Electricity: The Spark of Life – Wellcome Collection, London
I rather enjoyed this historic and thematic overview of the place of electricity in our lives. The broad structure of the exhibition takes us from Generation (early encounters with electrical forces, experimentation and understanding of the processes involved in creating electricity) to Supply (how electricity was stored, harnessed and transported) and Consumption (the effect it has had on our lives), with newly commissioned artworks accompanying each section.
Unfortunately, a drawback of exploring early experiments in electricity is that the displays are necessarily very static, in opposition to the spectacles they represent. Books, engravings and equipment stand in for the experiments themselves and their effect on the popular imagination, although the curators did work to break this up by including film and archival footage (a group of people being shocked in series by an electric eel is a particular highlight). Photographs and household objects add more variety as the visitor moves through the sections, and I particularly liked the tea towels produced by the Electrical Association for Women with information like how to rewire a plug. I could do with some of those.
I also found the exhibition design quite clever. The whole feel is quite industrial, with a lot of copper highlights, and the lighting design was slightly intrusive in a way that supported the exhibition’s theme and the focus on the importance of electricity to modern society. One review I read criticised the exhibition for focusing too much on interesting trivia (for example the fact that the name Bovril comes from ‘bovine’ and ‘Vril’, the latter being a revitalising and electrical substance from a science fiction tale), but I liked the bringing together of history, science, everyday life, commissioned artworks, exhibition design and quirky facts into a coherent and interesting whole. If you have a somewhat rainy afternoon free, as I recently did, I would recommend a trip to the Wellcome Collection to see it.
Until 25 June, Free