Banksy vrs The Bristol Museum

Leonie and I got up early this morning and headed to Bristol on the train (about 1.5 hours, assuming the emergency brake on the train doesn’t kick in all the damn time). We went down to see the Banksy exhibition, titled “Banksy vrs The Bristol Museum”. First stop was Paddington Station, named after the bear ofcourse.

Paddington Bear

Once down there, we had to wait about 40 mins to get in, but as it was free, the queue was moving quite quickly, and a nice day, it wasn’t too bad at all.

The main area of the museum, which is quite small, was taken over by Banksy, and scattered thru out the rest of the museum was other bits and pieces, eg in the ceramics area there was a bong and some weed, in the geological area with the stalagmites and stalactites was a dildo, amongst the fine art painting were obvious mashups. You had to look quite closely to see it all. I’d assume a lot of people thought they saw all of it, but only really saw half.

Venus (post surgery)

Stalacmite Dildo

I’m still not sure if the Giant Irish Elk were real or not. I guess they are as wikipedia knows about them.

The most disturbing thing there was Tweetie – old, without his trademark yellow feathers, and said to not like loud noises and children.

Tweetie at 80

To me, this just made me feel sad. He was subtly animated, his eyes moved a little, and occasionally a foot moved. The monkey, painting, which I didn’t get a shot of, was also kind of disturbing, but more because most of his movement was in his eyes and eyebrows, which made it creepy.

Some of it was amazing subtle, some of it was just outright obvious. But overall, it was very good, and well worth the trip down. Highly recommended, and on until the end of August.

The full set of my photos – all off my iphone – are here. Leonie’s, from her 400D w/50mm prime lens, are here. Big thanks to Banksy and The Bristol Museum for allowing (and encouraging) photography, but being explicit about not allowing tripods (we saw someone being thrown out for holding everyone up when using one)