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Something fishy will haunt Scarborough Art Gallery visitors on reopening from May 18

Scarborough Museums Trust documentation assistant Ela Bochenek with an item from the Animal Hauntings exhibition at Scarborough Art Gallery from May 18. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

ANIMAL Hauntings will take over Scarborough Art Gallery from May 18 to September 22, led by a tunny fish.

The exhibition combines film and objects from the Scarborough Museums Trust collection to ask what, in times of environmental uncertainty, we can learn from the ghosts of animals past in order to create more solid future relationships with the natural world.

Among those objects will be a tunny fish that was a favourite exhibit for many in a former life when the gallery’s neighbour, Woodend, was a natural history museum, together with examples of taxidermy, such as a pair of the now-extinct passenger pigeon, and equipment used by the “climmers” that once abseiled down Yorkshire’s East Coast cliffs in search of seabird eggs.

Tunny fishing and climming are the subject of two films from the Yorkshire Film Archive that form part of the exhibition, alongside moving images by artist Fiona Tan and exhibition curator and artist Martha Cattell.

Martha says: “The exhibition is inspired by Woodend’s past as a natural history museum, and by the book Arts Of Living On a Damaged Planet: Ghosts And Monsters Of The Anthropocene, an anthology of work by 20 eminent writers.

“Humans have long been fascinated with and reliant on non-human animals for food, transport, clothing and as pets. We are haunted by past connections to animals and many of the objects within the collection reflect this.

The full-size model of a tunny fish, cast from the original, that will be a star of the Scarborough Museums Trust collection on show in Animal Hauntings at Scarborough Art Gallery. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

“With more than 35,500 species threatened with extinction, this exhibition uses objects and moving image to highlight the entangled relationships between animals and humans, and offers ways of looking with animals, and not just at them.”

Scarborough Museums Trust will run a series of events inspired by the exhibition, to be announced on its website and social media channels in the coming weeks.

Animal Hauntings will run alongside two more exhibitions at Scarborough Art Gallery over the same dates: Scarborough: Our Seaside Town and Laughton’s Legacies.

The venue has been awarded VisitEngland ‘s We’re Good To Go industry standard mark, signifying adherence to government and public health guidance on Covid-19. All three exhibitions are on the ground floor and are fully wheelchair-accessible.

Entry to Scarborough Art Gallery is by annual pass, whose £3 cost gives unlimited entry to both the gallery and the Rotunda Museum for a year.

Opening hours at Scarborough Art Gallery are 10am to 5pm, Tuesday to Sundays, plus Bank Holidays.

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Recollections and collections to combine for Our Seaside Town exhibition at Scarborough Art Gallery from May 18

Tim Knight, from Scarborough Museums Trust, on the DePlacido’s Ice Cream tricycle cart , one of the items from the upcoming exhibition Scarborough: Our Seaside Town at Scarborough Art Gallery. All pictures: Tony Bartholomew

SCARBOROUGH Art Gallery’s summertime exhibition will look at life in a seaside town. as seen through the eyes of Scarborough people. 

Curated by Esther Lockwood, Scarborough: Our Seaside Town will run from Tuesday, May 18 to Sunday, September 12.

Esther interviewed team members from Scarborough Museums Trust, asking for their personal views and recollections of life by the sea year-round before selecting items from the trust’s extensive collections.

An early 20th century traditional deckchair from the Scarborough Museums Trust collection

These will include an early 20th century ice cream cart that once operated on Scarborough’s South Bay beach; the East Coast resort’s Pancake Bell, rung to signal the start of the unique tradition of skipping on the seafront on Shrove Tuesday, and other seaside ephemera, paintings, vintage photographs and postcards.

A clifftop diorama will provide the backdrop to a display of seabirds from the trust’s taxidermy collection, complete with smells.

Esther says: “I hope this exhibition will help the collections to be seen afresh through the eyes of the people who work at Scarborough Museums Trust.

Ela Bochenek, documentation assistant at Scarborough Museums Trust, with Bathers In Sunlight, by Zdzislaw Ruszkowski (1978), part of Scarborough Art Gallery’s Scarborough: Our Seaside Town exhibition from May 18.

“Their thoughts and memories are the lens for interpretation, and their voice is prominent, rather than the more traditional curator’s voice, meaning that visitors can enjoy familiar objects in a slightly different way.

“I hope this will spark intergenerational conversation and encourage visitors to share their own reminiscences and recollections of living or visiting Scarborough.”

Exhibition visitors will be encouraged to contribute by sharing stories, memories, photos, videos and more besides on social media, using the hashtag #OurSeasideTown. The posts then will appear on a social media wall in the gallery.

A Scarborough brochure, circa 1950s, from the Scarborough Museums Trust collection

Simon Hedges, head of curation, exhibitions and collections at Scarborough Museums Trust, says: “Scarborough: Our Seaside Town is about immersing yourself in a memory, not just the object or image but also the sounds and the smells: a trigger to a different time and place.

“Our recreation of the 1950s’ museum diorama has not only the sound of the nesting birds of Bempton Cliffs, but that very distinctive smell awaits you as well.”

Scarborough Art Gallery has been awarded the VisitEngland We’re Good To Go industry standard mark, signifying adhetence to Government and public health guidance with regard to Covid-19. 

Scarborough Museums Trust operations assistant Charlotte Munday with a clifftop diorama, showing East Coast seabirds, in the Scarborough: Our Seaside Town exhibition

Scarborough: Our Seaside Town will be exhibited on the ground floor and will be fully wheelchair accessible. Visitors for the foreseeable future will be asked to book a slot via the trust’s website at scarboroughmuseumstrust.com. Details will be posted shortly.

Entry to Scarborough Art Gallery is by annual pass at a cost of £3 that gives unlimited entry to both the gallery and the Rotunda Museum for a year. Once the gallery reopens under lockdown easement measures, opening hours will be 10am to 5pm, Tuesday to Sundays, plus Bank Holidays.

Detail from a 1931 map of Scarborough by Edward Bawden, from the Scarborough Museums Trust collection