Transcript
My name’s Phil Sofer, I’m a museum technician in the Technical Services Department at the V&A, and my role on the McQueen exhibition is to work on mounting all the objects and accessories in the cabinet of curiosities section. I picked this orb bag to talk about because the first time I saw it I just thought it was a really interesting object. It’s quite an unusual piece but a lot of the McQueen pieces that are coming in for the exhibition are unusual, you know, and present their own challenges. When I first started looking at how to mount this object, I looked at the photography that had been done for the publication to accompany the exhibition. And the objects…there’s another bag in the show, a red Fabergé egg bag, and they’re photographed so that they’re, like, suspending in space. So I thought I’d try and mount these objects in the same way. And looking at this object it’s actually, it actually has quite a bit of weight to it so where it would be quite simple to suspend that object simply from the leather strap, it was important from a conservation point of view that it’s weight is supported for the duration of the exhibition, so that there’s not that weight pulling down on the leather strap for the duration of the exhibition. It’s actually a really interesting piece with this, like, bird’s claw that’s been cast from a real claw in metal, like, hanging from the bottom of it. So we wanted to raise the height of this object in the compartment so that’s actually suspended in space. And the mount itself will be sprayed to match the colour of the cabinet so that once the exhibition lighting is done, you know, the mount will, sort of, disappear into the blackness of the compartment behind it.