The latest blog from Adam De Ville, Resident Armchair Artist at The Beaney in Canterbury. We brought him here for us to wonder, along with all the possible versions of his history and more in imagined flashbacks, glimpses in our mind’s eye, conjured realms, and a daydream or two. The Unidentified Man...
The ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’, or Wunderkammer, was a personal collection of unusual items from around the world. Many of these collections existed in private homes throughout Britain and Europe throughout the 19th Century. As they were the forerunner to the modern ‘museum’ they are of great interest to historians and...
It’s fair to say any new acquisition is exciting, but occasionally an item enters the building creating a stir amongst staff; something so good you can’t quite believe you’re lucky enough to get to work alongside it, and so beautiful you can’t wait to tell everyone. This month that item...
“For those of us about to leaflet, we salute you!” Some of you may have noticed the last few days that I’ve been wearing a – different kind of uniform recently. Something a bit more, shall we say, Romanesque! Yup! All last week (various days in July) I was parading as...
The latest blog from Adam De Ville, Resident Armchair Artist at The Beaney in Canterbury. Since my last experiment, birdsong at the miniatures, I thought I’d do another one! Reflections of an Unidentified Man explores Henry Weekes’ sculpture as a talisman of the imagination. I thought I’d place a rather fancy mirror...
Working with physical and digital sculpture, Sumita Chauhan – sculptor and doctoral researcher at the University of Kent – explorers the creative process of making sculpture with people with dementia in The Front Rooms gallery’s latest exhibition, Sculptural Revelations. Part of the research study was conducted over a period of six months at The...
The latest blog from Adam De Ville, Resident Armchair Artist at The Beaney in Canterbury. Ok, so they are actually three Barons who signed Magna Carta, but they certainly look a bit like Knights…well, two out of three. I find myself in the presence of three life size models of Stephen Langton,...
The latest blog from Adam De Ville, Resident Armchair Artist at The Beaney in Canterbury. It’s a couple of days after my experiment playing birdsong at the miniatures collection. All the birds have flown now but the session proved very successful. Visitors shared their personal responses to the miniatures, and to my...
The latest blog from Adam De Ville, Resident Armchair Artist at The Beaney in Canterbury. As the current Armchair Artist in Residence, I am exploring how the Beaney’s collection of artefacts make me feel and what associations and memories they trigger, related or unrelated. We collect memories in a similar way to...
This week we said goodbye to one of our Marketing volunteers, Patrizia Berchi, who is heading back home to Italy to begin what we are sure will be a very exciting career in Marketing (she can also speak five, yes FIVE languages!). Before we let her go, we asked her...
