied from a fully preserved mummified body to a box of glass eyes, from a Hieronymus Bosch painting to a lock of King George III's hair!
The expanse of unusual and obscure relics, beliefs and other strange objects displayed had a distinctive aesthetic, they fitted together in the exhibition in a similar way we intend to implement in our installation. The research carried out by our character will be from a variety of unusual and curious sources, enhancing his eccentricity and adding to the fantastical nature of the machines and blueprints.