We have a new interactive sculpture at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, which will provide fun for all the family. The sculpture is entitled ‘Reflected Vision’ by artist Kenny Munro, and has been created from mirrored stainless steel, allowing visitors to engage with reflections from the natural world (and of themselves and their friends!). The mirrored surfaces work both inside and outside the structure and are crowned by a model of a magic lantern.
‘Reflected Vision’ is informed by the pre-cinema holdings of the museum and the different ways of seeing created by optical entertainments. Bill Douglas was both a filmmaker and a collector and the museum was founded from the huge collection of moving image ephemera he put together with his friend Peter Jewell. Bill was fascinated by the wonder of different ways of viewing the world and the sculpture also contains a stone, bearing a poetry inscription from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that was used as the epigraph to the published script of Bill’s film Comrades.
Kenny Munro is an environmental artist who trained at Edinburgh College of Art and Royal College of Art and has designed many public works of art in Scotland. He is also a great admirer of Bill’s Douglas’s films and created a sculpture called ‘A Place of Dreams’ in Bill’s home area of Newcraighall, Edinburgh - you can find out more about Kenny’s work at www.kennymunrosculpture.com .
The sculpture has been largely funded through the Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell Trust, Exeter University Foundation, and private donations as well as the generosity of suppliers Fyfe Glenrock and McMillan Ltd. We are also really grateful for the help and support of the staff within the University’s Property Services, especially Mike Brookes, and our Grounds team. It has a great position on the grass bank above Prince of Wales Road, looking over the City. We hope that ‘Reflected Vision’ will be both an attraction for visitors to the museum, which offers two galleries of artefacts on the history of the moving image and a collection of over 75,000 items (www.bdcmuseum.org.uk) and an impressive addition to the University’s acclaimed sculpture trail (http://www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk/sculpture-collection/) .
