Crystalline: Science Week 2019

Crystalline

British Science Week 

at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery 

public event Saturday 16th March

last time, we invented crystal patterns

Abstraction

During British Science Week (9 – 16 March 2019), Buxton Museum and Art Gallery will be hosting the artist Will Hurt as part of the BM125 celebrations. Will’s work explores unusual ways of working with the minerals in the Museum collection 

During the week (11 - 15th) Will will be based in the Museum galleries working with schools and other groups. If you are interested, contact the Museum who will put you in touch with Will.

email: buxton.museum@derbyshire.gov.uk
Tel: 01629 533540

On Saturday 16^th, we are having a Minerals afternoon with all sorts of exciting things going on

With Will, you might:

• Make Mineral Sounds. Place minerals from the Museum’s collections on to turntables and listen to them make music. Custom software and webcams translate the silhouettes of minerals into audible soundscapes.
• Draw Minerals. Use an iPad to create images of your own virtual minerals. Draw geometry inspired by minerals into virtual space, choose sizes and colours then save and print your images.
• Create Mineral Abstractions. Interact with a large touchscreen to explore an audio-visual composition created in response to electron microscope images of minerals.

Musician Oliver Payne will also be joining us on the Saturday to do a short 20min sound performance using Will's Crystalline software and some of his own contraptions. 

 

Draw your own minerals

Other activities include

Growing Crystals Kits: prepare your own mineral mix so you can just “add water and wait” - grow your own crystal gardens or Borax "sort-of-snowflakes"

Make a mineral zoetrope: design and make your own flickering crystal magic lantern

 

crystals grown in earlier events - thanks, Jess!

Event details

Date: Saturday 16^th March

Time: 1 – 4pm

Joining in:

No booking needed, just drop by and join in: last new entries 3.30

Free

Materials provided

the shape and surface of a mineral gives us sound and music

Limestone and mermaids

Talking Stones!

richly fossiliferous limestone

Derwent Stories and BM125 at Altitude 2018

First there were rocks. And some lovely stones. And fossils. Chalk and limestone, granite and gabbro. Rocks to hold and think about. Trilobites, goniatites, crinoids and teeth.  We hoped these would feed into lovely puppet and word activities inspiring quiet conversation around mineral stories and the arguments of crystals.

Then it rained.

The Altitude Youth Arts Festival at the Mt Cook AdventureCentre where we were working was a lovely afternoon. There was some excellent music to keep us entertained. Songs from young musicians, dance from another young group, some quiet storytelling from others. There was a cap fire in the woods and bushcraft activities to try. And us making pebble puppets on a field while people sailed, shrikeining, down a zip wire overhead.

great fun - and he seems happy!

Great fun!

Our carefully planned activity dissolved a bit in the rain but we made some wonderful puppets all the same. We got people holding rocks. Talking about what they might find in their gardens at home or out on a walk. And they went home with some wonderfully crazy little characters….

Make your own pebble puppet: instructions will follow shortly

BM125: setting out to take the Buxton museum and Art Gallery . Follow the link above to find out more about BM125

collections out into the Peak District landscapes as part of the celebrations for the Museum's 125th birthday, Altitude gave us the chance to talk to people, show them rocks from local places, comapre these with not so local rocks, take that rocks and fossil knowledge and build characters inspired by that knowledge

DERWENT STORIES

For all our DS events, we post a "where did we go" note with advice and experience that might help people decide if they would like to go themselves on another occasion

Visiting Altitude

When: Altitude is a Youth Arts Festival within the bigger Wirksworth Festival. As such it happens once a year - watch for dates for next September

Access: activities happen at different sites. Mt Cook Adventure Centre has parking, easy access for wheelchairs and good toilets. Activities were free. The music was great. On a good day it would have been a lovely afternoon to sit on the grass with a picnic, do a bit of making, enjoy the music, and generally relax. At the Eco Centre next door there was more acoustic music

Useful links

Mt Cook Adventure Centre

Eco Centre

Altitude

Haregate Hall and crystals

Haregate Hall and stray minerals

wet tissue picture of a geode

The lively lovelies of Haregate Hall are back!

a line-up of the usual suspects

a meoment ind evelopment

After the dramas of our last Haregate entry, the Cast have glued themselves together a bit more and relationships are clearly developing...

