Goth Tourist in Glasgow

On my little holiday in Glasgow, I indulged myself by visiting various art museums. But, not all darkly inclined people are such art museum freaks as me, so I am going to feature just four sights that are rather gothy and are available all year around. All of these also happen to be free of charge.

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum are an extensive collection of art, natural science, and history. The exhibit space is filled with paintings, statues, taxidermy animals, armors and what not.

My personal favourite of the artworks was this distressed Harpy by Mary Pownall (1902). The title of the work is The Harpy Celaeno. It was almost impossible to take a photo of the statue, for some reason my phone's camera refused to focus on it. Spooky.

The harpy is groping her chest, her claws bite into her own skin, and her face expression implicates sorrow and pain. Harpies are usually depicted without hands and often in groups, so this is an unusual sculpture. It is much more human than is customary.

From 1st of April till 1st of October 2017 they feature an exhibition of superheros and comics. It looks very interesting but unfortunately I did not get to see it.

Glasgow University & the Hunterian Museum

Magnificent Gothic architecture of the University is worth checking out, and so is the Hunterian Museum inside it. The museum is named after William Hunter (1718–1783), who was a former student of the University and a keen collector of all things marvelous. His collection was the base for the museum. Collection ranges from the artifacts of Ancient Rome to Physics inventions.

The most macabre part of the collection is the Anatomical and Pathological Collection. Many of the samples are human but some are disfigured animals with more heads and feet than is usual.

The Glasgow Botanical Gardens

Glasgow Botanic Gardens are a marvelous place but for goths and other macabre folk the Botanic Gardens offer a whole room dedicated to killer plants. These plants are carnivores and on my visit I learned that there are 5 different method categories for the plants to trap their pray. One of them being 'lobster pot traps which use inward and downward pointing hairs to force pray to move towards a digestive organ'.

I doubt these particular carnivorous plants in the photo use that method of 'lobster pot traps' but they sure are beautiful. The other rooms of the hothouses were very nice too.

Glasgow Necropolis

Last but not least, the Glasgow Necropolis. It is a Victorian garden cemetery and there are many beautiful and ornamental gravestones and memorials. The Friends of Glasgow Necropolis organize guided tours and it is a good idea to participate one if possible. The Friends of Glasgow guides give depth to your visit, because they can tell about the history of the graves and the cemetery.

If your visit doesn't match with the tour program, another thing I can recommend is to buy a book they've published: The Glasgow Necropolis After lives – Tales of Interments by Ruth Johnston. It costs £ 8 plus delivery but it does make your visit way better. Me and my friend had that book with us when we went on our visit and it was marvelous.

We started on the recommended route up the hill and every time we saw an interesting gravestone, we searched its photo from Johnston's book. The book includes 150 most interesting graves and Johnston has collected all sorts of facts about the artwork, the lives of the people who are buried there, and so forth.

I hope these tips will be helpful for another goth tourist in Glasgow!

Goth Tourist in Edinburgh

This is the first post about the goth-y things I experienced on my trip to Scotland. Next week I'll write about goth-y things in Glasgow but now we'll concentrate on the capital.

On a day trip to Edinburgh, I and my friend visited two distinctly goth places. First the Surgeons' Hall Museums and then the pub with Frankenstein theme.

Surgeon's Hall Museums

I can wholeheartedly recommend this place. The Surgeon's Hall Museums is in plural because it consists of two museums and ole collection: Wohl Pathology Museum, the History of Surgery Museum and the Dental Collection. The museums have samples and curiosities beginning from the 18th century all the way to the present day.

Alas, one could not take photos in the museum but I'll just say that the exhibition rooms were amazing. There were thousands of samples in glass jars and also several interactive pieces. In one of them you get to participate to one famous postmortem, in another you get to try how much precision surgeon needs in her/his job.

I would also like to add that the members of the staff were very nice and helpful. Especially that lovely lady who was working in the ticket shop at around 1 pm on Saint Patrick's Day; you made our visit more than perfect, thank you!

Frankenstein Pub

I adore Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and also most of the movie adaptations of it. So of course I and my friend just had to go to the pub with Frankenstein theme!

