Blog yr Amgueddfa – Amgueddfa Cymru

My name is Arnie. I am an eight and a half year old Labrador retriever cross and I am a dog with a job. I am a guide to my human, the one called ‘Mum’.

We have been partners for seven years and she has very poor vision. Although she can see colour and shape, she has no depth vision and lives in a blurry world. My role is to keep her safe, stopping her from bumping into things and causing chaos.

This has been particularly important on our trips to one of our favourite places, National Museum Cardiff. Mum loves art and history, and we have been invited to help develop their audio tours for visually impaired people like Mum.

My role during these tours hasn’t just been to keep Mum safe but also to protect the priceless antiquities, beautiful paintings and fragile exhibits from the awkward accident-prone one!

During these audio tours the museum guides describe in detail, to visually impaired visitors, their surroundings and interesting objects around them.

They also had sighted guides to help guide visually impaired people round the museum safely. Sighted guides are humans that do what I do: indicate steps, avoid objects and keep the visually impaired person safe. I think this makes a lot of sense because if they are anything like Mum they may need a little supervising.

One of the tours took us through the Evolution of Wales galleries. Our guide explained that each time the floor surface changed, it represented a movement forward in time in the story of the Earth. I took my time and stopped and tapped Mum's knee with my nose, so she knew to lift her feet and be aware of the changes in the surfaces.

I worked hard to ignore the giant bones, hanging in shapes of strange creatures, all over the place. I am sure they would have been very tasty, but I was in harness and at work!

The only part I was greatly concerned by was the terrible giant hairy creature that made a noise and moved, I tried to walk straight past and guide Mum safely out, but everyone stopped and stood to listen to one of the human guides talk about woolly mammoths and changing landscapes….? I had my eye firmly fixed on a quick exit!

Arnie Guide Dog

PS If other Guide Dogs want to take their owners on a pawsome Museum adventure, you can book a place on their audio description tours by phoning (029) 2057 3240. Woofing great!

One of the many challenges curatorial departments face, especially within the Natural Sciences, is making specimens that are stored in our collections accessible to the wider public in a form where they can get a real sense of the what these specimens actually look and feel like. There is no real substitute to having specimens on display in the galleries and being able to see the texture, shape and scale at first hand, but this not always possible as gallary space is limited and only a tiny proportion of the 3 million specimens we hold in our natural sciences collections can ever be out on display at any one time.   

The museum is undertaking a large scale project to make our collections visible online in terms of collection data and images, but an exciting technique is now allowing us to produce and display 3D models of our specimens in fantastic detail, which is probably the closest you can get to having the specimen in front of you.

3D Scanning has been around for sometime now. Back in 2012, the department of Geology (now part of the department of Natural Sciences) was a lead partner in a JISC funded project to digitise all Type fossils held in the UK. Many of our type fossils were scanned in 3D during this project and are avalible to view on the website (3d-fossils.ac.uk). However, the technology for 3D scanning has moved on rapidly in the time since, and we are fortunate to now have the one of the the most up-to-date 3D scanners available at present - the Artec Spider HD. Our new scanner allows us the capture detail beyond the level we could previously achieve, and in much less time.

The museum now has a presence on the popular 3D model web platfom SketchFab, which is host to thousands of models produced by the public as well as other museums and gallaries across the world. Making the 3D models we produce available on the is platform allows us to promote our collections to a large audience who although may already be engaged in 3D modelling, may not necessarily be engaging with museums.

We are still learning the capabilities (and limitations) of our new scanner, and discovering which specimens and objects are best suited for scanning, but over the coming months more models will be added to the museum sketchfab site and will begin to be integrated into our own online collection websites.  

During past decades changes in land use over large areas have resulted in a significant loss of natural grasslands and meadow flowers, and thus food resources and habitats for insects. The number of pollinator species has declined dramatically and this poses a threat to the pollination of commercial crops.

The Welsh Government’s Action Plan for Pollinators has resulted in a number of initiatives by local authorities and projects by charitable organisations to promote actions for increasing the areas that can sustain meadow habitats. In many places, including public parks and road verges, wild flower areas have been established to improve local environmental quality and provide suitable habitats for pollinators. This would hopefully lead to an increase in biodiversity in Wales, with more diverse plant and animal communities.

To support these initiatives and efforts by local authorities the Department of Natural Sciences of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales offers workshops utilising its collections and knowledge. The Botany Section held a meadow plants identification workshop for Torfaen County Borough Council staff. The day began with an introduction to meadow plants, meadow ecology and pollination. This was followed by a hands-on session looking at flowers commonly found in meadows with the aid of microscopes. The workshop was lively and interesting and catered for a range of botanical experience.

To help identification we provided an information pack for over 60 meadow plant species. It contains descriptions and illustrations of species and information about their ecology and distribution in the British Isles.

The workshop ended with a visit to New Grove Meadows in Monmouthshire which are owned and managed by the Gwent Wildlife Trust, and which are very good examples of local, well-established and species rich wildflower meadows.

