THE WRITING'S ON THE WALL

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE MUSEUM

Readers please be advised that this page contains information concerning the historical theft of Aboriginal and Indigenous Ancestral remains for museum collections

In 2012, at the end of her first year of practice-based doctoral research in the School of Art & Design History at Kingston University London, Jane Wildgoose presented The Writing's on the Wall, an improvised performance and installation, in BONE: an exhibition exploring the history, substance and use of osseous material curated by Simon Gould and Rhiannon Armstrong at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.

Photo: Jane Wildgoose, Still Life with Flowers and Skull at The Wildgoose Memorial Library (2006) reproduced as silver gelatin print Florence Nightingale Museum (2012)

The curators had commissioned Jane Wildgoose to reproduce one of her vanitas photographs (above) as a silver gelatin print - a technique in which silver halide is suspended in bone-derived gelatin - as an exhibit in BONE.

They also invited her, as one of a number of "live respondents" commissioned to be in residence during the exhibition, to engage visitors in conversation on the theme of bone.

On her final day as live respondent at the Florence Nightingale Museum, in August 2012, Jane took the opportunity to encourage visitors to reflect with her on the extensive grave-robbing that occurred during the colonial era, as part of a supply chain providing large quantities of human skulls and other bones to museum collections where they were used to provide scientific data in support of (long-since discredited) theories of racial science.

Jane Wildgoose, The Writing's on the Wall No. 992: "Four miles east of Huacho, Peru. The body was found buried on the side of a hill; a loose, white, cotton winding-sheet was round the body and an outer covering of chequerwork. Probably some man of note" & No. 1096: "The articulated skeleton of a male native of Tasmania obtained from a grave on Flinders Island" Florence Nightingale Museum (2012)

Photo: Simon Gould

Silently chalking up verbatim evidence of theft of human skulls and bones, originally published as a means of establishing provenance in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical museum catalogues, on the black walls of the exhibition space, it soon became apparent (as people approached Jane to ask what she was doing) that museum visitors had little or no knowledge of this under-discussed aspect of the history of collecting.

Just as Jane herself had been ignorant until she was commissioned to write a report on the human remains collection at the Natural History Museum, six years earlier, in 2006.

But now the writing was on the wall.

Jane Wildgoose, The Writing's on the Wall No. 877: "A cranium from a tomb at Xico, Valley of Mexico" & No. 796: "The skull of a female native of New Zealand presented by the Hon. William Martin, Chief Justice of New Zealand" Florence Nightingale Museum (2012)

Copyright Jane Wildgoose and The Wildgoose Memorial Library