Museum of Now items featuring in Britain's First Human exhibit

Museum of Now is a Torquay based project working with local residents to create objects and artefacts that have meaning for them or their communities. These are inspired by responses to contemporary local and global issues and the collections at Torquay Museum.

Torquay Museum holds three extraordinary items in it’s collections, two of which will be on display in the forthcoming ‘Britian’s First Human’ show opening this Saturday, 12th September. They are small iron-age animal votives and almost nothing is known about their makers or why they were made, but they were found in a ditch near Newton Abbot and there are no others like them.

Inspired by these and the 8 animals found in Kent’s Cavern, two fathers Bobby Chancellor and Lewis Chamberlain-Drury have created four animal ‘Talismans’ that represent what they feel are valuable qualities for them living as young men in Torquay today and what they hope their sons to inherit from them.

The father’s moulded the Cave Bear, Woolly Rhino, Wolf and Woolly Mammoth out of Torquay beeswax. Having written key words onto minute pieces of paper, these words were placed, as with a fortune cookie, into the heart of the wax figure. The wax figures are then ‘lost’ as the metal is poured into the mould, using an ancient form of casting our ancestors would recognise called the ‘Lost Wax Method’.

One ‘Talisman’ will remain with the father, the other will be handed to their son. All four will go on display in the Britain’s First Human show.

Our warmest thanks goes out to Andrew Lacey and Sian Lewis for casting the animals and supporting the project whole-heartedly; to local beekeeper Mike Ticehurst for the wax and South West marine chandler Marine Bazaar for the Devon boat propeller which was melted down to create the bronze animals.

Museum of Now is generously funded by Arts Council England.

For more information visit http://www.encounters-arts.org.uk/