Utterly charming

I have always been a fan of the Wellcome Collection. The trademark mix of art and science that gives such life and interest to their exhibitions is just what I aspire to. They always manage to give their shows both breadth and depth while keeping them visually stunning and with a spark of unusual interest.

The current small show Charmed Life: The Solace of Objects is possibly the best yet. It has been selected by the medallic artist Felicity Powell from the Edward Lovett collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum. This collection of amulets comprises small, eclectic, and unassuming objects carried in the pockets of Victorian Londoners. Powell has selected her favourites and arranged them in a horseshoe shape cabinet at the centre of the exhibition, in thematic and aesthetic groups with somewhat whimsical titles like ‘Foodstuffs and Journey.’ The flowing display gives the objects a vital power lacking, I felt, in the similarly conceived installation Stirring the Swarm which I saw last week at Nottingham Castle.

Around the walls, Powell has picked out some key amulets, a small circle of paper on which is written the Lord’s prayer in minute script, for example. Added to these is Samuel Johnson’s ‘touchpiece’ against the king’s evil from the British Museum collections; also, Powell’s own exquisite series of works in wax on mirror backs. Medallic in form, but made more vulnerable by the use of wax, these capture the desperate, hopeful essence of the amulets with a series of heads (resembling the artist’s own) unravelling into tentacles, tears, trees, honeycombs, or hands producing glowing strands of coral.

Two haunting films in a second room show the ‘sleight of hand’ behind the show, combining one series of close-ups of the process of producing these pieces, and one inter-layering images of the amulets with MRI, PET and CT-scans of Powell’s body. The Wellcome’s message of the unsettling and eclectic human response to illness and adversity is here compelling, thought-provoking, and utterly charming.