Latest news with #AshmoleanMuseum
Yahoo
30-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists think this orange goo is 2,500-year-old honey
The buzz surrounding the contents of a 2,500-year-old bronze and copper jar has perplexed archaeologists for half a century. What was this residue with ties to Ancient Greece? Is it the remains of fats or oils from some kind of meat, or perhaps beeswax used for face creams, sealing boats, and more? A new reanalysis of this millennia-old residue found that it is likely the remains of ancient honey. The findings are detailed in a study published July 30 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In the ancient world, honey was an important substance. It was found in alcoholic beverages uncovered in the tomb of King Midas and people in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt used the sticky substance as a common medicinal ingredient. It was used to treat burns and fight infections. It was also used as a universal sweetener in foods and drinks. Honey also had a role in death rituals. According to historical accounts, Alexander the Great was preserved in honey upon his death. The substance was sometimes left in shrines as offerings to the gods and buried alongside the dead–whether they were conquerors or commoners. In 1954, an underground Greek shrine dating to about 520 BCE was discovered in Paestum, Italy, about 90 minutes from Pompeii. Archeologists at the time initially assumed that it was honey, but three different analyses over the next 30 years failed to confirm the presence of honey in the residue. Instead, it was believed to be some animal or vegetable fat that had been contaminated with pollen and insect parts over time. The copper pot eventually made its way to University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum for an exhibition, so a team there had a chance to re-examine the mystery substance. The researchers led by Oxford archeologist Luciana da Costa Carvalho and biological chemist James McCullagh, analyzed samples of the residue to determine its molecular makeup. This closer look revealed that the residue has a chemical fingerprint nearly identical to that of modern beeswax and honey. It has a higher acidity level consistent with the changes that occur during long-term storage. It also has a chemical composition more complex than heat-degraded beeswax. This suggested that honey or some other substance was once present in the vessel. [ Related: Ancient funerals may have included a ritual feast on a giant bird. ] Additionally, where the residue had touched the jar, degraded sugar mixed with copper was not found. Instead, hexose sugars–a common group of sugars that is found in honey–were detected in greater concentrations in the ancient residue than modern beeswax. Royal jelly proteins that are known to be secreted by the western honeybee, were also found in the residue. Together, the team says that these results suggest that the mystery substance is what remains of ancient honey. However, it is entirely possible that other bee products such as propolis may also be present in this sample. 'Ancient residues aren't just traces of what people ate or offered to the gods—they are complex chemical ecosystems,' da Costa Carvalho said in a statement. 'Studying them reveals how those substances changed over time, opening the door to future work on ancient microbial activity and its possible applications.' Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A succession of bad paintings': Stanley Donwood and Radiohead's Thom Yorke
For decades, Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood have been locked in an intense creative partnership. They scribble over each other's drawings, scrawl in each other's notebooks, push each other, inspire each other. Their work has been on every Radiohead album cover since 1995's The Bends, every Yorke solo record, every poster and every T-shirt. Nothing is farmed out to designers or agencies – Radiohead's visual identity has been fully overseen by Donwood and Yorke. And now, in a homecoming of sorts for local hero Yorke, their artistic output is being celebrated at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. There's no doubt that Donwood and Yorke, who met while studying at the University of Exeter, have created some of the most recognisable, ubiquitous and maybe even iconic album covers of their generation. But do they make sense in a huge, historic gallery such as the Ashmolean? Does any of it make for good art? Does it stand up to scrutiny when removed from the context of the records and merchandise it was designed for? It's a nice dream, but nope. The exhibition starts with LPs, CDs, posters and T-shirts arranged as though you are in a very hip but dour record shop. The gasping, deathly resuscitation dummy of The Bends; the ghostly schematics and angry doodles of OK Computer; the weeping little fella of Amnesiac; the mountains of Kid A; the multicoloured poetry of Hail to the Thief; the woodcuts of Yorke's The Eraser. This is how the work was meant to be seen, this is the context it works best in: arranged as if in racks, as if you could pull a record off the wall and play it. Donwood clearly has an issue with art galleries. 'They're just intimidating – it's not very democratic,' says a quote of his on the wall. 