Mamma Mia!

Tucked away amongst the buildings of the University College London, the grandness of this week's unknown museum was unassuming both by location and layout. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, as it is known, is a university museum set up in 1892 at the bequest of Amelia Edwards, later growing largely from the artifacts gathered by William Petrie and further added to by Henry Wellcome. Objects upon objects were crammed into glass cabinets, divided into rough sections that housed related relics from correlating time periods. Only a few were assigned small cards, giving snippets of details on what they might have been used for many centuries ago.

Much to my suprise, with more than 80,000 objects crammed in together, this museum houses one of the world's greatest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology. The vast collection provides some enlightening insight into the life in the Nile Valley from prehistory through the age of the pharaohs, Ptolemaic, Roman and Coptic times to the Islamic period.

The explanation for it's rather inadequate housing is that it had been moved to these premises for protection during WWII and has not been moved since. Plans for a more spectacular home have been in the pipeline; however, no doubt the recession has had some role in slowing or halting these altogether.

Under instruction to select and draw only one object, I choose a basalt statue from Thebes Dyn XVIII. My eye was taken by this statue, not only by its smooth, geometrically-shaped forms, but also because of the detailed encrypted message on the front plate. It occurred to me that in its time this object was probably treasured for both its craftsmanship and for the meaning of its message. Art here seems to have played both a functional and aesthetic role. Plus, this statue appeared to capture a life-like character, hence offering some insight to what the persons of that time may have been like, or at least represent traits they would have valued.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to finish my drawing. I must mention here that the objective of the class was to describe light and the way it moulds the object, and I could have spent hours building up and following the light over the many contours of this dark object. I've included what I have done so far and will aim to get back there one day.