Saturday’s Seedpill Workshops

    
    

Friday Late: Talks and Workshops

    
    

Re-Designing Objects from the Clore Discovery Area

Guerrilla gardening has been documented as far back as the Diggers, founded in 1649 by Gerrard Winstantley who began cultivating wasted and unused land in England to grow and harvest food. Although one assumes the movement continued throughout the 18th and 19th century, very little records exist to prove this was the case. Here, two artefacts taken from the Clore Discovery British Galleries have been re-designed as guerrilla gardening objects, suggesting methods that could have been used by the gardeners had the movement existed between 1700-1900.

1. THE SCOOP

Place of origin: England (made)
Date: 1740 (made)
Artist/Maker: Unknown
Materials and Techniques: Carved boxwood
Museum number: W.18-1935
Gallery location: British Galleries, room 52a, case 3

Scoops are one of the oldest types of eating utensils. A scoop allowed anyone without teeth, young or old, to eat a raw apple. Apple scoops could also be used to remove the core of the apple. The earliest apple scoops were made from sheep bones. This scoop is made from boxwood.

MEET… THE APPLE SEED DIBBER

In the year of 1740, Ireland was experiencing one of the worst famines in its history due to cold weather and draught, which eventually killed 10% of its total population. This modified apple scoop is an English guerrilla gardener’s response to the crisis. Given to his wife as a marriage token, this adapted apple scoop retained the apple core, allowing for the seeds to be replanted at a later date. This helped ensure that with every apple eaten, another apple tree was planted.

2. LADY’S ARCHERY SCORING KIT

Date: 1850-1860 (made)
Artist/Maker: Unknown
Materials and Techniques: Ivory, silk ribbon, printed paper and grease (mutton
fat and tallow)
Museum number: T.19-1946
Gallery location: British Galleries, room 122b, case 2

This is a lady’s scoring kit for archery. These usually hung from a lady archer’s belt together with a quiver, a spare string, and sometimes a purse containing shillings. Three golds (arrows in the centre) entitled a competitor to receive a shilling from each opponent.

The kit has three parts: The acorn-shaped cup or pot contained grease (a mixture of mutton fat and tallow) which help the finger protectors or shooting glove slide more easily off the bowstring. The pricker is the tubular object with a sharp pointed stiletto used for marking scores onto the card disc which holds a circular replaceable printed paper bulls-eye card with circles in gold, red, white, black and blue. Players scored nine for gold, seven for red, five for blue three for black and one for white.

Archery was a popular pastime in the 19th century. Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic player. It was one of the few sports open to
middle-class ladies and provided opportunities for them to mix socially with the opposite sex without a chaperone. This method of scoring archery goes back at least to the 1830s. Scoring in this way ceased at public archery meetings in 1872 and was succeeded by score books and pencils.

MEET… THE LADY’S SEED DARTS AND TARGET LOG

  

During the 19th Century, London’s population swelled by millions, exceeding London’s ability to offer its citizens basic human needs such as food and sanitation. This altered archery scoring kit is a middle class lady’s attempt to discreetly sow fruit and vegetable seeds to help feed those less fortunate. When venturing into London from her home in the countryside, she would bring her archery kit containing seed embedded clay darts rather than arrows. One would imagine that between running errands, she would throw the clay darts and use the scoring chart to mark out the areas where they fell.