Inside the Creative Mind: My name is….

Posted on 9 May, 2013 by Danny Birchall

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Artist Elaine Duigenan is working with young women at New Horizons Youth Centre. She has devised and is running a series of six workshops that explore connections with works in the current Wellcome Collection exhibition, Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan. She’ll be writing a blog each week to relay some of the ideas and outcomes in words and pictures; here’s the first.

The first workshop, titled ‘My Name Is…’, was focused on language and letters. The inspiration started with artist Mineo Ito, whose concentration on writing his name over and over results in unexpectedly exquisite landscapes. The obsessive, continually repeated letters lose their verbal intensity and become a visual treat, a new landscape.

The quick-fire ‘icebreaker’ built an instant artwork using post-it notes featuring the first letters of everyone’s name. The girls commented that the repetitive nature of writing a single letter numerous times was both strangely limited and took discipline to maintain. Ashliee commented that it was like saying or hearing any word over and over: it started to lose meaning and become strange and new-sounding.

One of the notable things about the artists’ work in ‘Souzou’ is the very accessible and ordinary materials used, and this is being reflected in the workshops. So, with coloured biros to hand, the next task was to fill a piece of squared paper with letters, symbols and made-up markings. No other directive was given, but it was fascinating what emerged. It was beautiful to see how each one was so individual. Kike commented that although she had not been instructed to make a narrative in the work, one had naturally crept in. She had names and other references hidden in her squares. Others referred to ‘labyrinths’ and puzzles, secret codes. We looked at the work of Shingo Ikeda and saw how his work is a unique, personal code recording journeys and predictions.

The final part of the exercise was to use some of the symbols and letters from the squares to create a secret alphabet. This took inspiration from the works of Takanori Herai (diaries)  and the love letters of Toshiko Yamanishi. The girls each wrote a hidden sentence on their postcards within a grid structure embellished with their own designs.

The nature of the work at times was really focused and calm. At others, the discussion that arose was broad-ranging, open and hilarious. We noted that the Japanese language consists of four different alphabets, and some conversation revolved around language as a result. It was clear that the tasks were not threatening; the simplicity was almost contemplative. The mini-artworks produced were beautiful and totally in the spirit of Souzou –  here’s to imagination and creativity, and I can’t wait for Workshop 2!

Find out more about Elaine’s work at www.elaineduigenan.com.

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A Day in the Life of an Entomologist

Posted on 15 April, 2013 by Danny Birchall
Scanning electron micrograph of a mosquito's head

Scanning electron micrograph of a mosquito’s head

Dr Nina Stanczyk works on mosquito control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, researching the development of new attractants and repellents. Nina and other researchers from the London School will be talking more about the insects that they work with at the Secret Insects of Bloomsbury walking tours this month, part of our Who’s the Pest? series.

Most people have been bitten by a mosquito at some point, and even if it’s just a nuisance for us in the UK, we’re very aware of the millions of people in other countries affected by the diseases that mosquitoes carry – such as malaria or West Nile virus. One of the best ways of preventing transmission of these diseases is to stop people being bitten. There are lots of possible ways to do this, including controlling the population with insecticides or preventing biting at night by using a bednet, but I look at manipulating mosquito behaviour. How? I look at what makes the mosquito respond in a certain way and see if I can use that against it.

I’m particularly interested in mosquitoes’ sense of smell. Mosquitoes use our odour to track us down from a distance and bite us. If we can isolate the chemicals in our smell that they find attractive, we may be able to make lures and traps for monitoring the population. If we isolate chemicals they find repellent, we can look at developing new repellents for people to use as personal protection.

At the moment I’m trying to find out whether mosquitoes infected with malaria react differently to people than uninfected mosquitoes do – are they more able to track you down and bite you? Do they sense different chemicals we could make a trap with?

An average day for me might be:

(1) Check on my mosquitoes, Anopheles gambiae, and collect females (only female mosquitoes bite) for experiments. Malaria-infected mosquitoes are kept safely in a maximum containment laboratory, isolated behind interlocking doors, mesh screens, incubators, doubled-sealed containers, and a healthy dose of paranoia. At the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, we have brilliant facilities for properly containing and dealing with diseases.

The mosquito cage

The mosquito cage

In order to infect a mosquito, we rear a mosquito adult to around five days old and give them a blood meal (artificially) with the infective stage of malaria in it.