'Whereas you go into a record shop and it's full of all kinds of oiks.' I'm not sure I buy into this. Record shops can have exactly the same atmosphere of sneering exclusivity as galleries. There's a touchiness here that makes the show feel a little bitter. Guys, you're in the Ashmolean. You're not kicking against the establishment, you're in it. The exhibition goes album by album, with sketchbooks and paintings displayed to lay bare their creative process. Everything is jointly attributed, positioning Yorke and Donwood as equals. OK Computer sets an unfairly high bar early on in the show. The 1997 album captured the era's zeitgeist with its anxious teardown of corporate facelessness, technological paranoia and capitalist excess. It still resonates, as does its sense of isolation and loneliness in a world where you're constantly surrounded by people. The artwork looked like nothing else of its era: featuring a motorway overlayed with airplane safety manuals and the ghosts of people rushing by, the cover image looks how the music sounds – cold, frustrated, isolated, desperate. A brilliant meeting of music and album artwork. But it works infinitely better as a CD insert. You gain almost nothing by seeing these digital images enlarged, framed and plonked on a gallery wall. Radiohead would struggle to capture the moment again in quite the way they did with OK Computer. The same goes for the art. Donwood and Yorke made vast, bleak acrylic paintings for the covers of Kid A and Amnesiac. Eight canvases are displayed here and they are an unbelievable mess: badly composed, poorly executed, smudgy, splodgy, confused landscapes that even the RA Summer Exhibition would reject. The paintings of spiders and trees for 2011's King of Limbs are even worse; sub-A Level attempts at Max Ernst that almost make me embarrassed for them. The woodcuts for Yorke's solo albums are less visually offensive, and the ultra-colourful paintings of rivers and forests for the most recent albums by his other band the Smile work better as artworks, but are still quite a distance from anything you'd call brilliant. Plenty of the work here, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, has entered the wider public consciousness in a way that proves album artwork has cultural heft. It matters. It has an impact. But that doesn't mean any of it is especially good, or even interesting, as art. If you're a Radiohead fan, there is tons of insight and detail here to keep you happy, but from an art perspective it is a succession of bad paintings. Donwood and Yorke probably shouldn't have put themselves in this position, but they did it to themselves, and that's what really hurts. This Is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 6 August to 11 January
Times
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
What Radiohead's artwork tells us about their music (and a new album)
In 2007, when Radiohead surprise-released the album In Rainbows, their legions of devoted fans were given a choice. Click here, we were told, and you can have the music for free. Or click here and you can pay £40 to have the music plus a load of artwork. Reader, I paid the £40 — and that record, with its gorgeous, trippy rainbow splurge of colour, is still on display in my living room. Hence This Is What You Get, an era-spanning hits, rarities and notebooks exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in the band's home town of Oxford, and which is named for a lyric in their song Karma Police. Because nothing sums up Radiohead diehards better than spending hard-earned cash on some photocopied paintings instead of opting to own In Rainbows for zilch . Do the band have a sleeve as iconic as Sgt Pepper? Nevermind? Parklife? No. But nobody else gets close to the synergy between music and image that Radiohead's body of work boasts — a point This Is What You Get pushes over and over again as it traces the singer Thom Yorke's professional relationship with his artist friend Stanley Donwood through 180 exhibits. • The time Thom Yorke smiled — candid snaps by the Radiohead bassist They met at Exeter University in the late 1980s and started working together for the front cover of The Bends in 1995 — that image of a crash test dummy looking as if he is at the point of climax. The duo have put images to music for everything Yorke has written since. For fans, then, this exhibition will be essential, from the opening display of album and single covers they probably own, all the way to the gift shop, where a blue and white teacup and saucer will set you back £42. Yet fans are hardly the test here. Heck, we spent money on essentially free music and acolytes will lap up not so much the art on the wall as the personal items, mostly shown in display cabinets. There is a self-portrait by Yorke with spiders in his beard. One notebook shows an alternative track listing for the album Hail to the Thief (I tried it out; it's better). Another lists Yorke's fears from 2006, which include Iran, smoking ganja, getting fat, the suffering of millions as a consequence of global warming, and evangelists. Scribbled above some lyrics is a phone number for someone called Ellie. These lived-in pages in themselves prove to be a joy, probably as close to an autobiography as Yorke will get, showing us a mind that is always on, always jotting. The explanatory text for his solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes says it was made at 'a particularly bleak time for Yorke'. I am not sure we knew that. • Radiohead are playing together again Still, the focus here is not Yorke's words, nor his music, which plays very little role in the exhibition at his insistence that nothing would be played through speakers (there are a couple of points offering headphones for the uninitiated who have somehow found themselves in a Radiohead exhibition). Instead the point is is to let the visuals speak for themselves, to extricate Donwood and Yorke's artwork, which they mostly create at the same time as the music is being recorded, from the awards-laden band that made said art famous. 