Victoria and Albert Museum

We, we...

You know, that's the, what the V&A do.

Why are you at Tate?" [laughs]

Why are you here? [laughs]

Right.

Um, and then of course she was absolutely thrilled that, you know, it, it...

I think Anne said something like, "Oh, the V&A and the Tate are coming to see me in the same week." [laughs]

[laughs] I think that's, that's a nice, nice sort of little prod just to, just to sort of think, you know.

And the thing with the 90s, because it's pre-smartphone and it's pre-social media, there's a kind of freedom to...

Like, there's a 90s exhibition at the V&A or something, and there's all the pictures of, you know, Kate Moss and Liam Gallagher and all that, and they're all...

And as a night out, it looks completely different.

You can smoke in nightclubs and all this.

in...

How many times are you going to do this? You could say my great-great-great-granddad was in the French Revolution, at which point it doesn't seem that long ago.

I'm going to actually add to your weight of evidence, Greg, because I went to see the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the V&A, I think it was, and they had most of her personal possessions in one place for the first time since she died, including her jewellery box and a lot of the dresses she wore.

And actually, when I was looking at them, you know, You're right.

She's exhibited at the Venice Biennale and has been the subject of survey exhibitions at Heidi and the National Gallery of Victoria and has created public commissions from Melbourne's Docklands to the Shanghai Library East.

Her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the NGV, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.

Let me introduce you to Emily Floyd.

Emily, welcome to Australian Women Artists.

What remains are some of the design sketches and the photographs of the designs.

And those are mostly housed in the V&A and in the Fashion Museum in Bath.

And unfortunately, the books, the account books themselves did not survive.

That being said, there are some invoices or receipts for different time periods.

Alphabet designed by Godfrey Sykes.

Among the many designs which have been issued by the South Kensington Museum authorities is the alphabet which we have illustrated here today.

The letters appear frequently among the decorations of the museum buildings, especially in the refreshment rooms and the ceramic gallery, where long inscriptions in glazed terracotta form ornamental friezes.

the alphabet has also been engraved to several sizes and is used for the initial letters in the various official books and art publications relating to the museum which are published by the science and art department building news section fourteen

It's just your dried amniotic sac, right? And it was like a thing that people would do.

It was like an important keepsake, right? And so they're like the Victoria and Albert Museum has like a locket that is thought to be a locket that held someone's call from like 1597.

Ooh.

Ooh.

But to the modern eye, the bed doesn't look bedazzled.

The ornate carvings rippling over every inch look just as fancy as the collar ruffles, delicate embroidery, and gold ornamentation in the adjoining rooms at the V&A, which would all have been considered more fancy than the bed in their time.

In 1765, 26 butchers and their wives, 52 people in all, crammed into the bed for a bet.

The story of butchers has been embellished over the years.

My friend Kevin McDonald and I used to make a fort of my twin beds when we were kids.

We'd tuck a bed sheet between them, then we'd put a fan at one end, and it would blow the sheet up into a vaulted ceiling, under which we'd read comic books and listen to K-Tel records.

The V&A Museum is filled with items testifying to the idea, among the nobility, that if you can be represented in art, you will live in the memory of others after you are dead.

The visitor to the Ware Inn, who carved initials in the bed, and the art patron were engaging in the same impulse.