(2) Culture the malaria. We can’t get malaria-infected blood from the source (i.e. humans) because they would have been treated before the malaria is transmissible to mosquitoes, so we grow it in flasks. These require a lot of care, with hours of staring down microscopes to check the parasites are still there and to see whether they are ready to infect a mosquito with.

(3) Do my experiments! I carry out behavioural experiments to compare the infected and uninfected mosquitoes. These could be flying mosquitoes down a wind tunnel to see which smell they prefer – which has to be done in the dark, as these are night feeders – or putting a sock on a cage (mosquitoes love human foot odour) to see how many mosquitoes try to bite it. I also look at the responses of the mosquito antennae to different odours, hooking the antennae up to a circuit to see if a signal is sent to the brain in response to specific chemicals. This is a brilliant way of identifying new semiochemicals (chemicals that affect the insect’s behaviour).

The wind tunnel

The wind tunnel

Once we know more about the response of infected mosquitoes to specific chemicals, we hope to develop an odour for traps that will target mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasites. This will prevent them being able to bite people and transmit the disease. Currently, around 1 million people a year die of malaria worldwide, with millions more affected, and any progress we can make towards reducing the spread of the disease is incredibly important.

Who’s the Pest? events and installation run until 16 May.

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Deer and the Human Voice

Posted on 26 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall

Dr David Reby, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sussex, will be presenting a demonstration at The Voice on Friday 1 March at Wellcome Collection. In this post he explores the connections between the larynxes of deer and humans.

What can deer tell us about the evolutionary origins of our voice? We all know that, overall, men’s voices are lower-pitched than women’s, and most of the time we are able to recognise someone’s gender simply from listening to them, for example over the telephone.

In order to understand the basis of this difference, it is necessary to look at how the human voice is produced. According to the source-filter theory of voice production, we generate our voice in two stages. The first stage takes place inside the larynx (our “voice box”), where the vibrations of the vocal folds creates a sound wave characterised by its “fundamental frequency”. Men have lower pitched voices because they have much longer vocal folds that vibrate at a lower frequency.

Then, in the second stage, this source soundwave is filtered in the speaker’s vocal tract, whose resonance properties affect the timbre of the voice. In fact, changing the shape of our vocal tract to modulate its resonances enables us to produce different vowels when we articulate the sounds of speech.

Then, in the second stage, this source soundwave is filtered in the speaker’s vocal tract, whose resonance properties affect the timbre of the voice. In fact, changing the shape of our vocal tract to modulate its resonances enables us to produce different vowels when we articulate the sounds of speech.

But here too, because men have longer vocal tracts than women, their voice is characterised by lower resonances, giving them a more “baritone”, “deeper” quality, which is a key dimension of the gender of men’s voices.

Interestingly, men’s vocal tracts are on average 20% longer than women’s, giving them deeper voices than expected from the relatively small differences in body size between the two sexes. This suggests that over evolutionary time these differences may have been accentuated as a result of sexual selection. How can we investigate this hypothesis?

This is where deer can help us. Indeed, because their sexual calls are extraordinarily diverse, ranging from almost infrasonic low-pitched groans to extremely high-pitched bugles, deer provide an ideal model for understanding the evolution of mammal vocal signals.

For example, like human males, Scottish red deer stags have a longer vocal tract than females, and are even capable of extending it further when they roar (the arrows on the illustration point at the stag’s larynx or Adam’s apple):

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This enables them to produce extremely low resonances, making them sound much bigger than they actually are. Experimental research suggests that sexual selection may have favoured males that were capable of extending their vocal tract to sound more attractive to females and more threatening to rival males.

These observations are interesting because they may provide an explanation for why human males have a longer vocal tract, and therefore deeper voices than women. And indeed, recent work has shown that in humans men tend to rate deeper male voices as more physically and socially dominant. This suggests that in our species too, size exaggeration in the context of male competition may be at the origin of voice differences between males and females.

Finally, this size exaggeration hypothesis may also help in understanding why, unlike most mammals, deer and humans have a descended larynx, an adaptation that may ultimately have facilitated the evolution of human speech in our species.