Amgueddfa Cymru’s sites support diverse Welsh habitats, which include wildflower meadows. Recently, we have transformed a corner of our most urban site, Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd-National Museum Cardiff, into a meadow and a place wildlife can thrive. This Urban Meadow and City Bees project aims to draw attention to the need for green spaces for pollinators in urban areas. The meadow is not only a good source of nectar and pollen for the bees occupying the three beehives on the Museum roof, but is also an outside learning area to inspire new meadow advocates.

Over the last few months Kate Congdon from Cardiff and the Vale College has been working on resources for ESOL (English as a Second or Other Language) students. In a previous blog I discussed how these had developed and been trialled at the college. On Thursday 8^th September we had around 300 students and 9 tutors come to St Fagans to try out the resources here on site. The resources that were trialled were for: Bryn Eryr Iron Age Roundhouses, Rhyd y Car, Gwalia Stores, St Teilo’s Church, and the Melin Bompren Corn Mill.

Shadowing some of the groups I was able to see how the students worked with the resources. All of the students were engaged with the resources and were keen to ask questions if they were unsure of the answer. By asking questions the resources were not only testing their reading ability but encouraging them to practice their spoken English. A big thank you goes to the front of house members of staff who were excellent at answering the questions in a simple and easy to understand manner.

As well as the printed versions of the resources we also trialled an iBook version of the Rhyd y Car resource which I adapted from Kate’s Rhyd y Car resource. The students that trialled this enjoyed the opportunity to use a different medium. The students appreciated that the iBook provided immediate feedback on the questions and used the iBook together with the printed version to check their answers. The only downside of the iBooks is that it is not compatible with android tablets which the college have. Therefore an alternative android version should be created to make the electronic resource more accessible.

The feedback from the students will be used to improve the resources and a finalised version will be completed in the coming months. Once they are completed we can then upload them to our website for future ESOL groups to use.

My artistic practice is multi-disciplinary and includes film, performance, design and engagement with communities. Using an investigative approach my work responds to journeys and geographical locations. Previous projects have included, an odyssey across Wales (Cerbyd), the life, death and afterlife of an elephant in Swansea and a hunt for the Beast of Bala.

From November 2015 to April 2016 I was chosen as artist in residence at Parc le Breos, Neolithic chambered tomb. During the residency I used engagement activities and film making to explore how the exposure and freedom to explore the Parc le Breos site through a host-guest scenario could give agency to the individuals involved.

Focusing on the themes of shelter, survival, hunting and rituals, I arranged a programme of regular activity for Community First groups to work with myself and local practitioners in the area sharing their expertise. Partners included Dryad, Forest Schools, Gower Unearthed and Guerrilla Archaeology who created experiences including shelter building, fire making and story telling. Over 1000 people took part in the project, many of whom had never visited Parc le Breos and the Gower before.

Amgueddfa Cymru provided a vital resource throughout - this included visiting the Museum stores with Jody Deacon, Curator: Prehistoric Archaeology (Collections and Access) to film material relating to Neolithic sites in Wales.

I was also given access to the taxidermy, scenes, models and soundtrack from the Natural History displays. This was particularly special for me; as a Cardiff boy I remember the mammoth from my school visits to the museum. The opportunity for me to return to this remarkable beast was not only nostalgic but added a sinister dimension to the project by questioning the unharmonious co-existence of the neolithic period, my own childhood memories and the present day.

A range of academics and specialists have given their time for audio interviews to be used within the film of the project including Professor Alasdair Whittle, Research Professor in Archaeology, Dr Jacqui Mulville, Reader in BioArchaeology and Roy Church, Manager of the Gower Heritage Centre. Audio was also gathered from story telling developed with the English and Maths Group based at Phoenix Centre in Townhill.

Since April I have been editing together footage and audio for my film The Chambered Cairn. The film itself opens up a variety of possibilities, suggesting that not everything is as it seems and highlighting the inevitability of change. It also hints at the hidden or unknown aspects of human development. For example, for approximately 2 million years prior to the advent of agriculture, gatherer-hunters enjoyed excellent health, social and sexual equality, very light workloads, plenty of leisure time and freedom from any form of government. The Chambered Cairn explores our evolution and migration to the British Isles and the impact of human development from hunter gathers to agriculture and domestication.

The launch of film will be on Saturday 17 September between 12.00 – 3.30pm at Gower Heritage Centre. The film will be screened in La Charrette, a 23 seated cinema, built by Gwyn Phillips, an electrician who fell in love with the movies in his youth while working as a projectionist, and began showing films in 1953 in his back garden in Gorseinon.

All are welcome.

The Chambered Cairn
La Charrette, Gower Heritage Centre
Sat 17 Sept 12-3.30pm

This project was funded and supported by Cadw, The Gower Landscape Partnership, Arts Council for Wales, Welsh Government, Heritage Lottery Fund, National Trust, Natural Resources Wales, City and County of Swansea, Cardiff University’s Guerrilla Archaeology, Amgueddfa Cymru and Gower Heritage Centre.