MUSE Issue 13, March 2016
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Issue 13, March 2016 Detail from a 4th century BC South Italian wine Detail from a 4th century BC South Italian wine jug with imagery of a Persian. Nicholson Museum. Magazine of Sydney University Museums In this issue 02 Alpha and Omega 17 Tombs of time 32 Rites of passage Opening with a unique flower, Pottery from an Early Two students take a close an exhibition in the Nicholson Bronze Age cemetery in look at Indonesian cultures Museum honours the old and Cyprus reveals a great through exquisite objects in Towards a looks forward to the new. experimentation with form. the Macleay Museum. new museum 04 Dušan Marek: 21 Microscopic abstractions 34 Making history art/film post 1960 Images from under the All the news on University David Ellis. Photograph We explore the multitalented microscope rendered of Sydney museums: talks, A word from the Director by Martin Ho Czech exile and surrealist’s large form intriguing works acquisitions, VIP visits, new painting and filmmaking. by an emerging artist. staff, overseas trips, theatre. 08 Gene genius 24 Visions for the Macleay 36 Find your muse Gregor Mendel uncovered Architecture students apply For your diary: everything We had an extraordinary year in 2015 As part of their studio curriculum, our own a whole new scientific field in their considerable skills to that’s coming up at Sydney on so many fronts. architecture students were asked to propose the humble garden pea. We devise stunning designs for University Museums over conceptual designs for the new museum. celebrate his work. a new museum. the next few months. With more than 120,000 visitors – a 15 percent They certainly rose to the challenge: see increase on 2014 – it was a record year. page 24 for some of their brilliant ideas. Most notably, we secured significant funding 11 Stone age Stanley knife 28 Grave secrets Artefacts from our prehistoric Roman marble funerary stones for the new Chau Chak Wing Museum. This We will keep you up to date with the past reveal a shared humanity: offer a glimpse into lives long will see the collections of the Macleay and development of the Chau Chak Wing Museum developing cognition and skills past and encourage us to Nicholson Museums and the University Art in future issues of and, from March, on Muse that could be passed on. contemplate our own mortality. Collection consolidated into the one site in a our website: sydney.edu.au/museums refurbishment of the Macleay and Edgeworth David Buildings along with a contemporary Two new exhibitions are opening at the 14 Women in Power 31 Donations extension to link the two. Nicholson Museum. Sea and sky: art in ancient Chancellor Belinda Hutchinson Sydney University Museums Cyprus opens in February while Alpha to AM’s speech, read by alumna acknowledges the help This critical infrastructure will transform Omega: the beginning and the end opens in Anne Summers, to open an and contributions of our From the cover: detail from a 4th century BC South Italian the way we use the University’s cultural March (see page 2). important exhibition. many supporters. wine jug with imagery of a Persian. Nicholson Museum and scientific collections in teaching and NM97.185. Photo: Carl Bento. research and greatly expand our capacity for At the Art Gallery, Women in Power continues One of the objects from the exhibition Alpha & Omega. community engagement through exhibitions until 8 April when it will be followed by a See story page 2-3. and related programs. Visitors to the new survey of late works by surrealist artist museum will see far more of the collections Dušan Marek (see page 4), opening on 18 April. than they can at present. Opening at the Macleay in conjunction with Sydney University Museums Macleay Museum Muse edited by Michael Turner. Produced by the continuing Written in Stone exhibition is Comprising the Macleay Museum, Macleay Building, Gosper Lane Marketing and Communications, the University Architects for the project will be Sydney firm Rapid Prototyping – Models of Climate Change Nicholson Museum and University Art Gallery (off Science Road) of Sydney, March 2016. 16/5400 +61 2 9036 5253 ISSN 1449‑0420 ABN 15 211 513 464 Johnson Pilton Walker. We selected these by PhD candidate Kate Dunn. Open Monday to Friday, 10am to 4.30pm and +61 2 9351 5646 (fax) CRICOS 00026A architects because of their experience in the first Saturday of every month 12 to 4pm [email protected] Closed on public holidays. designing museums (including the National Please check our website for details: General admission is free. Nicholson Museum Forest Stewardship Council Portrait Gallery in Canberra) and the adaptive – sydney.edu.au/museums In the southern entrance to the Quadrangle (FSC®) is a globally recognised Become a fan on Facebook and +61 2 9351 2812 certification overseeing all fibre re‑use of heritage buildings. They enjoy follow