This pub is goth, horrifically funny and quite kitschy. They had the movie version from 1931 playing on loop on all the televisions they had in the place and they had all sorts of cutely tacky decorations on the walls.

On the entrance they had this huge statue of the Creature. I tried to hold hands with him but he seemed a bit distracted the whole time.

If you check the pub's Twitter, you'll notice they have among other things Harry Potter themed quizzes.

Other tips for goth tourists

I also want to hint about three goth-y things in Edinburgh. We didn't have time for these this time, but especially the Ghost Bus Tour seemed very interesting. We sighted one bus on our way and it looked very charming. Alas, it was all dark so I didn't get a decent photo of it.

Ghost Bus Tours

The Ghost Bus Tours are not just an Edinburgh thing; they also have tours in London and York. This is a horror comedy show on wheels. They promise to take the travelers to the most grim and famous sites of Edinburgh

The Real Mary King's Close

The Real Mary King's Close is a prize winning tourist attraction. The 'main ingredients' are 17th century streets that were sealed away for some reason and guides in character costumes. On the guided tours people get to see the 17th century life as if it was frozen in time. During that era, life could be rather brutal.

The Edinburgh Dungeon

According to my friend who has been there, the Edinburgh Dungeon is a gothier version of the Real Mary King's Close. History's macabre details made fun and gory entertainment.

Goth tourist in Finland: Body Worlds – Animal Inside Out

Here is a tip for all darkly inclined tourists (and also residents!) in Finland: The Body Worlds – Animal Inside Out is displayed in the Finnish Science Center Heureka until 29th of October 2017.

This exhibition is about the anatomy of animals and features plastinated animal bodies. They are extremely fascinating! Though, for more sensitive people they might be a bit too much.

Before anyone gets enraged I must point out that no animal has died in order to be a part of this exhibition. The animals are donations from zoos and other places like that and the animals have died of natural causes.

I was most impressed by the entire body of a great white shark. It stood out because it was almost artistically positioned. All other specimens were featured by themselves, and often in static poses. The shark on the other hand was frozen in the middle of a hunt. It had just caught a seal.

I learned from a guide that actually this shark was not meant to be part of the exhibition. It is a replacement for another plastinated shark because this original shark was damaged in transportation. The original was the plastination of blood veins and blood filled organs, and would've looked a bit like this little pig.

The only thing I must criticize is that in the Body Worlds – Animal Inside Out exhibition the info signs next to the specimens were a bit repetitive. The same sentences featured in numerous signs which was rather annoying.

Plastination is a process of preservation in which all fat and liquids of a body are replaced with liquid plastic. The plastic gets solid after a while and then the specimen is ready. This preservation method was invented by a German medical expert and anatomist Gunther von Hagens. It aids us to study organs and for example, blood circulation, in a totally new way. In the following photo plastination helps us to examine the intestines of a goat.

In Heureka they have four other exhibitions too, not just those animals. They also have a planetarium movie theater with three science films and also rats that play basket ball. In a planetarium the film screen is a half of a huge ball, so watching a film in there is very impressive and immersive.

Their tickets might feel a bit pricey first (22 € for an adult) but when you consider how much you get with it, it is quite reasonable after all.

Creepy and geeky art treasures at the Serlachius museums

As I promised in my previous post, I am going to continue writing about my art road trip. After the city of Tampere and Ron Mueck's installations our next stop was at Mänttä-Vilppula, the city of art as they are called. This nickname came because a very influential family Serlachius lived in Mänttä-Vilppula and the members of this family loved art, especially a man called Gösta. The Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation was created and the artworks they've acquired are displayed in Serlachius museums at the city of Mänttä-Vilppula.

Art Museum Gösta

The art museum is named after Gösta. They have a new extension to it, Gösta's Pavilion and in there they feature contemporary art. This summer they have a big exhibition of Mark Wallinger's works, open until 9th of October 2016. Wallinger is a painter, sculptor and a video artist. His works, materials and style varies a lot.

This are from the series of id Paintings. The inspiration came from Sigmund Freud's theories and the concept of id and I presume also from the idea of subconscious. They look like huge versions of the Rorschach test. They are taller than an average human, and in the exhibition room there were about 20 of those paintings. It made a person feel really small.

