Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

The collections in the museum include natural history; geology; local, national and international archaeology, including an Egyptology section; history; pottery including English delftware. The art gallery contains works from all periods, including many by internationally famous artists, as well as a collection of modern paintings of Bristol.

The building is of Edwardian Baroque architecture.

The main hall is stunning. 

Hanging from the middle of the ceiling is a replica of the first aircraft built in Bristol. It is one of three made for the film Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines in 1965.

The entrance to the Egyptology section

Banksy, Paint Pot Angel (cast in resin with commercial paint, on a painted wooden base, 2009)

Banksy has altered a statue of an angel - the sort that you might find in a cemetery or a garden centre - by tipping a paint pot on its head. The intention is to challenge what people expect to see in a museum like this and question the value we place on art.

A plateosaurus





A different view from the first floor

Lots of art on the landings and stairs, including:

John Craxton, Creatures in a Mountain Landscape, 1950-51.

Doris Brabham Hatt, Brandon Hill, 1931, (oil on canvas)

Kehinde Wiley, Mojisola Elufowoju, (from the Yellow Wallpaper series), 2020, (oil on linen)

Ken Armitage, Moon Figure, 1948, (bronze)

Jacob Epstein, Kathleen, 1935, (bronze)

Nagae Shigekazu,  Forms in Succession 1, 2012, (slip-cast porcelain)

Casting is usually seen as an industrial method for mass-producing everyday ceramics, but Nagae transcends this stereotyope with his experimental sculptures. For his series Forms in Succession he first casts two thin porcelain pieces with razor-sharp edges using moulds and hangs them together in the middle of the kiln. This causes the pieces to sag, creating a sculpture with a sense of organic movement.

The Egyptology Gallery:

I went in the Egyptology gallery in search of Fayoum.

There were mummy cases

and one Fayoum.

Jessica Ashman, Those That Do not Smile Will Kill Me, Decolonising Jamaican Flora. Installation, part of current exhibition.

Ashman's installation challenges the Enlightenment version of scientific research. She explores the history of European colonisers and the extraction and exploitation of Jamaica's natural resources and people. She is creating an alternative narrative that explores how Indigenous and African-Jamaicans used plants to resist their enslavement. 

She has conjured three figures: two women foraging and planting and a deity. They embody rebellion through the magic of  horticulture. The rebellion included growing food to eat and sell, harvesting plants for medicine and birth control, hallucinogens to connect to spirituality and even poisons.The title of the installation is a proverb about the Jamaican fruit, ackee: when the fruit does not split or 'smile', it is poisonous.