in her 100th year

I have been photocopying the correspondence to send to Sally for transcribing.
I got a bit emotional yesterday when I came to this…
Mary was still corresponding with the gallery up to her death.

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.

I have pleasure in sending you herewith the Platypus

I only photographed a few letters..and that was one of them..
It must have been an unusual letter to open.

Platypus

Dear Sir William Boyd Dawkins

I have pleasure in sending you herewith the Platypus, from Mrs Greg, which you so kindly promised to hand over [to] the proper authorities in the Manchester Museum.

With all good wishes for 1923

Believe me,
Yours sincerely

Assistant Curator

Storytelling

‘I can teach you – yes, anybody – what the instruments are for, and the light will flash once every four seconds as it always does, but I must teach you how to keep the light. Do you know what that means?’
I didn’t.
‘The stories. That’s what you must learn. The ones I know and the ones I don’t know.’
‘How can I learn the ones you don’t know?’
‘Tell them yourself.’

Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson

Marymary

We have a provisional date and exhibition venue for marymaryquitecontrary! Alex and I met with with Miles, the curator at Platt Hall, today about staging an exhibition in 2011. A showcase for Mary, her extraordinary collection and the creative, imaginative possibilities unleashed by opening the cupboard doors and seeing what happens. Very excited about the possibility of bringing things blinking and stumbling back into the light. Just need to work out some funding…

Quizzing Glasses

When we found these in Mary’s collection, I thought they were wonderful objects and had never heard them called quizzing glasses before.
A tool to look at things quizically..

Lists

Mary’s Lists

As promised..
One of Mary’s Lists.
The one list says
“fossil of fish eye in a box”

Hazel

Ear trumpets and grannies

I found this picture on a website about Samuel Greg Junior – son of Samuel Greg from Quarry Bank Mill. I loved this photo of Mary Greg (was Mary Priscilla Needham) who was his wife (they married in 1838 and had 2 sons and 6 daughters), and mother of Amy Greg sitting beside her. Is this the grandmother and mother of our Mary? I absolutely love Mary Priscilla’s ear trumpet. Does it survive in our Mary’s collection? I really want to find an ear trumpet now. What a useful tool.
Actually, it reminds me of a seminar we went to last week about mental health and schizophrenia: we did an exercise about hearing voices, and I had to speak through a makeshift ear trumpet.

http://happy-valley.org.uk/history/people-greg.htm