Unfortunately, this was just a short series of workshops and my time has finished...I may never know what happened ot Lady Mary Dovery-Little, and the Brigadier and this ominous looking bishop....

This post is a bit of a chance to catch up on images. As well as the last Haregate ones, I've had a few pictures back from people who joined in Marvellous Minerals

 at Buxton Museum earlier this month

crystal picture in window

Borax and copper sulphate crystals

 With so many thanks and much laughter to the Borderland Voices Art Club and the mad scientists of Marvellous Minerals

Every stone tells a story

a very smart Marble

Every stone has a story to tell, a story spun out of a million years of growing and crumbling, heating,  freezing, cracking, melting and the heavy tread of dinosaur feet, or maybe the silent weight of mammoths or even the warm, careful hands of a cave-child

At Marsden Community Primary School in the spring of 2015, I worked with a  group of Year 3 children to find some of those stories and use the stones to inspire some new writing. We mixed children from both Year 3 classes and, at the school's invitation, parents joined us as well adding a lovely extra element to the atmosphere

From simply handling our stones and reading up on their uses, our first stone-stories were poems:

In snooker tables and mirrors,

In graveyards and floors,

Safe and solid and strong,

Brown slate will even

Let us draw on the floor

Lumpy as a camel's back,

Yellow and orange and grey,

Hard and heavy as a frying pan,

Granite begins,

Hotter than chocolate,

Hotter than tea,

Hotter than fire

Hot liquid rock

Is where granite begins

We listened to an old story where a boulder in a forest tells a single boy the first stories and he starts storytelling. We took that story and told it back to each other. We mapped it and remembered it. Our schools torytellers took their maps and stories home to tell their familes and like the boy in the story (in our telling one boy became a boy and a girl), to keep the stories spreading

We played with our words, building descriptions:

As red as a rose,

As red as blood,

As red as plums and rubies and beetroot,

As red as cherries,

As red as a volcano before it erupts

(This is actually a description of the hair that grew on Medusa's head after the animals had nibbled her snakes to freedom - but that is another story!)

And finally we gave our stones faces, with wide-mouthed puppets that took their shapes and colours and natures from the stones they started life as. Small, quick pebble-people-puppets provided an avalanche of backing vocals, rattling away like rockfalls.  The bigger stones themselves started talking. Telling their own stories. reciting the poems of their first memories, singing, sighing, arguing and shouting. Whispering their stories to anyone who would listen

Many thanks to Julie and the team at Marsden and 

to all the puppeteers and geologist, writers, 

poets and storytellers - and their parents! - at Marsden

pumice always seems to have a lot to say
- too much  hot air perhaps?

Practical points:
we worked with the core group for 4 mornings spread out over 6 weeks
afternoons were spent with the rest of those classes on similar themes
materials: I brought in some of my rock, mineral and fossil sets, adding some lovely big chunks of rock to handle

Summer stories

ready for stories

 Summer stories

Stories in school with Creeping Toad

Summer 2015

celebrating the richness of the season, here are old stories, 

new adventures and chances to create tales that

no-one has ever heard before!

With stories spinning from the first signs of spring right through to earth giants, summer flowers and thunder-tigers, here are stories and activities to enchant and inspire.

me, in action at Plas Power Woods*

I am now taking bookings for the summer term -and would welcome enquiries from schools, clubs, parks and nature reserves looking for public events, and just about anyone really! We all breathe the same air, maybe we can all enjoy the same world!

 Where

I am based in Buxton in Derbyshire and organise work spreading out from there. I am due in the north of Scotland for two definite blocks of time

Scotland

April: 20 - 29th

August 24th - September 4th

Other than that will be working across England, with a few days now and then in specific areas - Sussex for example in April and May.

So, if you're interested in a workshop get in touch and we'll sort something out

planning Arts Week? shaking your literacy up a bit? designing a celebration? hoping to get to grips with the stories of stones or the speaking and listening of your children....

Who are workshops for?

Most of my work is with school children from Reception through to the end of Primary , but activities can be adapted to suit Reception or High School students. Equally, public events might be aimed at families or shifted to suit particular audiences - I'm writing stories and poems with adult groups just now on one project and training teachers on another.

What could we do?