The Voice takes place at Wellcome Collection on Friday 1 March. Find out more about David Reby’s work

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Voices of the Dead

Posted on 11 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall

In the video above, the composer, roboticist and sound historian Sarah Angliss demonstrates a contemporary voice recording made using an Edison phonograph, an entirely mechanical device that requires no wires or batteries. In the post below, she describes some of the ideas she will be exploring in her talk at The Voice on Friday 1 March at Wellcome Collection.

In 1933 Howard Flynn heard a dead woman speak. The strange encounter happened in his record company storeroom, where he found an old wax cylinder lying undisturbed in a sealed mahogany box. Flynn had seen cylinders like this before. In the earliest days of sound recording, sounds were stored as grooves etched into the wax. But this one was covered in mildew, which obscured its surface like moss on a gravestone. Undeterred, Flynn slipped the cylinder onto an old phonograph, wound the phonograph handle to make the cylinder spin, then placed the machine’s playback stylus onto the wax. At first, he heard nothing but rumbling and popping as the stylus skidded over the mildew. But a few seconds later, he heard a woman speaking clearly but faintly – a voice that had been lost for many years:

‘When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life.’

Flynn was listening to the only surviving recording of Florence Nightingale, a message she’d recorded on wax in July 1890 to raise funds for destitute veterans of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Nightingale left one other sentence: a blessing to her comrades at Balaclava. But today, it’s the opening 50 seconds of her message which are so striking. Working in the military hospitals of the Crimea, Nightingale knew better than anyone that the dead were dead. Yet, in the little time she had to leave a trace on the wax, she spoke about the prospect of her recorded voice surviving the grave.

Just as the photograph could keep a visible trace of someone after death, the phonograph could keep a vocal trace. Thomas Edison, its inventor, made his first public phonograph recordings in 1877 using cylinders covered in tin foil. Within a year, he was experimenting with recordings on wax. Although there had been earlier attempts to capture sound using soot on glass, his was the first device which could record and play back sound. Nightingale wasn’t alone in having a slightly morbid reaction to the disembodied voices that emanated from his machine. Shortly after hearing a tinfoil recording in Edison’s lab, a reporter for Scientific American remarked on ‘the startling possibility of the voices of the dead being reheard’, adding:

“When it becomes possible, as it doubtless will, to magnify the sound, the voices of such singers as Parepa and Titiens will not die with them, but will remain as long as the metal in which they may be embodied will last.”

As an electronic composer, I often work with disembodied voices, treating them more like plasticine or daubs of paint than vocal recordings as I cut, splice, timestretch, repitch, layer, retrograde and otherwise use them to create music. I’m part of a tradition that began with Edison’s early experiments in the 1870s. I’m fascinated by the time when people first heard a voice that was disembodied – the eeriness of this encounter. When their voices have been immortalised in sound recordings, the dead never seem to fully leave us. To the listener, they continue to exist in a disembodied, unresponsive limbo, only limited by the lifetime of the wax cylinder, vinyl record, hard disk or other medium where their sounds are captured. We are so used to hearing deceased strangers, we rarely stop to think about its oddity, for instance when we sing a teenage love song performed by someone buried 40 years ago. Or when we watch an old television sitcom and find ourselves joining in with the laughter of the dead.

The Voice takes place at Wellcome Collection on Friday 1 March. You can find out more about Sarah’s work at www.sarahangliss.com.

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Installing the bone chandelier

Posted on 6 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall

It’s not often that Wellcome Collection hosts a work as physically imposing as Jodie Carey’s ‘bone chandelier’ In The Eyes of Others which features in Death: A self-portrait. Installing it was a challenge: the timelapse film above, by Ben Gilbert, shows the chandelier being assembled  over the course of a week. Our Exhibitions & Touring Manager Jane Holmes explains how we did it.

The artwork In The Eyes of Others by Jodie Carey weighs 2 tonnes and is 13 and a half feet high. It is actually the smallest of three chandeliers that Jodie has created. Due to the weight and height, we could only situate the artwork in the atrium area of the gallery, which has two existing steel beams that could be used for support. We invited Jodie to see the space before installing the work: she was delighted with it, because she loved the idea of visitors encountering the chandelier unexpectedly, and also of the chandelier entirely inhabiting the space.

After discussing the logistics of the installation with Jodie, the next step was to commission a structural engineer to work out the dimensions of a new structural beam with hook that could be supported off the two existing steel beams, enabling the chandelier to be centred in the space.

