The egg labels

In putting together the Birds’ eggs display, it might have been more visually appealing to just position the eggs in the drawer, with a small modern label giving the bird’s name. However, museums are more than just presenters of artefacts, they usually aim to conserve and share the stories behind the objects too.

This is expressed by Rachel Morris in her 2020 book, ‘The Museum Makers’. ‘When we make museums, during my day job as a museum maker, we make them as follows. First we gather up the artefacts, listen to the curators, understand the stories that each object tells, and the bigger stories that they tell when you group them together. We learn the stories that our objects have gathered as they journey through time, and we try not to strip an object back to a single meaning but somehow to evoke the clouds of meanings that hang around each one of them.’

In our blog entry, Hatching a plan, we explained our lack of knowledge of the provenance of the collection of birds’ eggs at Market Lavington Museum and, in our previous entry, Bird’s eggs, we suggested a probable journey through time. We have the 21 eggs themselves, albeit three of them are broken shells, we have the old ink written labels tucked inside more modern tissue wrapping and sticky labels. All these are part of the story and so the wrappings and labels have been kept with the eggs in the display drawer.

Next time we will look at the rest of these eggs and consider the Latin names on their old labels.