'It was years before I could go into a gallery,' an introductory text by Donwood reads. 'They're just intimidating, whereas a record shop is full of all kinds of oiks.' It says something about the confidence of the two men that we are clearly not in a record shop any more. So do the paintings, drawings and sketches, on canvases great and small, digital and analogue, stand alone? It is hard, as a fan, to divorce the art from the music — this is a nostalgia trip on which you recall where you were when you first heard each album in every room — but, largely, yes they do, albeit not at the start. The Bends, for instance, is limited here to a couple of posters, but its acclaimed follow-up, OK Computer, is gifted its own big room for artwork that was a parody of self-help and business speak — that lack of soul the album was railing against. It follows Yorke's lyrics and technological fears, thus making it less album art, more art for an album. Non-fans may wonder whether the room actually belongs in a gallery. Move on, though, and as Radiohead's music became more abstract, so did the images. The initially divisive, glitchy Kid A, we are told, was made when Yorke was struggling with the idea of following up OK Computer's success. 'Some anxiety could be exorcised by painting with brushes, knives, sticks, rags, anger, frustration and kicks,' the supporting text reads, and the nightmarish paint-splatter mountains and monsters perfectly evoke music that had left guitars behind and lyrics that no longer told stories but dealt with feelings. Which is pretty much what the past quarter of a century has been for Yorke, a man who, over time, became perhaps more interested in the visuals than he was in music. A real highlight is Yorke's debut solo album, The Eraser, for which Donwood created a London cityscape swept away in a flood. It is black-and-white, eerie and powerful in a way very little album art manages because most of it is not made in cahoots with the musician. At certain points the music supports the art, rather than the other way around: the monochrome sketches of endlessly chopped-down trees for Radiohead's single for war veterans, Harry Patch (In Memory Of), is far more memorable than the actual song. Now that I have seen that image, which I never had in full given I had only streamed the track on Spotify, the song packs a greater power. The exhibition ends with the Smile, Yorke's most recent band. This final room showcases how free-form his partnership with Donwood is. Made after lockdown, the bright, vivid paintings are full of life. It was a happy time and it shows. Many yellow suns are out and the trees are growing again. Donwood said he wanted to make 'less miserable pictures', something both Radiohead fans and haters will smile at. • How Radiohead reinvented rock (with help from a composer) But then the show ends — with a full stop rather than the comma fans would like. They would, after all, love another room, a hint at a new album by Radiohead, if one will ever exist. It is a question this exhibition does not even try to answer but it does at least point us towards what we already knew: that Yorke is an enigma who has put the art into art rock, someone who long ago left behind the idea that his music can be defined, let alone predicted. There is, after all, no mention whatsoever of the breakthrough hit Creep, made before Yorke really knew who he was — and before he started to work with Donwood, his most important creative Is What You Get is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Aug 6 to Jan 11,
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Big turnout for Ox In A Box hospitality food awards
Oxfordshire's hospitality industry celebrated in style as 170 finalists and sponsors packed out the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Guests gathered at the Beaumont Street venue on Monday night to witness the winners in the Ox In A Box Food Awards for 2025. VIP guest for the night was Brett Graham, who has three Michelin stars at The Ledbury in London, and is number one in the UK National Restaurant Awards. Kibou, the Japanese restaurant in Little Clarendon Street, Oxford, won best newcomer, while The White Rabbit won best pub, Quod best restaurant, and Il Corno in the Covered Market won best cafe. READ MORE: U's to stay at Kassam for two more seasons Katherine MacAlister, founder of Ox In A Box, who hosted the awards, said: "We hold the Ox In A Box Food Awards to celebrate the best of Oxfordshire's hospitality industry and make them feel appreciated, to champion what they do. Oxfordshire Hospitality Woman Of The Year Award – Aimee Collins – Five Little Pigs and The Bear in South Moreton (Image: Ed Nix) 'It was such a huge success and we've had such incredible feedback from everyone who attended The Ashmolean about how brilliant it was this year, how much these awards mean to them, and what a difference they make. "And that is our intention - to celebrate the best and give them a night to remember, so we pulled out all the stops, because they really deserve it."