us on Twitter. +61 2 9351 7305 (fax) sourcing standards. This provides [email protected] guarantees for the consumer that a strong international reputation and are David Ellis products are made of woodchips Sydney University Museums Administration from well‑managed forests, other accustomed to working on projects valued at Director, Museums and Cultural Engagement +61 2 9351 2274 University Art Gallery controlled sources and reclaimed more than $20 million. We are delighted to +61 2 9351 2881 (fax) War Memorial Arch, the Quadrangle material with strict environmental, [email protected] +61 2 9351 6883 economical and social standards. welcome them to the project. +61 2 9351 7785 (fax) Education and Public Programs [email protected] To book a school excursion, an adult education tour or a University heritage tour +61 2 9351 8746 [email protected] 1 Alpha and Omega – As the University prepares for its new is applied to still‑wet plaster. As the plaster dries, the pigments in the paint flagship museum, an alphabetically are absorbed, ensuring that the colours arranged exhibition comprises an elegy remain vivid. to the past even as it anticipates the The style of the painting is future, writes Michael Turner. impressionistic and typical of the time of the emperor Nero (54‑68AD), a period that fits nicely with the redecoration necessary in many villas around the Bay of Naples following the earthquake of 62AD and before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD. Cut – some may say vandalised – from a much larger scene on the lower zone of Alpha and Omega: The Beginning and the End the foothills of the Apennines on the border a painted wall, it shows what appears to opens in the Nicholson Museum in March. It between Tuscany and Umbria (Book 5.6, Letter be an iris albicans, a type of iris common will be the last major exhibition in the museum to Domitius Apollinaris). in the Bay of Naples area even today. before we move to the Chau Chak Wing Museum in 2018. In his villa is a wall decorated with trees and In his Natural History (Book 21. 40‑42), birds. In the garden are clipped box hedges Pliny the Elder (23‑79 AD) describes the The exhibition explores things mysterious and obelisks, bushes cut in the shape of iris as being prized for both its exquisite and beautiful across all three collections: the animals, beds of acanthus, a rose garden, perfume and its root, which was used Nicholson Museum, the Macleay Museum and plane trees linked by garlands of ivy, fruit in medicine and for the making of the University Art Gallery. Each letter of the trees, water features and marble seats. There ointments and perfumes. He writes that Greek alphabet will introduce an object or are contemporary descriptions of the Roman the Illyrian iris was multicoloured like objects with stories to tell. countryside in Virgil’s Georgics and Eclogues. the rainbow, hence the name: in Greek Indeed in the 17th and early 18th centuries, mythology, Iris is the winged female To begin at the beginning … no self‑respecting garden designer in England personification of the rainbow. would set to work without a copy of Pliny in one * alpha for ἄνθος: anthos , a flower hand, Virgil in the other. Michael Turner is Senior Curator at the Nicholson Museum. αWith their flowers and trees, fountains and Painted on plaster, this picture of a flower is Above: Fragment of a Roman wall painting birds, wall paintings are a haunting reminder of nearly 2000 years old, and comes from the wall * of an iris, 60-79 AD anthos: as in agapanthus (the flower how beautiful Roman gardens must once have of a villa such as Pliny’s. Volcanic inclusions Nicholson Museum of love); acanthus (the sharp flower); NM80.49. Photo: been. Added to this visual feast are the writings in the plaster suggest that the villa was in, or Carl Bento. anthology (literally, a collection of Pliny the Younger (61‑113 AD), who describes close to, Pompeii or Herculaneum. It has been of flowers). in detail his villa and gardens at Tifernum in painted in the true fresco style by which paint 2 3 Dušan Marek: art/film post 1960 – Surrealist, Imagine the plight of a 23‑year‑old that Marek was referencing an Czechoslovakian refugee, forced exotic repertoire of surrealist visionary, painter, to flee his homeland in the wake iconography to express his filmmaker, outsider. of the Stalinist occupation in 1948 sense of dislocation, alienation and who, after many dangers, and homelessness – a message Guest curator adventures and dislocations, arrives that failed to resonate among Stephen Mould in Australia, eventually settling in prospering postwar Australians. Adelaide. He knows little of that city introduces an except its reputation as the “city of During the early 1950s, Marek exhibition of works churches”, which plants in his mind lived a peripatetic existence, the an erroneous connection with the recognition he sought eluding by multitalented city of Prague.