The Education & Entertainments Committee of the Museum of Miniature Found Objects enjoyed their research trip to Shetland this summer. This photograph was taken by Dagmar Vedfør (Comestibles and Beveriges Sector), while the E&EC visited the 50,000 pairs of puffins at Hermaness on Unst, and was taken on the ferry between Yell and Fetlar.

What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests us – all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in those beautiful half tones, or in whispers, in deep shade.

The Brothers Quay

The Museum of Miniature Found Objects is currently displaying the films of the Quay Brothers, and watching their animation Street of Crocodiles, Ludmilla Pomodoro (Keeper of Collections) was struck by a reference to Jan Švankmajer, Czech surrealist and animator, in the pocket watch disgorging screws from its meaty interior. As in the world of Švankmajer, objects are animated by an interior life of their own, and transformed in the process. Ms Pomodoro noted, "The delicacy of the objects' relationships with one another is beautifully rendered. However, the world of Street of Crocodiles is darker and more labyrinthine than Švankmajer's. I found myself as perplexed as the shabby protagonist, exploring this unknowable, uneasy environment, and like him, unable to leave it."

Click here to watch Street of Crocodiles.

(Photographer: Les Chatfield)

The Ghost Roost is a performance by thousands of starlings. Thor McIntyre-Burnie and Chris Watson captured the sounds of these birds as they came to roost for the night on Brighton’s long-derelict West Pier in 2001, recording them from dusk to dawn. Then, in 2005, in the main hall of another decaying Victorian structure built for pleasure, the air was filled with the sounds of these birds, flying in and out of the West Pier's disintegrating ballroom, in vast, balletic flocks. These were McIntyre-Burnie and Watson’s compositions, made from their recordings of the thousands of starlings in Brighton, and used to create the installation in the main hall of Wilton's Music Hall in London, 'A Pier at Wilton's'. 

"Sitting in Wilton's, I was struck by the familiar feeling of another site, beautifully sculpted by time and filled with the distant echo of music and laughter from a bygone era, but now occupied by a colony of starlings and pigeons, the roof pierced with holes, the floor shaken by the rumbling surf beneath." (Measure.org.uk)

To hear the recordings and read more about 'A Pier at Wilton's', click here.