Brick Wonders is open at the Horniman Museum throughout the summer
The majority of our exhibition stay in a single venue for a few months, then they move on. Sometimes it’s much less - but sometimes it’s more. Especially when a large, busy, London museum needs a crowd pleaser for the summer!
Back in February, the team were down at the Horniman Museum, installing Brick Wonders. Whilst we’d usually only send 2 members of the crew , this time we had a little bit more to delivery! The Horniman Museum has a world renowned anthropology collection, which includes more than a few models - of all sorts. So a long while back it was decided to add a few extra models to their collection, this time out of LEGO!
The first and most obvious target was a walrus. Not just any walrus though, this particular Walrus is stuffed to an inch of its’ life and is famously on display at the Horniman! In fact, the story goes the taxidermist had never seen a walrus before - so when stuffing it, he just carried on until all the folds of skin were plumed out. We didn’t stuff our Walrus - but he sure is plump!
Tincture of Museum gave a lovely expose of his delivery, right here. The second model that we delivered was a tad more traditional - but just as accurate! The museum buildings themselves are a beautiful mix of the modern and the original building - started in 1898. They’ve undergone changes over the years, of course, but we’re pretty sure they’ve never been re-created in LEGO!
Creating large buildings in bricks is one of our favourite jobs as it usually involves most of the office. So, whilst Guy was wrestling with the Walrus, Alastair worked on the museum architecture, with Teresa and Kirsten creating literally hundreds of exhibits to go on display. At the end we even had to check our choice of LEGO elements with the collections team. Just to ensure we’d not chosen anything inapropriate!
Both the museum model and the Walrus can be seen as part of Brick Wonders at the Horniman Museum until 27th October 2019, along with the rest of their collection of course. And if you can’t make it there in person (or even if you can), Tincture of Museums took a backstage look whilst we were installing the exhibtion. You can read all about it, right here.
