Stuffy Museums

I wonder if the phrase stuffy museums comes from all the stuffed animals. I'm still haunted by the idea of thousands of bird skins. Steve at Rotherham told me a story about their bird skins and their freezer going down for a week - he said they got a bit high and I don't think this means they learnt to fly again. I remember walking down a road with my heavily pregnant wife and her finding a flat dried out frog - she was in the middle of putting on an exhibition about whichcraft and needed it to make a spell - she had to order the eye of newt from a newt farm.

Rotherham is going well it feels great to feel like an artist again some how all twisted and tangled in a spiral of thoughts going around and around and around. Steve the director was talking to me about conjecture and how curators would like to be able to imagine what may have happened to an object but don't - the facts just the facts. Thinking about museums and archeology it all seems to be based on conjecture. "A tool which Could, would, may have, probably at around the turn of the century been use to skin birds which now may or may not be extinct in some parts of the world for future genertions to dispose of."

I've just read heart of Darkness as I'm roughly modeling my quest to rediscover Rotherhams ethnographic collection on Conrads tail. All journies have a starting point and I'm hoping I've found mine.