Happy New Year.

After a long and relaxing Christmas break it is all go here again at SPRI.

At SPRI we have a full temporary exhibition program planned up to five years in advance. This is necessary to ensure the research can be undertaken, the objects selected and conserved and the labels written and printed in plenty of time.

Our Sidney Nolan exhibition came down over Christmas and we are currently in the throes of installing our new exhibition.

‘Return to Antarctica: the British Graham Land Expedition 1934-37’

Our new exhibition is heavily objectbased so we are putting all our temporary display cases into action.

While this has been going on I have been downstairs in the Conservation workshop condition assessing and conserving the objects required for display. They are all waiting for installation over the next couple of weeks.

As some of the objects for the temporary exhibition have come from the permanent gallery displays, they have been replaced with objects from another expedition. Two exhibitions for the price of one really. In the beginning though I was very confused as these objects relate to the British Expedition to Graham Land (BEGL)! However, I got my brain around it in the end.

During conservation one of my favourite objects was the HMV gramophone used on the BGLE exhibition. It was in very good condition considering where it had been, and the archival material suggested that it was well used. Fortunately they had more than one gramophone record and these were kept in a separate storage container.

During my time on the ice I also listened to a lot of music but rather than having to lug a gramophone around I had a slightly more portable MP3 player.

It’s amazing to think that in a relatively short space of time, approximately sixty-seventy years, technology has moved on from playing one record at a time to a hand held device holding 2,000 songs.

You can see full information on the exhibition and additional images.

(Images © SPRI/Fiona Cahill)