The chandelier itself was installed using a block and chain placed over the beam. The central steel frame was put together at ground level and hoisted up to allow each plaster bone to be wired to the frame individually. As the number of bones on the chandelier grew and the framework was filled, the chandelier was hoisted a little higher towards the beam, to allow the artist to install the bones at the next level.

When the chandelier was completely finished, we all watched anxiously as it was transferred from the hook of the tackle to the hook on the steel beam by a technician on a scissor lift. Thankfully the changeover was very smooth and we could all breathe out again!

Death: A Self-portrait runs until 24 February.

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Bringing Death to life

Posted on 5 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall
The cast of Mortal: A drama

The cast of Mortal: A drama

Wellcome Collection’s Youth Programme is working with producer Elizabeth Lynch and a cast of ten teenagers. Together they have devised a theatrical response to our exhibition ‘Death: A self-portrait’. Here cast member Hannah gives an inside account of the devising process of Mortal: A drama.  

Death lurks near the jostling mass of London Euston station. Wellcome Collection’s exhibition ‘Death: A self-portrait’ leaves no (grave)stone unturned in exploring the visual representation of Death throughout the ages: from contemporary wire sculptures of the Grim Reaper to medieval tapestries of peasants falling into eternal damnation. A company of young actors, myself included, are using this morbid ephemera as inspiration for devising a piece of theatre that brings this exhibition, ironically, ‘to life’.

‘Mortal: A drama’ explores the devastating, gruesome and sometimes humorous aspects of death. Our fascination with death, as humans, has always had a theatrical quality to it, from the spectator sport of medieval witch-burnings to the final speeches of Shakespearian tragedies to the cult following behind the ‘Bunny Suicides’ merchandise today.

This entire play has been devised entirely within the company, from discussions about personal experiences and our ‘gut’ reactions to stimulus material. Director Elizabeth Lynch comments on the challenge of broaching such a sensitive subject matter with a group of relative strangers, commenting: “People come to different things at different stages of their lives. [Someone] may have been bereaved at an early age and therefore have a more profound understanding of death than a 35-year-old”. Although this is not a verbatim piece, the text we are working with has been taken straight from words spoken by members of the company, or directly from the written comments of visitors to the exhibition, and has simply been transposed into the mouths of different actors. This method, according to Lynch, is the best way of generating words that have genuine emotional authenticity, without there being any pressure on the actor to re-live their individual experiences or ‘bare their soul’ on stage.

‘Mortal: A drama’ is certainly not a traditional ‘aesthetically pleasing’ piece of theatre. It is jarring and surreal to watch, with periods of destructive dancing juxtaposed with reimagined reality television that judges the dramatic value of contestants’ deaths. Lynch firmly didn’t want to create a piece of theatre that just allows the audience to sit back and ‘enjoy’; she wanted to stimulate in the individual an ‘intellectual, emotional and sensual’ response.

As a company, our aim is to get the audience to think about the implications of their own deaths. If you died tomorrow, what are the things you wish you’d never said or done? What would your fantasy funeral be like? What objects would your family keep as mementos of you?

‘Life’ is intrinsic to a good performance, because actors need to feed off the energies of the audience and their fellow performers. The physical vibrancy of this piece and the youth of the company mean that this play could be seen to be more of a celebration of life than a dialogue with death. The only thing we know for certain about this life is that we get one shot at it. So let’s make the most of it!

Mortal: A drama can be seen at Wellcome Collection on Thursday 14 February at 18.30, Sunday 17 February at 15.00 (BSL interpreted) and Thursday 21 February at 19.30. Tickets are free.

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Breathing for Speech

Posted on 4 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall

Neuroscientist Sophie Scott will be speaking at The Voice, an evening event on Friday 1 March at Wellcome Collection that explores the unexpected qualities of voices in all their forms. Here, she explains the importance of breathing for our ability to talk.

For animals with lungs, breathing is obviously central to life, making metabolism possible. What can be somewhat less obvious is that for humans, breathing is also central to speech, and the way that we breathe when we speak is very different to the way that we breathe to stay alive (called metabolic breathing). If you use a breath belt to look at the movements of the rib cage during metabolic breathing, you see a very regular, almost sinusoidal profile of expansion as air is drawn in, followed by an elastic contraction that forces air out:

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When we breathe to speak, we breathe very differently, taking in a breath and then using our intercostal muscles and diaphragm to control a fine flow of air through our larynx. This enables us to produce a (relatively) lengthy utterance and to control aspects of the loudness and pitch of our voice. Although we think of speech as being to do with our larynx and our articulators, our voices are only really possible at all because of how we breathe.

