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Rosie H. Cook

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Conservation and Climate Change

The Sound of Shadows

Making Connections

2017 Asialink Arts Residency

Asialink+AsiaSoc.23March(1)

  Crazed Puppets

Crazed Puppets 04

 This is not a Kowangan

bundengan-01

#APTCCARN5

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Every day I strap on my 8kg of baby and walk up the steep hill where the Chateau de Gex once stood. Most of the town was burnt to the ground in 1590 by Genevese soldiers, this abandoned house at the top of the hill is therefore fairly modern with its 1776 lintel. I love the gradient patina on the door — obviously much more recent with its 20th century paint, but still, #rosielovesteal and I also love the hand-shaped knocker 👇. I will try and capture some more pictures from around the town, baby doesn’t like it when I stop to take out my phone — he is a harsh taskmaster!
A very Instagram textiles moment, using my @bawntextiles x @jenerates.shopwindow square ruler to check the scale on the @zenzietinkerconservation pattern 🧵🪡📐
Yesterday I learned that my grandmother Joan had passed away overnight, at home in Devon. Because of living in different countries my entire life, I am lucky that we had such a good relationship, thanks to her being so great with the Internet. I would send emails full of photos and anecdotes about what I was up to on my travels; I’m grateful for iPhones which made it always easy to open up an email and drop in some pictures and then just start writing. Granny also followed my various blogs over the years, as well as my Instagram (getting a Like or a comment from her was always the best feeling!). After Taiga was born, my emails became scarce, but Granny downloaded Tinybeans (a private app for sharing baby photos with family) to her iPad and followed along, sometimes leaving comments which were always so special to me. For Christmas we sent her a printed album of a family photoshoot we did with Taiga and Karl in Taiwan, and it went missing for weeks before finally being delivered in January — I’m grateful she got it in time because that would have broken my heart. My grandmother made my career possible; she approved of my decision to go back to university to become a conservator, and my family knows how important her approval was to us all. I’m incredibly sad that she never got to meet her first great-grandchild, who was born so far away in Taiwan and then was so close in France but not able to visit because of Covid, and the isolation she experienced over the last year make it all the more frustrating. I have to keep focusing on the things I am grateful for, including the visit I made in Christmas 2015 with my sister, and more recently in November and December 2017 with James for her 91st birthday and in September 2019 with my mother. I’m also grateful she was independent and living in her own home until the end. When we are finally able to attend her funeral (Covid and Brexit making things much harder than it should be), I hope very much that the service will be at Weare Giffard, it will be so comforting to assemble our very small family in such a quiet and beautiful place, the church I always remember her attending.
Very grateful that baby Taiga is being chill and letting me watch the fantastic presentations for day 2 of the Icon Textiles Group spring forum! Currently on break, I’m crossing my fingers he lasts long enough to see @ksyniamarko and @may_b_textile_conservation’s talk next. I really feel so lucky to be able to double up on my professional and parental commitments (as you can see, that doesn’t involve tidying the living-room — nobody’s perfect!). #icontextilegroupforum
These are a few of my favourite chairs! Day 1 of the #icontextileconservationgroup Spring Forum was very chair-oriented. My paper on conserving chairs belonging to Chiang Kai Shek was followed by an amazing array of much more glamorous armchairs. This spectacular suite re-upholstered in poison green is from Heather Porter’s presentation and wins most eye-catching; second favourite chair of the session was actually one of Siobhan Barratt’s “sad chairs” of the National Trust: apparently it’s a semi-standard practice to place a pine cone on historic chairs so people won’t sit in them? I laughed out loud alone at my computer screen, anyway; and my third favourite was this much more modern iteration, which was treated to a customised cover at the V&A by Isobel Harcourt. I’m hoping to get to see more tomorrow... today James took the baby out so I could manage unimpeded, but the next 3 days will require me to somehow watch/listen whilst wrangling Taiga... 😥 #textileconservation #upholsteryconservation #upholstery #conservator
Some rare textile conservation related news — I’m presenting this paper at the ICOM textiles group spring forum this Thursday 15th of April. There’s a link in my Instagram bio to the online event if you would like to register (free for ICOM members, £10 for non-members). I will be talking about how interacting with Taiwanese visitors impacted my perspective whilst working on chairs belonging to Chiang Kai Shek. #conservation #textileconservation #taiwanhistory #taiwan #icontextilegroupforum
Meanwhile, somewhere between the Jura and the Alps...