Irish Times
06-05-2025
- Science
- Irish Times
Combustible character: Brian Maye on prickly Irish chemist William Higgins
Irish chemist William Higgins, who died 200 years ago either this or last month (the exact date is unknown), was an early proponent of atomic theory and his life offers insights into the emergence of chemistry as a career during the Industrial Revolution. He could be a prickly individual, who engaged in personal clashes during his lifetime, but also a person of great charm. Born in 1762/3 in Collooney, Co Sligo , the younger of two sons of Thomas Higgins, he came from a medical family. Nothing is known about his mother and little is known about his early years except that as a young man he became an apprentice chemist at his uncle's school of practical chemistry in Soho, London. His uncle's tutoring developed in him a devotion to experimental chemistry, and he later expanded on some of his uncle's ideas on the nature of matter. Following a mineralogical tour of England in 1785 that included visiting chemical manufacturers, he entered Oxford as a student and was also a lecture assistant. In the Ashmolean Museum laboratory he continued his own experiments but, for reasons unknown, left Oxford in 1788 without taking a degree. He returned to London. A central issue in chemistry at this time was the true nature of combustion, according to Patricia Byrne, who wrote the entry on Higgins in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. The 'phlogiston theory' held sway – it was posited that all combustible matter contained the substance phlogiston, which escaped in the form of fire on combustion. Familiar with French research that tied in with his own experimental results, Higgins advanced his own ideas to reject Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids (1787) by chemist Richard Kirwan, who was also Irish. Higgins's A Comparative View of the Phlogistic and Anti-Phlogistic Theories (1789) became his most famous work. It was the first and one of the best defences of the anti-phlogistic position in English and contributed to the theory's demise. READ MORE 'However, it holds additional interest regarding the question of priority in the origin and development of chemical atomic theory, and it is for this that Higgins's name is best known. Pioneering the use of the 'ultimate particle' (ie atom) as a means of explaining his anti-phlogistic theory, he later claimed it pre-empted the development of the atomic theory in 1801-08 by John Dalton,' according to Byrne. Higgins's Experiments and Observations on the Atomic Theory and Electrical Phenomena (1814) tried to prove his claim and virtually accused Dalton of plagiarism. Dalton defended himself by saying he was unaware of Higgins's work and although the latter lost the argument, the controversy continued off and on for more than a century after his death, with Dalton being generally seen as the first to proffer a systematic atomic theory. Higgins fell out with his uncle, probably over the phlogiston theory, and was out of work until appointed chemist to the government-supported Apothecaries' Hall in Dublin in 1791. Kirwan magnanimously recommended him for the position, clearly showing no resentment over their previous differences over phlogiston. The position included accommodation as well as a salary but working hours were long and Higgins was charged with raising the quality of Irish pharmaceutical products. When the Apothecaries Company had financial problems, Kirwan again helped Higgins gain appointment as chemist to the Dublin Society and he became professor of chemistry and mineralogy there until his death, with a substantial salary of £300 a year. Also a part-time chemist for the Irish Linen Board from 1795-1822, he did important work on more economical and safer bleaching processes using calcium sulphide, and published his findings as Essay on the Theory and Practice of Bleaching (1799). He also did much to popularise science in Ireland, organising through the Dublin Society, lecture courses on chemistry for its members and the general public. His A Syllabus of a Course of Chemistry (1801), which was a 40-lecture society laboratory course, 'shows that he kept abreast of scientific developments', according to Byrne. Elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1794, he was on the council of its science committee for many years. 'His blunt personality led to many clashes during his lifetime with (among others) his uncle, possibly some of his professors at Oxford, the Apothecaries' Hall and the Dublin Society,' Byrne remarked, and he was ordered not to interfere with other Dublin Society professors' lectures in 1814. [ From Democritus to Einstein, the long search for the tiny atom Opens in new window ] Higgins lived at several Dublin addresses, latterly at 75 Grafton Street, where he died in May/June 1825. Where he's buried is unknown but his will (April 28th, 1825) showed he'd accumulated considerable wealth due to the purchase of property, all of which he left to his nephew, Capt Charles Higgins.