We start to breathe for speech by using our intercostal muscles initially to prevent air from flooding out through the larynx, and to keep a constant pressure of air at the larynx (called subglottal pressure). Towards the end of a breath, we need to use our intercostal muscles to squeeze air out, and if you keep speaking long after you want to take another breath, your voice starts to fall apart, as this soundclip demonstrates:

The next image shows what happens to the movements of my chest wall (reflecting the actions of the intercostal muscles) when I speak this way. You can see that, unlike metabolic breathing, the movements of the intercostal muscles are much more constant, and that as I keep speaking without taking another breath, the intercostal muscles are starting to squeeze the air out – followed by a big inspiration as I take another breath – then some rapid spasms of the intercostal muscles, which is due to me laughing!

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Strikingly, we can only breathe this way because we walk upright, which means that we don’t need to use our ribcages to support our weight. If you try and speak while using your ribcage to support your weight – for example, while doing press-ups – you get a sense of how hard this would be. The development of this fine control of our intercostal muscles was central to the evolution of human speech, and although we don’t typically think much about how we breathe to speak, we in fact have as much fine control of our intercostal muscles as we have of our fingers.

The fine flow of air from our lungs is just the start of the story of speech, but it’s an essential and often overlooked aspect. Of course, breath control is central to other ways that we use our voices – to sing, beat box or rap – and I’ll be discussing breathing and the human voice in greater detail in my talk.

The Voice takes place at Wellcome Collection on Friday 1 March.

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Access all objects

Posted on 31 January, 2013 by Danny Birchall
The Thing Is....

The Thing Is….

At Wellcome Collection we aim to make our exhibitions and events as accessible as possible, and this often means thinking outside the box – sometimes literally. As with many other museums, much of our collection lies in glass cabinets, so we have to ask ourselves: what are the ways we can take these objects out of their display cases and make them more accessible to our visitors? Catherine Walker explains more.

We can’t always change the physical space in our exhibitions, especially with valuable or delicate objects, but as Visitor Services staff we can use our skills to make objects more accessible. As a team we work hard to improve our levels of engagement across the board and to break down barriers to the collection. We want to make everyone feel welcome in the museum and it certainly doesn’t make sense to exclude anyone when we are in a position to reach as wide an audience as possible. We therefore provide several different ways of engaging – for example, through multimedia guides, speech-to-text and British Sign Language interpreted tours, audio-described events, and a growing handling collection. These make our collection more accessible, but they also encourage people to enjoy the collection in new ways.

One of the aspects of the visitor experience that I work on particularly is our offer to blind and partially sighted visitors. When developing our offer we considered focusing on audio guides; however, one of the things the Visitor Services team pride ourselves on is our personality. There is a lot of room for each Visitor Services Assistant to have their own interests and to interact with people as individuals. For example, while other venues might have standardised tour scripts, we research and write our own, focusing on our own expertise. We wanted to translate this personality to our provision for blind and partially sighted visitors and offer personalised tours rather than audio guides. This now means that we can offer flexible visits, led by the visitor, that will hopefully encourage a deeper level of engagement. Guided tours also allow us to counter some of the physical difficulties blind and partially sighted visitors might have; we can alert them to physical changes in the space, give them the space to get close to objects and describe the details that might be difficult to make out.

It is also a great experience for the Visitor Services Assistants leading the tours. Orla O’Donnell says: ‘I have really enjoyed doing audio-described tours. They have allowed me to gain a new skill but also allowed me to interact with blind and partially sighted visitors, which has been the best part for me.’ It has also been a really enjoyable experience for me personally. We get to meet lots of really interesting people, and  audio description enables us to have conversations with more of our visitors. It means that we can get their perspective on objects in the gallery and what interests them. It becomes a discussion and a sharing of knowledge – an opportunity you don’t always get, especially when giving a tour to 20 people. It certainly adds to our confidence as a team. We are proud to offer flexible tours, allowing visitors to drop in at any time. Once our Visitor Service Assistants learn audio description skills, these can be applied to any object, creating flexibility and removing the need for rehearsal or too much preparation. The fact that our team is confident enough to provide a tour like this is a testimony to the training and to our staff.

