Margaux Illescas/Interactive Arts

Twenty Interactive Arts students from MMU visited Platt Hall before Easter and came up with ideas for a proposed event at Platt Hall in Autumn 2012. Margaux worked on ideas for creating a keep sake/promotional object based on the keys in Mary Greg’s collection. I will be blogging the results during the next few weeks. Hazel

“The Mary Greg Project

For this project I have chosen to focus my work on “the way to promote the Event”.

Seeing the Mary Greg key collection at Manchester Art Gallery I decided to use it in order to find an original, creative and effective way to promote this future event. Rather than making simple paper flyers I drew the same shapes as the original collection onto Illustrator in order to go to the laser cutter and make my own keys. The keys are between 10 and 15cms long but the size can be reduced. There are different prototypes in plastic and in wood. I engraved the Mary Greg website onto the keys so once people get the flyer they can directly go on the website and see what this is about. I added a catch phrase on some keys as well to attract people: “Would you like to know where this key gives you access to?”

I believe this could be a nice way to promote the event and that people would keep the flyer rather than throw it away.”

Margaux Illescas

Snippet from the letters No.7

Four Keys from Mary Greg's collection

One of my favourite quotes from the letters…November 10th 1928

To Mr Batho from Mary Greg.

“…If a number of any set of things are put together they at once become more interesting – this is most of our collections become of any value – I began by buying a key which interested me by its fine work – a friend said ‘oh’ I have an old key I do not want you shall have it & so on until my collection as you know is a most valuable one – & so on with other things…”

Hazel

Mary out in the world.

This might seem a little trivial but I thought of Mary yesterday whilst shopping. I saw a necklace with lots of miss- matched keys as pendants. One even says Hope on the side of it. Something about it reminded me of her chatelaines too. I wonder what she’d think of her collection used as bling!  

Melanie

Mystery Keys

Found on a boot sale in Cuddington.
The tag on these keys makes you wonder what on earth the appliance could have been!
My suspicions are that they are for a fridge…but my imagination conjures up a huge child snagging machine!!

An interesting object to the curious

It seems the museum had not yet opened as it continues: ‘Previous to its opening, by way of specimen, two temples are exhibited, nearly seven feet high, supported by sixteen elephants, embellished with seventeen hundred pieces of jewellery, in the first style of workmanship’. These temples were in fact ‘two magnificent clocks, engaged for the Emperor of China, at nine thousand pounds’.

Other attractions included mechanical models of a bird of paradise and a tarantula spider; the latter was ‘formed of steel’ and ‘darts out by itself from a box . . . and, in fact, performs all the appropriate movements of the insect which it represents’.

A Bumper Find of Keys

Went to a Boot sale over at Cuddington today..found all these keys on one stall…Mary would be proud.
If you want to see them better go to Alscrapmetal Blog and click on any photo, which will take you to my Flickr page.

Mary Greg’s keys

I was so excited at seeing the keys, I neglected to take many photos.
These are are amongst my favourites.

Drawer of keys

I finally have a day to think about my own work.
We first visited the Bygones collection in 2006.
The room was full of metal cabinets and it was a very exciting moment when we opened the drawer full of keys.
The thing that was so exciting for me, was that most of the keys were quite ordinary, used everyday for years.
Folding keys, engraved keys and keys that looked they locked something very heavy and important.
The pencil holders I made since are influenced by the rows of various sized keys, but I still need to do them justice.