The Rorschach test is a test based on association and interpretation. The patient (or a person examined) looks at cards with ink spots and tells what she/he thinks they look like or symbolize. These interpretations are then seen as sort of messages from the persons subconscious and from them others can try to judge if this person is having stress or for example mental problems.

I would like to note that I have not studied psychology and that short explanation is a simplified and possibly quite crude way to describe the Rorschach test. I personally think that doing/playing this sort of an association game can be fruitful but people really should pay attention to the fact that humans do not share all symbols: for someone a butterfly is a joyful thing, for another one it symbolizes fragility.

It was actually quite fun to start to really look at these paintings and try to analyze and imagine what all those shapes formed. In this painting I saw two mountain hares hanging from something. Possibly they are today's catch and someone is about to make dinner of them. What do you see in this painting?

The id Paintings were made 2015. This sculpture named Time And Relative Dimensions In Space is from year 2001.

As I mentioned in the previous post, there was something that reminded me of Doctor Who. If you picture this shiny box to be blue and have the words Police Public Call Box on it, you'll understand.

Here is me next to it for measurement. Its outer dimensions (aka size) are almost exactly the same as Tardis has. They might even be the same, alas I have never seen Tardis or the props they have for the TV show.

I did not touch it because I am a law abiding art museum visitor and it was highly prohibited. Wanted to, though.

Museum Gustaf

Those were some works at the Gösta Art Museum. In Mänttä-Vilppula there is another Serlachius Museum named Gustaf. They usually have exhibitions about history and technology but this summer they also had an exhibition called Landscape. It was an interactive exhibition in which people could learn about the history of landscape art, and create their own landscapes of the pieces of famous landscape paintings.

From the photo above you can see the entrance. Maisema means landscape and on the right there are pieces of famous paintings. Inside the room there were sort of tables with frames. On the other wall there were replicas of famous paintings, the pieces of paintings for constructing one's own landscape (in the shelves), and video screens. The videos were about landscape paintings and their history.

Here are two installations I made. The other one is with Dalí's watches and a random angel.

And the other one is a mix of some winter paintings. A more classy combination, I'd say. Do click the images for a larger view and better details. I took these photos with a real camera, not my phone, so the quality is not that devastatingly bad.

I hope you enjoyed this post. I had fun at the museums and fun writing about them, and I do hope some of that happiness and enjoyment shines through this post.

Next time: cute and macabre art from the next destination on my road trip!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: Uncanny Giants of Ron Mueck

Last weekend I went for an art road trip in a small but selected company. This means that we left the capital of Finland and traveled through ten art museums and other summer exhibitions during three days.

The route took us from Southern Finland to West, the city of Tampere, and then to Eastern Finland. You can roughly see the route here in this map in purple, it's unimaginatively named as 'Art Road Trip'. The distance me and my entourage traveled was about 600 km (370 miles).

Map made with karttaikkuna.fi

The places we visited on Friday were:

Riihimäki art museum
Hämeenlinna art museum (Riihimäki and Hämeenlinna are the names of different cities)
Sara Hildén Art Museum

Sara Hildén (1905–1993) was a Finnish businesswoman and a patron of arts. She started an art foundation (named after her) in 1962. The foundation concentrated on modern art but they do hold exhibitions of contemporary art these days. This summer they are hosting a solo exhibition of Ron Mueck. Previously they've had solo exhibitions of many famous artists, among them Andy Warhol.

Mueck is an Australian artist, and has made only 40 works. 10 of them are displayed this summer at Sara Hildén Art Museum in the city of Tampere. The works are extremely life-like sculptures that are in some way out of proportion. They are either outrageously large and hence uncanny or very small. 

I found the exceptionally large works delightfully disturbing. among them were a giant couple under a parasol, a human-sized dead chicken and a baby the size of a whale. 

The sculptures are detailed, they have individual hairs and pores and everything. This might be a weird thing to say, but the sense of 'flesh' was very strong in the exhibition. 

Unashamed I used random people as measuring sticks for these art works. The sculptures would not look so exceptional, if you could not understand the size of them. I think this gigantic baby is fascinating and at the same time repelling. 