The audio description training was provided by VocalEyes, a charity that provides audio description support for a range of venues, from museums to theatres. Implementing this training has been another enjoyable aspect of the experience, including working with the people at VocalEyes and going out to local community groups to encourage visitors to the museum. Out of this experience, we not only have more people visiting the museum but are also getting repeat visits. People enjoy the museum and want to come back, and we have a really positive presence on many blogs for blind and partially sighted visitors.

Now our offer has developed from audio description tours of the galleries to audio-described events. We have an event series called ‘The Thing Is…’, which is based around a mystery object. It is a discussion-based event exploring objects from our founder Henry Wellcome’s collection. We have adapted it to include an audio-described tour of relevant objects in the galleries, or of library material. We then describe the room in which the event takes place and the object the discussion is based around, so users get a ‘sneak peak’ before the talk begins.

For us it feels like we have achieved a lot in the year and a half we have been developing this offer. We had our first audio description event in April 2011, and now we have a regular audience within the community that wants to engage further with our collection. We have also trained more members of staff, so there is even more flexibility in our offer, and it is going from strength to strength.

For more information about our accessibility offer, please see our website. If you are interested in attending our events or if you have any questions about access at Wellcome Collection, you can call 020 7611 2222 or email access@wellcomecollection.org.

Catherine Walker is a Visitor Services Duty Manager at Wellcome Collection.

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The making of Death: A picture album

Posted on 28 January, 2013 by Danny Birchall

The film above gives a flavour of the hard work that goes into producing a publication like our new publication Death: A picture album. Here is a behind-the-scenes view from Kirty Topiwala, Commissioning Editor, and Marianne (‘Maz’) Dear, Senior Graphic Designer.

1. Concept

We first started thinking about the book early in the summer of 2012. Having spoken to the exhibitions team, we sat down with the images and information we had about the show. Given the visual impact of the work in the exhibition and the limited time we had to produce something, we agreed that the publication should be simple, beautiful and picture-based. We also wanted it to work both as a fitting souvenir of the exhibition and as a book that would standalone and have a ‘life’ after the show had ended.

At first, we considered a postcard book or box. Then, inspired by the black-and-white snapshots and postcards from Richard Harris’s collection, Maz suggested producing an ornate, old-fashioned photograph album, with images that would look as though they had been collected and stuck in. We consulted our printer, Murray Arbiter at Arbiter Drucken, about what would be possible and what we could afford. It was surprising what cost the most! Boxes and metal clasps were out, but a clothbound hardback was just inside our budget. We explored that idea further and after reworking it several times eventually came up with the final concept: an elegant picture book that feels like an old-fashioned keepsake.

2. Cover design

Maz spent many hours rummaging through old source books for antique patterns and then re-drew them by hand to incorporate deathly elements: the bones, clocks, moths and ravens and the skull. Much discussion went into these designs. Maz tweaked the birds to look more menacing, then less menacing, and finally more menacing again. We tried several different skulls, including one looking to the side (too creepy) and one that was almost smiling (too cheerful), before we finally stuck on the current model. The yellow background was chosen to fit in with the colour scheme of the exhibition and the posters. We hoped there would be a subtle visual link between them, and that the colour would make the book stand out on a crowded bookshelf.

3. Images

We thought it would be easy to select the images we needed, as all the works were from one collection. We were wrong. Most of the items hadn’t been photographed and, to make matters worse, they were sitting packaged up in crates in a dock in Chicago waiting to be shipped to London. We had no choice but to send our trusty photographer, Ben Gilbert, on an emergency transatlantic trip to the Windy City, where he set up a makeshift studio and photographed hundreds of the items for us and the press team. Ben, we couldn’t have done it without you!

4. Print

It might look simple, but it took serious work, multiple tests and a few migraines to get the final printed product right. We wanted Maz’s ornate cover design to be pressed into the surface of the cloth cover to make it tactile and feel more special.To get this effect means using an old-fashioned technique known as foil debossing, where hot metal plates stamp the design through a thin layer of foil into the cloth. Murray tried several types of black foil before we found the right one.

