Shirley Chubb

Pen Rest

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Pen Rest 2014. Natural history specimens, glass domes, perspex, reverse mounted digital photographs, video. Photograph: Keith Pointon. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014 Natural history specimens, glass domes and Perspex. Photograph: Keith Pointon. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014 Sea Horse (natural history specimen), glass dome and perspex 16 x 16 cms. Photograph: Keith Pointon. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. Ivy Leaf (natural history specimen), glass dome and perspex 16 x 16 cms. Photograph: Keith Pointon. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. Pigeon Feathers (natural history specimen), glass dome and perspex 16 x 16 cms. Photograph: Keith Pointon. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. Tooth of Ray (natural history specimen), glass dome and perspex 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern slide sy9105: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern slide sy11898: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern slide sy11761: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern slide sy11805: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern sy11909: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern sy10001: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern sy12099: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Pen Rest (detail) 2014. C-type reverse mounted digital print from lantern sy11944: http://www.darwincountry.org/ 16 x 16 cms. Courtesy of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery

Video clip: Pen Rest - Force & Calm (clip 1) 2014
Video clip: Pen Rest - Force & Calm (clip 2) 2014

Pen Rest 2014

Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery

Note: Pen Rest & Thinking Path feature in the Inspired by catalogue produced to accompany the 2014 opening of the redeveloped museum and available by contacting the museum http://www.shrewsburymuseum.org.uk/about-us/artist-commissions/

Pen Rest is on of a series of embedded artist commissions funded by the ACE Grants for the Arts scheme as part of the major Shrewsbury Museum redevelopment project. The commissioning process was designed to explore how contemporary visual practice can enable reinterpretations of the past and reveals the multiple narratives of artefacts held in a major municipal collection.

Pen Rest focuses on Darwin’s experience of environment during his formative years in Shropshire and Wales and brings together video, reconfigured natural history displays and archive photography.  In contrast to Thinking Path, that used movement as a metaphor for understanding, Pen Rest explores stillness and focuses attention on the minutiae of the world around us.

The emphasis on positioning in relation to exhibits throughout the museum is at the core of the exhibition, which reflects on personal and collective histories and explores how the museum acts as a catalyst for understanding our immediate, regional and global environments.

The accompanying film Force and Calm records movement and stillness as a process of engagement with significant sites, and explores how video editing and manipulation processes can capture the tension of moving through and remaining still within resonant places. Building on existing methodologies of encounter and measurement Force and Calm embodies the process of looking and investigates the relationship between what we see and what we know of a place.