What do you think of Ron Mueck's art?

Next week: the treasures of Serlachius Museums, among them something that will probably remind you of Doctor Who!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: The everyday cruelty in Jarmo Mäkilä's art

Some time ago I went to see the art exhibitions at HAM, Helsinki Art Museum. There were a couple of big exhibitions and a couple of small exhibitions in their facilities. The exhibition that made my little goth heart shiver the most was the exhibition From Heino With Love. Heino is the surname of a family that began to collect contemporary art. Their love for art gave birth to the Heino Art Foundation. This exhibition in HAM is the first time the public can see a glimpse of their extensive collection. The exhibition is on until 28th of August 2016.

Bleak and cruel childhood

The exhibition From Heino With Love featured many interesting contemporary artists but what really caught my eye on my visit to the museum were the works of Jarmo Mäkilä. His works often show the mundane cruelty of our everyday life. Mäkilä has made sculptures, paintings and installations. Many of his work have a sort of a horror film atmosphere, but some are terrible in a more documentary sort of way.

The piece I want to show you is named First Day at School (2007–2008). It is an installation of a miniature model of a school building. On the other side there is either a trail of toys leading to the school, or quite possibly escaping from there.

On the other side the building there are visible marks of violence. The windows are smashed and there are signs of a fire or an explosion.

For me this is a bleak description of a child's feelings when he/she is forced to go to a scary new facility for the very first time. Very big schools with not enough staff and too many bullies can seem like a hostile place to be.

What thoughts spring into your minds?

Art around the city

What I really like about HAM is that they also organize exhibitions outside the museum. At the moment one of the old boulevards for pedestrians in the center of Helsinki is the showplace for an installation by one of the best known contemporary artists: Japanese Yayoi Kusama.

Kusama has wrapped the trees into polka dots. The whole street looks like this. A bit like Wonderland, isn't it?

HAM also has an exhibition room or a window in the nearest metro station (simply named as HAM metro). It is a sort of a glass cage for the art on the platform so people waiting for the next metro can look at some art while they are on the platform.

At the moment HAM features large paintings by a Swedish graffiti artist Kaos.

I hope you enjoyed this post!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: The Black Paintings of Goya and a trip to Madrid

I spent the last full week of May in Madrid, as a sort of a summer holiday because I am going to be working the whole summer (of which I am glad!). In my previous blog post I already mentioned that this spring would be very busy for me and I was not wrong. I have finished my studies and before I traveled to Madrid, the capital of Spain, I had emptied and cleaned my apartment in Tampere, the city where my (soon to be ex-)University is. I returned from Madrid  two days before my new work began and for the past week I've been still very busy, learning the new job.

The view from the hotel room in Madrid

In Madrid I visited many amazing art museums and saw many great paintings and statues by famous and not so famous artists. The works were beautiful or thought-provoking but not something that was hitting that "goth spot", if you know what I mean. :) The most goth paintings I saw on my trip would be Francisco de Goya's "Black Paintings". I saw most of them at the Museo del Prado, the distinguished art museum with the largest collections in Madrid. They had a whole room full of Goya's grim and ominous paintings.

The Black Paintings are paintings Goya (1746–1828) made between 1819 and 1823. He used much darker colors and shades compared to his earlier works and most importantly, the paintings depicted sinister and horrifying things. This is a painting called "Saturn eating his son" and the name is quite explicit. Saturn, the father of Zeus and other gods of Ancient Greece, is devouring his own son because there was a prophecy that one of Saturn's own children would kill him. So he would eat them all. This is a striking and obscene painting.

Source

I must admit that I've never been a fan of Goya and the Black Paintings do not make my heart shiver nor do they put me into awe. The subjects of the Black Paintings are interesting but something in Goya's style just isn't suitable for me. Goya also made some paintings of witches and their grim rites in the end of the 18th century. Their colors are lighter but subjects are not. In this painting a group of witches are having a feast with the incarnation of the devil or another demon and they are offering dead or ghoulish children to him. Or at least that is how I interpret this scene.

Source

These paintings could easily delight and interest goths. The macabre and twisted elements are fairly visible and they have a sort of a timeless vibe in them, with the mythical themes and folklore-ish subjects.

