An Artist's Impression of Wroughton

I spent a fascinating (if rather filthy and tiring!) day on Friday at the Science Museum's 'large object' storage site out at Wroughton in Wiltshire. I was working with Ruth from the museum and Neil & Dennis who are based there to check and archive our largest ever 'object' art work - An Artists' Impression, which I am SO relieved to report now resides in the Science Museum collection. As you can see from this and other images it's quite a thing to store and Wroughton is quite something as a 'store'!

It was a real trip down memory lane taking all the bits and bobs out of boxes and re-locating them on the model. As the storage crates were a bit mouldy when they arrived they've been kept (to date) in this kind of holding bay hangar - now, in my fantasy, the pieces will all be individually loaded into the high-tech storage bays in the rest of the stores. In these rooms (which are in fact aircraft hangars) you push a button and whole walls of storage glide across to reveal layers and layers of strange objects. Our is now one of them.

Posted Monday 10th May, 2010 at 9:42 am by Nina

Bata-ville news ...

This Saturday I'm heading off to Reading with "Uncle Mike" for a Bata-ville outing as part of Searching for the Spectactor: Art for New Publics A One-Day Symposium organised by Artists in the City, and the Department of Fine Art at the University of Reading.

Meanwhile it's all go at the Bata Resource & Reminiscence Centre ...

"The Bata Reminiscence and Resource Centre, based in East Tilbury Library, Essex, has recently made a successful bid to EEDA (The East of England Development Agency) and received a grant to enable a major refurbishment of the Centre and Library which will provide extra space for displays and exhibitions. Since it’s opening in 2002 the Bata Reminiscence and Resource Centre has been so successful collecting hundreds of photographs and many items of memorabilia that it has become impossible to entertain interested groups in the limited space that remained.

Work should be completed by the middle of October 2007."

We can't wait to visit - in the meantime you can find lots of new materials on their great website, or see the article written about East Tilbury on Radio Praha.

Posted Tuesday 18th September, 2007 at 2:24 pm by Nina

All for Charity ...

I'm not sure I need to plug it here as Mike is already doing a great job of selling tickets, but there's a Thurrock screening of Bata-ville coming up:

Thameside Theatre,Grays, Thurrock Essex
Monday the 10th of April 2006 at 7.45pm
Tickets £3 (concessions £2) Box Office 01375 383961
This is a charity screening presented by Thurrock Heritage Forum in support of
Bata Reminiscence & Resource Centre
Free tickets for any Bata-ville passengers attending!

In addition Karen's also hosting a charity northern screening this week with
Oxen Park Cinema Club.

Posted Tuesday 28th March, 2006 at 11:45 am by Nina

Terror Hound of Bata-ville

Back home and back to Bata-ville (as the Thurrock Gazette is now apparently calling East Tilbury, in last week's headline "Terror Hound of Bata-ville"). Last Saturday was the Bata Resource and Reminiscence Centre open day where I joined Bata-ville old comrades (as 'uncle' Mike Ostler calls them) for a get together.

As usual Fred had lots of new material to show me, but not as much as our new Bata-ville friend Felix (as mentioned in the previous open day entry) the collection pictured opposite is a fraction of the items acquired since we last saw him (!) The viewmaster 3D images of Zlin were particularly good.

There was also a stall in the library run by Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation, which was very interesting. Not least as they confrimed that no actual plans have been passed for East Tilbury as yet and any that one sees or hears about are in effect just proposed bids from different developers. The final detailed master plan for East Tilbury is yet to actually be drawn up.

Posted Tuesday 28th March, 2006 at 11:26 am by Nina