Very very brief visit to the Creuse for the first time in 20 years. My baby got to see the house where my father lived until he died 2 years ago. I got to pose with various Aubusson tapestry-related signage. And I brought a massive pâté de pommes de terre (a Creusois specialty: flaky buttery puff pastry filled with potatoes and crème fraîche) for us to sustain ourselves after getting home. A 1000km return trip — Taiga only screamed for the last 300km — so I can secure my carte de séjour, post-Brexit. Hopefully we will be able to head back this summer/post-Covid so I can visit all the tapestry workshops and the beautiful museum!
Catching snowflakes ❄️
For this Mothering Sunday (“mother and son day”, as James misheard me the first time I mentioned it), I got the best and only gift I could want: James took over around 3am, and I slept in till 11:30am, and then had another 90min nap from 3:30pm to 6pm. Painting by Christian Krohg, “Sovende mor med barn (Sleeping mother with child)” 1883, which is one hundred years older than me but I feel about the same age.
No couch 🛋 but some mountains 🏔 and a @rudienudie_designs playmat 🚼
Possibly not a huge amount of overlap between James’s network and mine, but he is running this online workshop 23-25 March, for humanitarians based in Afghanistan looking to develop their negotiation skills. It’s a bit niche but the course is invaluable to the right people! Anyone who would be interested can Google “CCHN negotiation Asia” to learn more about this course supported by @icrc (International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent), @unhcr (United Nations High Commission for Refugees), @doctorswithoutborders aka MSF, and the UN @worldfoodprogramme. #humanitarian #negotiation #afghanistan #kabul #redcross #redcrescent #humanitariantraining #cchn
Sporting stains including, but not limited to: breast milk, dog drool, baby drool, spinach baby purée, and gratin dauphinois, everything sprinkled with lavish amounts of dog hair. Still no couch.
Taiga’s first museum visit! He loved the interactive “witnesses” — life-size projections of individuals telling their stories. I guess he doesn’t get to see many people’s faces, due to being a pandemic baby, but he was transfixed watching all the different people talking and engaging with him. Another “pandemic baby” experience is interacting with people on screens, since he Facetimes a lot with our family in New Zealand and Australia. Thanks for the sweet pictures of us @micheligodwini
It’s great being in the right timezone to attend online talks. I was intrigued to watch this one, organised by the ICON Ethn*graphy group: “Multaka-Oxford: Museum Collections from Multiple Perspectives”, about a digital exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford curated by volunteers, many of whom share cultural backgrounds with the objects they chose to display. My initial reason for watching was because of a talk a couple of weeks ago about the book “The Brutish Museums” and the Benin Bronzes. The talk was a panel centred around the author who is also the curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum of anthropology, aka “the most violent place in Oxford” according to Rhodes Must Fall Oxford. I confess that I found the Brutish Museums talk a bit disappointing and ironically still very centred upon a white male academic telling us that the museum is still too white, male and academic (yes, yes it is sir). However I wanted to get a better idea of the museum’s actual praxis, and this project hinted at being, if nothing else, more diverse in its storytelling. And it is a beautiful project (based on one in Germany). But all the way through I kept waiting to hear how these digital curators and experts in bringing meaning to the PRM’s collections had been compensated... but (tragically although unsurprisingly) they were rewarded by the “social interaction” and “sense of pride”. I rather cowardly asked my question anonymously but I should own my opinions here at least! This initiative isn’t just a feel-good exercise. It’s an incredibly valuable output at a time when museums are not able to host visitors. This digital exhibition is curated by experts who bring lived experiences and meaning to objects that a white Anglo curator (such as myself) COULD NEVER. It has a lot of value. It feels incredibly disingenuous to lean on people who already volunteer their time, to take from them in a way that benefits everyone (the museum, the collections, and society at large) and not give even a token payment. If crappy magazines can pay £25 for a “top tip” about recycling toilet rolls into glasses cases (@britishgoop) then the University of Oxford can do better.
Just watched the most delicious talk about cleaning some of the gigantic historic carpets at Felbrigg Hall, by Ksynia Marko and Glyn Charnock. I loved seeing the bags of extracted dust and the filthy rinse water — this “dirt trolley” is certainly my kind of visitor engagement. I can see it recruiting a few curious onlookers to the dark side! #textileconservation #icontextiles
Baby and colours on a makeshift couch (both of ours are stranded on a shipping container somewhere in the ocean). #oddrunembroidery is progressing slowly! #rosielovesrainbows
Can’t wait for row 5, if only my child would understand that watching me do embroidery is the most entertaining thing he could hope for. #oddrunembroidery
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