A re-evaluation of life
- Jamie Crocker
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Words by Jamie Crocker
With many museums and art galleries going through a period of self-examination, Exeter’s does not shy away from its inheritance.
The Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM) is a Victorian institution that courageously challenges its genesis to show the world it has a contemporary grasp of what it has to be – to exist and to survive. Founded in 1868 to mark Prince Albert’s memory, it was conceived as a place where a growing city might meet the wider world through objects and ideas. Its Gothic Revival building, raised through public subscription, announced that learning was not to be sealed off in universities or private libraries but placed in the path of ordinary lives. From the outset, the museum amassed a wide range of materials: natural history specimens, archaeological finds from Devon and beyond, ethnographic objects acquired through trade and travel, and works of art intended as points of enquiry. RAMM is neither a storehouse nor a shrine. It is closer to a working reference library made physical, where the past is arranged so that it can be brought into the light of critical dialogue.
That philosophy was sharpened during the major redevelopment completed in 2011, when the museum returned with a new approach to display. Instead of separating disciplines into anatomised compartments, the galleries were rethought as conversations between geology, zoology, archaeology, fine art and social history. The result won the Art Fund Museum of the Year award in 2012, with judges praising the intelligence of the rehang and the refusal to patronise visitors. Since then, RAMM has built a reputation for accessibility. A quarter of a million people come through its doors each year, from school groups handling Roman pottery to researchers working with its Designated World Cultures and Natural Sciences collections, recognised for their national and international importance.
TOP Are We Nearly There Yet, RAMM 2024
MIDDLE Time Odyssey students exploring the museum
ABOVE Ganesh Chathurti
It is also a museum that understands that collections are not inert but exist in a shifting universe of new ideas and reinterpretations. Contemporary artists are invited to disrupt and interpret, to argue with what is in the cases and sometimes to contradict the labels. This winter and spring, that dialogue becomes particularly pointed with a major new commission by Charmaine Watkiss, developed in response to the museum’s West African holdings.
Watkiss’ project, From the ones who came before…, is rooted in archival research into the botanical knowledge carried from Africa to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. Resisting the temptation to present that history as a sequence of dates and statistics, she approaches it through what she calls “memory stories”: imagined voices of women who preserved the uses of plants as medicine, protection and ritual, passing them on under conditions designed to erase such knowledge. The commission consists of two new works installed directly into the World Cultures galleries, so that contemporary drawing and sculpture sit in close proximity to the artefacts that prompted them.
The first, Flash of the Spirit, is a large drawing in which Watkiss presents herself as a double figure, opening her body to reveal leaves and roots associated with healing. Nearby stands an nkisi from the museum’s collection, a carved wooden figure created to hold substances believed to activate spiritual forces. The example Watkiss chose depicts a kneeling woman, once masked by a mirror that concealed a medicine bundle, now faded to reveal shells within. An X-ray shows a spiral shell placed between the figure’s legs, associated with midwifery and cycles of life and death.
TOP Artist Charmaine Watkiss and RAMM cuarator Lara Goodband in Charmaine’s studio
ABOVE LEFT Charmaine in RAMM’s World Cultures gallery June 25
ABOVE Nkisi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Watkiss does not attempt to reconstruct the original meaning of the object. Instead, she places her own image in conversation with it, proposing continuity rather than explanation. Rivers to Cross, is a woven mask built from wood, straw and brass, modelled on a nineteenth-century Mukenga helmet mask from the Kuba people of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The historic mask symbolised authority and descent from a founding ancestor said to have come from the sea. Watkiss’s version alters the function by adding a pouch containing dried herbs and a written prayer. Displayed alongside RAMM’s own collection of African masks, the piece insists on the afterlife of materials and motifs: how they are broken, remade and recharged as people move. For Lara Goodband, the museum’s Contemporary Art Curator, “Her (Watkiss’s) thinking about ancestral spirits and lost connections through forced, enslaved migrations from Africa to the Caribbean has inspired these powerful, new works.”
If Watkiss’s work asks adult visitors to reconsider the moral and emotional weight of the museum’s holdings, RAMM’s next major exhibition is designed to work at a different pitch without simplifying its subject. Wow! Amazing Science in Children’s Books, touring from the Museum of Somerset, opens at the end of January and turns illustration into a form of scientific argument. It draws on the work of artists such as Oliver Jeffers, Colin King and Yuval Zommer, whose books translate astrophysics, anatomy and ecology into images that invite active inspection as opposed to passive admiration.
Arranged thematically, the exhibition moves from the early history of scientific thought through to imagined futures shaped by artificial intelligence. Along the way it pauses to consider figures who changed how knowledge is organised, including Galileo, Ada Lovelace and Wangari Maathai. Children are invited to trace the structure of the human body, the mechanics of machines and the scale of the solar system through pages enlarged and mounted as works of art.
A programme of Easter holiday workshops extends the exhibition beyond the gallery, with sessions on fossils, engineering, space travel and the digestive system, delivered by local science educators. Entry is free, reinforcing the museum’s long-standing position that curiosity should not depend on income.
Running in parallel is RAMM’s first exhibition devoted to Sir Grayson Perry. Aspects of Myself brings together ceramics, textiles, prints and tapestries in which Perry dissects the unstable business of identity. Works such as
A Map of Days turn habits and anxieties into street plans, mapping inner life onto imagined towns. In Aspects of Myself and Mad Kid’s Bedroom Wall, fragments of childhood are fixed into glaze and pattern, at once comic and uncomfortable. The exhibition also includes elements from A House for Essex, the secular chapel Perry built as a memorial to the fictional Julie Cope, shown here through tapestries and tile moulds that are rarely displayed together. Through them he examines aspiration, grief and class mobility using craft techniques traditionally associated with devotion.
TOP LEFT Ada Lovelace illustrated by Owen Davey
TOP Right Galileo illustrated by Chris Haughton
ABOVE A Perfect Match, Grayson Perry, 2015. Crafts Council Collection: 2016.18. Acquired with Art Fund support (with a contribution from The Wolfson Foundation) and a donation from Maylis and James Grand. Courtesy the artist, Paragon | Contemporary Editions Ltd and Victoria Miro. © Grayson Perry
Taken together, these exhibitions demonstrate the museum’s direction. It is comfortable staging displays that interrogate an imperial legacy, actively commissioning work that examines the origins of its own collections. It continues to act as a municipal service, funded by the council and Arts Council England, inviting visitors to become participants rather than mere observers.
For visitors from Cornwall, as well as those making the pilgrimage from Devon, the journey back home will encourage conversations that circulate around the institution’s confidence to admit that its collections are incomplete, sometimes compromised, but always open to reinterpretation. Whether through Watkiss’s meditation on inherited knowledge, the illustrated mechanics of the natural world, or Perry’s forensic humour about identity, RAMM demonstrates that a regional museum can operate at an intellectual scale that is sometimes missing outside of the capital. In this sense, it is a dynamic civic resource that demands to be visited.