In the midst of this panic, we discovered that the yellow cloth sample we had been carefully matching to the gallery paint and posters was, in fact, sun-bleached. This meant that the hundreds of metres of cloth we had ordered from a special supplier in Holland was the wrong colour. It was at this point we started to think we weren’t going to make it…

5. The finished product

I’m pleased to say, however, that we got there in the end. This book did, at times, make us lose the will to live (which was apt for a book about death), but we’re all immensely proud of the result. We like to think that it’s a beautiful object in its own right rather than just a normal ‘catalogue’, and it’s wonderful to see that the buyers in our shop seem to feel the same way.

You can buy ‘Death: A picture album’ at Wellcome Collection, or order it online.

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Technology and Tinseltown: The legacy of Salvatore Ferragamo

Posted on 5 December, 2012 by Danny Birchall

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Fashion historian Amber Butchart will be discussing the iconography and cultural history of shoes, from classical Greece to glam rock, at On Pointe this Thursday – part of our Rhythm is a Dancer series. Here, she shows how the history of one of Hollywood’s most fashionable shoemakers can tell us about class, prestige, gender and power, as well as the innovations that drive the evolution of design.

Ferragamo is one of the most coveted footwear brands on the red carpet, yet few people know that the association with the film industry stretches right back to the silent era. Salvatore Ferragamo’s career spanned the Golden Age of Hollywood. He forged early links with the Dream Factory; he moved from Italy to the USA at a young age and bought the ‘Hollywood Boot Shop’ in Santa Barbara in 1919. The company did so well under his guidance that he opened a branch in Hollywood in 1923, where he remained until 1927, when he returned to Italy and started his own company.

His time spent among the glitterati of the silent era certainly paid off, and throughout the rest of his life he was known for his strong ties to Hollywood. In 2006, long after the death of the founder, the company was even awarded the Rodeo Drive Walk of Style Award for its perpetual contributions to the worlds of fashion and cinema.

But Ferragamo was not one to ride on the coat-tails of his famous clientele. He was obsessed with making shoes that were both beautiful and comfortable, and while the former came easily, he studied anatomy to gain a greater understanding of how to increase the latter. He used plumb-lines – previously the preserve of architects and engineers – to establish where the most support was needed in the shoe, which he discovered was the arch of the foot. He developed specialist steel shanks, which he patented in 1929 and 1958, that kept his shoes very light but gave added strength, while other shoemakers at the time were using card or leather.

Ferragamo’s return to Florence in the late 1920s sparked an interest in unconventional fabrics. The city was celebrated for its manufacture of straw, which inspired Salvatore to revive its use in shoe design. Plant fibres have long been used in shoe construction, but by the early 1930s had fallen out of favour, superseded by hard-wearing materials such as leather and kidskin. His ‘Pompeian by Ferragamo’ range was launched in 1930 using woven raffia – from the leaves of an east African palm – for uppers.

Ferragamo’s desire to innovate stepped up a notch in the wake of the Great Depression. By the early 1930s his business faced bankruptcy, and sanctions placed on Italy after Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 ensured that the shoe-buying public were certainly not in the financial position to afford hand-crafted luxury goods. In the run-up to World War II, various materials that were vital for shoemaking became scarce as they were commandeered for military use. The story goes that Salvatore bought a box of chocolates for his mother and became entranced with the strong, brightly coloured transparent cellophane they were wrapped in. He began experimenting and soon incorporated it into his designs.

As steel was reappropriated for the war effort, and increasingly difficult to obtain owing to economic sanctions, Ferragamo needed to find a suitable replacement for his patented steel shanks. Using Sardinian cork, Ferragamo was able to fill in the space between the sole and the heel, creating extra height with comfort. Not seen in shoe design since ancient Greece, the corked wedge went on to become one of the fashion triumphs of the 1940s.

The career of Salvatore Ferragamo highlights the importance of technological innovation, yet not at the expense of the fantastical dream-weaving side of fashion. The company’s affiliations with Hollywood last to this day, and the eponymous museum in Florence is a dedicated showspace for his iconic designs. His story is also a reminder that fashion, and design in general, never exists outside of contemporary politics and culture. The history of innovation is intrinsically bound to the continual desire to adapt and survive.

Read more of Amber’s work at Theatre of Fashion.

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