#socl2

Making an Acid Chloride from Carboxylic Acid using SOCl2

We choose O=S=O as the leaving group because it leaves as a gas and gases are really good leaving groups.

The Power of Museums…and my thoughts of the Conference.

This year, the Annual Museums Association Conference and Exhibition were held in BT Convention Centre, Liverpool. The conference themes explored the changes that staff and organisations are facing, with regards to funding cuts and promoting the collections to a wider audience.

My SOCL2 traineeship is based at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, located in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, so I took a lot of value from the discussions, debates, exhibitions and workshops I attended; these were largely structured around providing and understanding about how success could be achieved, and indeed what success would look like, to professionals working in different areas of the Culture and Heritage Sector.

The British Museum: Community Evening View: Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum

"Seize the Day", by Sarah Ezekiel, inspired by the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. © Sarah Ezekiel.

A Special Evening

On Saturday 20th July 2013, members of the community were invited to an exclusive Evening View of the British Museum's current special exhibition, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The Exhibition

Pompeii and Herculaneum were struck by a volcanic eruption in 79 AD. The cities were buried under ash for 1,600 years. The exhibition recreates the layout of a Roman home to present everyday objects preserved by the ash, giving us a glimpse into daily life before the eruption. 

Seize the Day

Five individuals were invited to create a series of performances in response to the exhibition to share at the Community Evening View. The participants chose to focus on the theme Carpe Diem (Seize the Day).

The performances, inspired by the exhibition and the participants' respective experiences with stroke, aphasia and motor neurone disease, remind us that we never know what’s around the corner and inspire us to grab hold of life, to seize the day.

The Performers

Eddie

“Sit down, turn over a card, and I’ll tell you a story…” Edwin Martin’s stories, each triggered by a phrase on the back of a card, ranged from throwing a toy lamb into the fire in a school nativity play to working “a hard day’s night” (cue Beatles song excerpt) at Charing Cross Hospital, from having a stroke whilst walking down the road, to watching his step-dad work the docks. Each story, told with Eddie’s characteristic humour and charm, captivated everyone gathered around his corner of the atrium.

You can hear a snippet of Eddie’s storytelling here.

Jasvinder

Jasvinder Khosa sensitively explored the frustration of conversation being limited by aphasia, and the solace of poetry as a means of communication with oneself and others. Jasvinder’s performance in the garden room used movement to take us on a compelling journey of identity and expression, with a soundtrack which merged overlapping words, conversation and poetry excerpts, instrumental music and a beautiful reading by Jasvinder of Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love”.

You can find articles by Jasvinder at www.ukconnect.org and can read his reflections on aphasia and its impact on identity in the book, Aphasia Inside Out: Reflections on Communication Disability, edited by Susie Parr, Judith Duchan and Carole Pound.

Rachael

Rachael Dougherty’s magical performance fused: self-penned poem, “A Walk in the Woods”, full of tantalisingly squelching onomatopoeia and poignant loss; graceful and commanding movement; and song – an exploration of identity through a ditty taken from her personal answering machine message, and a haunting rendition of The Beatles’ “Blackbird”. A primary teacher by trade, Rachael’s magnetic gift for engaging people lit up the garden room.

You can listen to Rachael reading her poem, "To Walk the Woods" here.

Sarah and Martin

Sarah Ezekiel and Martin Vishnick brought to life the scene of a bustling Roman street, providing the unique chance to watch an artist at work on Roman flowers, accompanied by the atmospheric melodies of an acoustic guitar. As we marvelled at the skill and artistry behind the intricate objects and paintings on display in the exhibition, and wondered what music accompanied the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum, it was incredible to get a live insight into the creative process of an artist and a musician in collaboration.

Sarah is an eye-gaze artist with a fantastic website and blog. You can see Sarah’s art at eyegazeartists.com, read her story at sarahezekiel.com and follow her on twitter: @sarahezekiel. 

Martin is an innovative guitarist, composer, teacher and researcher. Visit www.mvish.co.uk to find out more.

