A visit to the Design Museum’s Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924-Today followed by a behind the scenes tour started the MMN events programme for the year.
A small, diverse group of conservators wandered around the exhibition, we were intrigued and delighted by the objects and chatted about the challenges they pose to the people who care for them. The exhibition was glamorous and beautiful, full of masterpieces of design, many instantly recognisable icons, and also quite a few new (to us) surreal discoveries. A lot of the surrealist designs would not have been possible without Modern Materials and the properties of the modern materials is sometimes precisely what makes the objects surreal.
Tom Wilson, the Head of Collections and Research at The Design Museum kindly gave a tour of their superbly organised on-site storage. We got a chance to browse the shelves and ask Tom all the questions we could think of. Their collection is relatively small at around 4000 objects, spanning from the early 1900’s to today, it is full of design classics. It consists mainly of mass produced objects, but recently they have acquired the Sir Terence Conran archive, important to them as he founded the Design Museum in Shad Thames in 1989.
Tom told us that the design museum have no staff conservator, but use the conservation register to find conservators when they need them. Tom is looking after their collection singlehandedly, only helped by a small robotic vacuum cleaner (Roomba) that sometimes get stuck in the rails for the roller racking.
Watch this space and follow us on Twitter for more visits to more and less well known museums where we can see some historic collections of modern materials.
