Traveller’s Tails pop-up museum ©National Maritime Museum
When: Until 30th April 2017, open Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 5pm, and Sunday 11am – 4pm
Where: Lewisham Shopping Centre, Lewisham, London SE13
£: Free
What is it?
Royal Museums Greenwich has teamed up with Lewisham Shopping Centre to open Traveller’s Tails, a new interactive pop-up museum, offering visitors a hands-on opportunity to explore the collection of their local museum.
Now open to the public, the free pop-up museum focuses on the history of exploration, art and science during Captain Cook’s voyages to the Pacific. The space has been designed to showcase objects and stories from the museum’s diverse collection, sharing with the local community what is on offer at the museum, which is located a short bus ride away from Lewisham Shopping Centre.
Visitors will be able to handle a number of objects from the Pacific exploration collection, including a real kangaroo skin, as well as make their own kangaroo puppets. The audio-visual Digital Explorer gives users an interactive tour of Pacific objects within the collection, whilst arts and crafts workshops invite visitors to create their own exotic creatures for display on the pop-up museum’s drawing wall.
Inside the interactive museum ©National Maritime Museum
In addition to these activities, artists in residence Victoria Briggs, Simon Watt and Dan Rollings are running a programme of activity sessions, including Second-hand Species, where participants can draw their own versions of Pacific creatures, based entirely on description. The session places participants in the position of contemporary artists, who made artistic representations of creatures, such as kangaroos, after hearing about them for the first time from eye-witnesses on Cook’s voyage.
The pop-up museum is part of Travellers’ Tails, a HLF funded project where Royal Museums Greenwich collaborated with four partner museums in the UK to exhibit George Stubbs’s painting of a kangaroo, following the acquisition of both the kangaroo and a dingo by the museum in 2013.
The famous artworks, informed by artefacts from Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific, are the earliest images of these animals in western art. A replica of Stubbs’ Portrait of a Large Dog, depicting a dingo, is currently on display in the pop-up museum in Lewisham. It was commissioned as part of a conservation project to better understand the wax painting technique used on the original painting in 1772.
More info: travellerstails.co.uk/pop-up-museum