Museums come ALIVE!

Posted by Angeline under Hobbies and Toys, Lifestyle, Museums/Heritage Galleries, Reflections
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The International Museum Day ’08 finally opened on Saturday, 31 May! On the day itself, everybody get to enjoy free entry to all the NHB museums and participating Museum Roundtable museums. I had initially planned to hop down to all the museums but I just figured out that 24 hours wasn’t enough. Greedy me! xp

So in the end I only went to 2 museums- National Museum of Singapore and NUS Museum on Saturday. Why NUS Museum you may ask. It is because there’s a talk and workshop on Contemporary Jewellery where you get to learn how to transform junk into jewels. Being a crazy addict of hand-made jewelleries, I would definitely go for it.

But for an easterner like me who seldom goes to the west, travelling to NUS Museum was like almost like going to JB. So I took a cab down to NUS. Can you image how big the NUS campus is, to the extent that the taxi uncle even keep a NUS campus map in his cab at all times.

This was my first time going to NUS and when I got down the taxi, I was immediately attracted to the serenity of the atmosphere at the University Cultural Centre.

Before the start of the workshop, I attended a free talk conducted by Julie Ross, a programme director at Raffles Design Institute. It was on “Sculptural jewellery using recycled materials” and it was sort of like an introduction for us before we start the hands-on at the workshop. During the brainstorming session, she taught us how to use mind-maps and sketching to develop concepts for the jewelleries. Look at how everyone is engrossed in putting our creativity on paper.

Later on, we proceeded to the workshop conducted by Sandra Fie, a lecturer from Raffles Design Institute, for the hands-on. Yippee!

Our equipments for the day…

One of Sandra’s student assistants, doing the demo for sticking acrylic pieces together using acrylic glue. I didn’t even know there was existence of such special glue for sticking acrylics. Whatever things I needed to stick, I always use Superglue.

Everyone was so absorbed into Sandra’s briefing before we officially start the hands-on activity. She showed us how to use heat to mould acrylics into flexible shapes. Beware though, because the “hair-blower replica” is so hot that you need to use gloves!

Finally it is action time.

Drilling hole into the acrylic. It really sounded like going to the dentist! Arghhh…

A thorn among the roses because he is the only guy participant during the workshop.

I am sure all the participants enjoyed the workshop as much as I did. It is amazing how we got so much creativity during the workshop… And of course credits shall go to Sandra and her students who assisted us throughout the workshop.

At the end of the workshop, I asked Sandra whether it’s important to have natural artistic talent or it is something that can be gained through experience. She said, “It is good to have talents, but sometimes it’s difficult” and in case you are wondering where she draw her inspirations from, she actually gets them from furniture. What an interesting avenue!

Oh, by the way, this is one of the rings which I did!