A day’s visit to your school might include

storytelling performances: lasting up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time

stories out of anything! outdoors or in, we'll use leaves and pine cones, twigs and stones and shells to inspire words, create poems and shape a set of stories never told before

(allow 60 minutes for a class session)

story and book workshops: taking a bit longer (allow 90 minutes for a class) as well as discovering those stories no-one has ever heard before, now we will build those into the books that no-one has ever read before and leave the classroom with a library no-one has ever visited before!

pop-up storyscapes: allow an hour for a class: gathering ideas, images and words we’ll make quick 3-d landscapes holding the essence of a story or maybe the thrills of a lifecycle in a setting, key characters and the words that set the adventure running

a shadow puppet visit to a castle

shadow stories: out of my stories might come new stories: drawing on whatever theme we are working with to create quick performances of shadow puppets. Incorporating silhouettes, translucence and transparency, we'll mix science with story to create an (almost) instant set of story performances to show or perhaps to film

Ancient Lives: add a voice from the distant past to your history topics with stories that our Stone, Bronze or Iron Age ancestors might have listened to. Stories, models, artefacts and drawings can feed into art inspired by cave paintings, carvings and jewellery

 

inspired by Celtic jewellery

Old Scotland: sets of stories drawn from a Scottish heritage: tales of clans, of heroes and villains and the wonder-tales of an ancient Celtic world

your own themes and ideas: or are you exploring a particular theme that you would like to involve some stories in? pirates….tropical islands….ancient Greeks…fairies, frogs and trolls…..where in our school would bears live?…the Great Fire of London have all featured in recent Creeping Toad projects

How much?

 £250 a day: includes storyteller’s fee, travel and materials. Can be paid on the day or I can invoice you. 

Activities can be adapted to suit groups from Reception through to Secondary

 To book: contact me (Gordon) directly at

            creepingtoad@btinternet.com

            or by telephone:

            landline: 01298 77964

            mobile: 07791 096857

you never know who, or what, will end up

 in a Creeping Toad story!

* Plas Power Woods photo c/o Laurence Crossman-Emms 

and the Woodland Trust

Hugh Miller, stonemason, geologist, writer

Book of the moment

Hugh Miller, stonemason, geologist, writer 

by Michael A Taylor, 

National Museums of Scotland, 2007 ISBN 1 905267 05 3

"the quiet enthusiasm of the true fossil hunter"

Hugh Miller would seem to have been one of those careful Victorian gentlemen* who peered and probed and revealed county flora and folklore, geology and palaeontology and who mixed science with culture and religion in an intriguing, if sometimes patronising, whole.

He was much more than this: a complex mix of pride and humility with a strong sense of his working-class Presbyterian roots and values that guided his out look and informed his attitudes through his sadly shortened life

Pterichthyodes milleri

From the environmental side of things, Miller's collections of fossils from the early 1800s are invaluable as he found, named and laid bare to our fascinated eyes the fish of the Old Red Sandstone of northern Scotland. (They are still fascinating now)

P milleri, revived 

This books weaves it way through this intriguing life and the connections and companions that inspired, helped and frustrated him. While  "quiet enthusiasm" seems right, he was also clearly ready to wade into issues and, as the editor of The Witness , Edinburgh's second-best-selling newspaper of his time, his words on suffrage, land-owneship, the Clearances and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland carried influence. 

A good read!

(* for adventurous Victorian ladies, I would recommend the outspoken and sometimes appallingly judgemental Isabella Bird - Adventures in the Rocky Mountains; and the much more sympathetic Mary Kingsley's The Congo and the Cameroons - both available in Penguin Classics edited versions)

Fossils make friends

a weekend that began with foxgloves

Our tent at the Garden pARTy

Our Ancient Landscapes project spent this weekend as an installation on the Buxton Art Trail. We entertained some 150 visitors over the weekend, inviting them to stroke, cuddle and play with our ancient creatures......capturing the essence of the Carboniferous environments that gave rise to the limestone that we live on here

WE were one of four sets of artists exhibiting in Caroline's wonderful garden: Caroline Small herself, Adrienne and Langley Brown, Caroline's Mum and Team ( cakes and tea!) and ourselves. Thanks to Langley and Ady for the tents! Our umbrellas came courtesy of High Peak Community Arts

Visitors wandered into...

block printing fossils with facepaint

ammonite arm

trilobite arm

We did discover, however, that by Day 2 the Reef was growing adventurous....

coral colonising

And then made a valiant escape attempt....

reef pretending to be foxgloves

ancient landscape and ancient limestone