All photographs by Benedict Johnson. © Trustees of the British Museum

Project Partners

Performers worked with a creative team including choreographers from contemporary dance centre, The Place, over a period of seven weeks. The project was run in partnership with health innovation charity, Rosetta Life, with support from City Bridge Trust, the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

Rehearsal photographs by T. Gunesekera and H. Bahra. 

© Trustees of the British Museum

Make Your Mark!

*Insert terrible pun about making my mark on the blog/internet/heritage sector here*

Now that’s out of the way…

Make Your Mark! marked (sorry) the first of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery’s Summer Holiday Discovery Days. I had been in my traineeship in the Learning and Community Participation team at Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives for just over seven weeks, but this was the first hands-on family activity I’d been a part of – this being particularly important considering that my supervisor, Louise, is in charge of the family programme here at BMGA.*

The aim of the workshop was for families to engage with our collections on a deeper level, and then to express this creatively. This was to manifest itself practically through exploring the museum’s objects and its architecture, and creating observational drawings of what most inspired them.  We would then help them to make a monoprint from their drawing to take home with them (my rather pitiful example is shown below; along with some of the visitors’ rather more exciting prints).

Bright and early on Wednesday morning, I met the six volunteers who were to prove an enormous help. Louise and I briefed them on the plan for the morning, including a whistle-stop run-through of how to make a monoprint. For those of you who don’t know: make a drawing on tracing paper, roll ink onto an acrylic base, retrace your drawing onto a new sheet of paper placed on top of the ink and peel off – easy, fun, and very messy!

After an initially quiet start, the activities room was soon filled with families clamouring to take part – children and adults alike! BMAG’s collections are eclectic to say the least – once summed up to me as ‘dinosaurs next to pianos’ – which allowed for a wonderful range of drawings, with our Natural History and Egyptian collections proving most popular. The volunteers and I helped families to transform their drawings into prints, with easily the most enjoyable part of the day being the look on participants’ faces after the ‘big reveal’ of the prints at the end. 

Louise and I had discussed how encouraging visitors to draw museum artefacts allowed them to focus on them in a new way, a fact which became increasingly evident throughout the day. I discovered parts of the museum I hadn’t even noticed before, and it was refreshing to see our collections through the eyes of our younger visitors. One of the key objectives of the family programme is to encourage intergenerational discussion and, based on this alone, Make Your Mark! proved a resounding success. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and it provided invaluable experience for our next set of family workshops, Fingertip Explorers, which I am helping to lead throughout August at M Shed. The last session will be on Tuesday August 27, and will provide the subject of my next blog post!

* Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives = BMGA. Bristol Museum & Art Gallery = BMAG. Not at all confusing.

Welcome to the SOCL blog, a site dedicated to the work, experiences and insights of the SOCL2 Trainees.

Strengthening Our Common Life (SOCL) is a HLF funded programme led by independent arts and education charity Cultural Cooperation. Established in 2010, SOCL offers yearlong paid traineeships in the UK’s leading cultural heritage organisations.

The aim of the programme is to increase the diversity of the UK heritage sector by providing high quality skills training in heritage management to those sections of the community currently under-represented in the heritage workforce. SOCL seeks to make Britain’s heritage more accessible, and more meaningful to our richly diverse population. Indeed, the independent evaluation of the programme noted that SOCL was:

 “A best practice model for diversifying the workforce in the cultural heritage sector…[one]…that is truly charting new territory”

We are part of the second cohort of SOCL trainees, and let us tell you from the outset - we have a great deal to live up to! Our SOCL1 predecessors truly made their mark, with 11 of the 12 trainees going on to secure paid posts in the heritage sector. As SOCL2 trainees, we are truly privileged to have joined such a talented and passionate network of young heritage professionals, and we are all striving to continue the great work of our programme.

But it doesn’t stop with us - our network is set to keep growing, as we recently found out that HLF has announced its initial support of SOCL3. We are all thrilled that the programme may have the opportunity to continue its path of innovation and excellence in the Cultural Heritage sector. The sky’s the limit.