As a side note: Museo del Prado is now having an exhibition of Hieronymous Bosch and his works and it looks like it is amazing. Alas, I could not see it because I had to return to Finland before the exhibition opened. The exhibition is the biggest exhibition of Bosch this year. If you happen to be in Madrid in near future, that Bosch exhibition is definitely worth checking out!

Personal update and some uncanny art

Once again a month has passed by. I have been working on my thesis relentlessly and I am happy to say that in two weeks it shall be finished and I will graduate this semester! That will mean that I have more time to write this blog. ^__^ Another thing that has been preoccupying my free time for the past couple of months is the search for an apartment. In the beginning of June I start working in a different city and need to find a place to live. I am really excited because a new chapter is beginning in my life.

For the past couple of months I have visited several art exhibitions but they have not often suited the themes of this blog a.k.a. the artworks I've seen have not been extremely "goth" nor have they represented darker aesthetics. This installation is something I would like to feature. I think it is rather uncanny.

This installation was made by Finnish artist Mia Hamari. Another work of hers was featured in this post in January. The name of this work is "Manual, Siberia, Jester, Party". It is made of two figures. A more human-like creature and an animal with a human face. Hamari draws inspiration from dreams and the subconscious. Her works often feature a human-animal metamorphosis. In this work there are also mechanical/clockwork aspects to them, since the other one has wheels instead of back limbs.

This work was exhibited at the Gallen-Kallela Museum. Gallen-Kallela is one of our national artists and the museum is his old home turned into an exhibition place. There are changing exhibitions and this work of Mia Hamari can be seen till the end of May 2016.

As you can see, this artwork is made of mixed materials, among them bronze, wood and parts of animals. The animals Hamari uses in her art have died in accidents. She has also used human parts like hair and eyelashes. Presumably they are of her own or donated to her.

This smaller statue is the size of a small terrier or another dog. What I really like about this installation is that the expressions on both the creatures' faces are a bit ambiguous, one can easily interpret several different feelings. This way the work can express different feelings and atmospheres, depending of the viewer. The small one is looking up and the taller one has closed its eyes. Though the small one has no pupils in its eyes so nobody knows if it can even see. Very uncanny.

I hope you liked this installation of Mia Hamari!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: biblical irony or devotion?

I had once again grand plans to make a new Creepy Reads Review but the truth is I have not had any chance to read anything else but things related to my studies. I've been feeling very stressed for the past few weeks and it has manifested in many ways, one being that I have not had the energy to read or read and comment other blogs. I believe this abstinence of blogger contact makes me more melancholic and passive, so I do try to get back into blog sphere!The best way, I hope, is to write a post.

I managed to have a short break of my overwhelming studies and went to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art aka EMMA. It is situated in the facilities of Weegee exhibition center with four other museums and one futuristic cabin that looks like a flying saucer. The exhibition center is about 20 minutes bus drive from the centrum of Helsinki, so it is a great place to visit if you are on a weekend trip in the capital of Finland.

There were many a beautiful and intriguing art works to see but here is the one that I thought was the most suitable for Gothic Art in Spotlight.

This work is made by a Finnish artist Pauno Pohjolainen 2009. It is mixed media on wood and the name of it is Court Jester. I had seen Pohjolainen's works previously but they were more abstract. From this photo you can see how 3D this artwork is. Pohjolainen's works are often quite massive and are somewhere between paintings and sculptures.

Year 2011 he has made two public works to the Cathedral of Turku. They represent the Last Supper and can be found from the artist's webpage. The webpage is unfortunately in Finnish but just scroll to the year 2011, it is easy to spot which artworks have biblical reference in them. :)

I actually find this really interesting, because the Court Jester has clear biblical allusion in it but it is not necessarily positive or without critic or irony. At least I see a lot of resemblance between the crown of thorns and this hovering circle above the skull.

I see a clear point of contact between the Savior of Christian mythology and this skull with thorns. The skull, not being human, is against Christian mythology that very clearly separates humans from animals and places man above other creatures. On the other hand, the sacrificial lamb is a powerful symbol in the Christian mythology and the face of this creature does resemble a lamb a bit.

