Family Learning at Thackray Medical Museum, Leeds
In 2010, I ran a Family Learning project with the excellent Thackray Medical Museum. I was working with a truly lovely bunch of families - Mums and Dads, Grandmas and Aunties and their children aged 5 to 8. Together we explored how our bodies worked using movement, creative writing, drawing and generally having an ace time learning new things. The Pea-to-Poo opening event was great fun, and I also ran sessions on most of the internal organs, how digestion works, why we look (at least a bit!) like our parents. I love this sort of project that interlaces science and art, and uses all sorts of aspects of creativity.
'Thackray Remembered'
This a project I ran with retired staff from the internationally renowned Leeds-based medical supplies company Chas F Thackray Ltd. I worked with a wonderful group - mainly engineers from Thackray's shopfloor who producing all the equipment and medical instruments needed to run a hospital. I helped them capture and celebrate their contribution to Thackray's engineering and technical achievements. Thackray is world-famous for being the first engineering company to produce artificial hips. We put together some great stories from the engineers - eg of patients coming onto the factory floor to personally thank the guys for making the hip joints, and thus getting them out of pain for the first time in decades. The Thackray Medical Museum will be opening a new exhibition to celebrate the contribution of Thackray workers using lots of the material I have collected from the workers.
The Thackray engineers who made the first artifical hip joints had to experiment a lot before they got exactly the right shape and accuracy of ball joint, so there were a lot of seconds thrown away.
Thackray had a sea-fishing club for staff, and the guys found, by drilling a series of fish-hooks into the stem of the joint, these 'seconds' made brilliant lures for cod!
Hook, line and hip joint
One micron out,
and their destiny changes
- never to be clothed
in the warm pulse of human flesh;
never to bond with
bone; to climb
the stairs with an 80-year-old; to let
a motorcyclist
ride again; to become
a bleep at an airport scanner.
One micron out,
and they're fish-bait.
On works' days out, we lower them
- drilled with six hooks -
onto wrecks where goggle-eyed cod
snatch at their super-polished glow, suck
- expecting tender mackerel -
swallow instead
Thackray's seconds.
Thackray had a sea-fishing club for staff, and the guys found, by drilling a series of fish-hooks into the stem of the joint, these 'seconds' made brilliant lures for cod!
Hook, line and hip joint
One micron out,
and their destiny changes
- never to be clothed
in the warm pulse of human flesh;
never to bond with
bone; to climb
the stairs with an 80-year-old; to let
a motorcyclist
ride again; to become
a bleep at an airport scanner.
One micron out,
and they're fish-bait.
On works' days out, we lower them
- drilled with six hooks -
onto wrecks where goggle-eyed cod
snatch at their super-polished glow, suck
- expecting tender mackerel -
swallow instead
Thackray's seconds.
