Culture Syndicates CIC

   First posted: 31st January 2017  In  Exploring History My final undergraduate year revolved around one man, King John, King of England from 1199-1216. This makes me very passionate about his life and reign. Rightly or wrongly, his reign is viewed as one of the worst England has ever seen. As I have relocated from Newcastle for this role, I have been trying to get to know the local area a bit better. I remembered that on Richard I‘s ascent to the throne in 1189, he granted his younger brother John lands in Nottingham and so I began to refresh my memory about John’s links to the area. Henry II, the father to both John and Richard had rebuilt large parts of Nottingham castle in stone around 1150 onwards. During the 1190s, Richard went out on Crusade and while he was away, John was banned from England due to his troublemaking tendencies. However, their mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine felt that this was too harsh on John and allowed him back into the country. In 1194, Joh...

   First Posted: 31st January 2017  In  Collections ,  News And Opportunities Here at Bassetlaw Museum, whilst looking for some remarkable facts to accompany our upcoming  steampunk event on the 11th February , one of our museum officers stumbled across some interesting Victorian visions of the future. The following are some cigarette cards produced between 1899 and 1910, predicting the world as it may look in the year 2000. There are 87 known images in the series, produced by a number of French artists, including Jean-Marc Cote. As you will see, some of the predictions completely missed the mark and within all of them, they did not predict that fashion and architecture would change. However, some of the ideas do share similarities to some 20th and 21st Century inventions, with themes focusing on mechanisation of industry, advances in transportation and labour saving domestic items. A House Rolling Through The Countryside Electric Scrubbing The New-Fangled ...

   First posted: 31st January 2017  In  Health And Wellbeing Commissioned in 2014 by People Dancing, with support from Unlimited Impact and Arts Council England, ‘11 Million Reasons to Dance’ is a disabled dance project that aims to shine a positive light on deaf and disabled dancers. It aims to challenge the perceptions people may have about those with a disability, and reflects the fact that there are more than 11 million disabled people living in the UK. At the core of the project is a touring photography exhibition that is currently at Ayscoughfee Hall! The exhibition features photographs by emerging photographer Sean Goldthorpe, with images inspired by iconic dance film scenes. The project has been developed further, and in collaboration with a range of local venues, dance artists, educational establishments and cultural agencies have created a dance programme that runs alongside the touring exhibition. In Spalding, the performance aspect of the programme will b...

   First Posted: 24th January 2017  In  Industry Trends And Critical Analysis South Africa: The Art of a Nation Exhibition at the British Museum A few weeks ago, I went to the exhibition of South African art at the British Museum. Admittedly, I did not know a lot about South African art, and so did not have much in the way of expectations or preconceptions about what the exhibition would be like. It turned out to be inspiring and fascinating, both in the story it told about South Africa’s history and in how it defined what we think of as art. ​The exhibition encompassed a huge variety of objects dating from as far back as three million years ago. This 3m year old object was a pebble, which had been eroded to resemble a face and picked up by an early human because of its unusual appearance. It was a piece of ‘found art’. Also included in the exhibition were cave paintings of antelopes, a pair of Ghandi’s sandals, anti-apartheid badges, an intricately beaded waistcoat ...

   First Posted: 2nd January 2017  In  Industry Trends And Critical Analysis Once in a lecture during my undergraduate degree in Archaeology, the PowerPoint screen was pasted with a picture of what could only be described as a warehouse stacked high with boxes and bags of archaeological finds. We were posed with the question of what should we do with all this stuff? Being in the throes of disillusion with my archaeology degree at the time (2nd year – I think we were in the depths of philosophy by this point) I was struck with the notion that we just needed to STOP DIGGING! There was no space left, and if we weren’t doing anything with the stuff then why should we keep it?! That was a dark time. However, I quickly moved on, got back into loving my degree and indeed loving archaeology; I forgot all about it. I was made the Site Manager of the research dig that I attended as part of my degree later on that very year in the summer, a role which I was asked back to again ...