The name of this artwork also highlight a power structure, even though it is not strictly biblical. A court jester was an anomaly, a person in a court that supposedly had no power and was ridiculous but had the possibility to bring visible other people's schemes for power. The skull is grinning a wide fool's smile with its teeth partly scattered outside its mouth. The horns are also rich of significance: the other one is broken, why? Do they resemble a Fool's Hat or more likely the biblical Devil?

I like Court Jester because it is open to various interpretations. What do you think of it?

Goth tourist in Dublin

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent the first weekend of September in Dublin.

Things I saw

I went to two art museums, the National Gallery of Ireland and The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery. Both were exquisite and had free entry. Nothing extremely goth art was on display, so I am not going to write about them much. All I'll say is that if you are in Dublin, they are extremely nice places to spend a couple of hours.

Another not particularly goth or gloomy place to visit but in which I had a great time was Teeling Whiskey Distillery. They arrange tours and it is the only working whiskey distillery in Dublin.

In these huge tanks water leaves alcohol. They all had names and the liquid goes through from the biggest to the smallest. There are three copper ladies in a row.

Rebecca on the right can hold 9 000 liters. She is the smallest one. If I remember correctly the biggest of the sisters has the capacity of 15 000 liters or more.

A tad more goth-y or at least more geeky place to visit would be the old library of The Trinity College. The quality of photos is awful due to lighting conditions (to preserve old books). One could photograph only in The Long Room. If you think there is something familiar in this place, it might be because you have seen its doppelganger in the movie Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.

They have around 200 000 books in this library and many of them are extremely valuable first editions. The most priced book of this library is the Book of Kells, It was written and drawn around year 800 and it contains the four Gospels. The most intriguing thing about it are the marvelous drawn decorations. Underneath this Long Room in the photos is a huge exhibition area dedicated solely to the Book of Kells. 

The most goth tourist attraction I found on a 48 hour trip was Marsh's Library. They have many ghost stories and other peculiar and sometimes morbid things on display. Among them a copy of Jonathan Swift's dear friend's skull. No photos are allowed to take in the library, so alas, I have nothing to show. They do have great photos and information on their website, though.

The Marsh's Library has stayed pretty much the same for 300 years and is an almost pristine example of 18th century library. James Joyce, Jonathan Swift and Bram Stoker have all visited it and used its services. The library still has the chair Mr. Stoker rested his bum on while he read about witchcraft!

One thing particular makes this place the gothiest place I visited and it is because their history and that they made a small comic book about the weirdest tales. It was created by John Rooney, the illustrator, and Julie Burke, who is the Education and Outreach Officer of the Marsh's Library.

I bought a copy and I must say it is great! I adore the style of the illustrator. All incidents or stories consist of a one picture and a text box but they are really amusing and sometimes a bit gross. My favorite story is about a 3500 years old mummy that was found in a cupboard at the library in 1888. Nobody knows how it ended up there!

You can read this small treasure online, if you want to, though I must say that buying it for mere 2 euros for a physical copy is a very good deal. They also have beautiful photos of details of their collection on Pinterest.

Prospects on shopping

In the post before the trip I wrote that I would like to go to goth clothing shops, if possible. There were a couple of alternative fashion stores in the Temple Bar area. They were nice but they mostly sold rock, psycho-billy etc. styles so I end up leaving without any purchases.

Obviously for those interested in Celtic myths, jewelry, and things related the Green Island is a heaven. Celtic necklaces are beautiful but not my style anymore, so no products came to my possession. What I really wanted to have was a selection of animal themed sticky notes. The bat and the dodo are my favorites.

 The sticky notes were sold in the shop of the National Gallery of Ireland. It contains 8 different animals in 8 different sticky note piles and it costed about 12 euro.

From an Irish gift shop called Old World New I found this beautiful thing. "Wolf's Bane. Potion No. 5. Slightly bitter potion to take the edge off your Lycanthropy. Drink at your own risk."

I am not sure if one can actually use it and store some liquid in it. The bottleneck is really small and it would be a pain in the ass to try to clean it after usage. No matter, it looks gorgeous by my window, next to a candelabra I found at a flea market last summer.

Next up: Creepy Reads Review after a long pause!