Plastics at home

Hello all, I hope you enjoyed an extended bank holiday weekend. While trying to think of a topic for the blog post last week, my mind kept redirecting towards my own plans for the bank holiday which gave me an idea: A picnic inspired by MoDiP. The MoDiP collection is filled with a wide variety of...

If you’re a regular reader of the museum’s blog, you’ll know that we like to promote plastics’ virtues because this material group is often misunderstood and misrepresented. Reading Pam’s recent post where she talked about the EasyRoller 2 wheelchair, she highlighted ten different types of plastics...

The early semi-synthetic plastics utilised natural, plant-based materials that then had chemicals added to them in order to change or improve their specific properties. Development soon introduced the first completely synthetic plastics, man-made by reacting chemicals in the laboratory that were...

Spending so much time at home has really made me appreciate those little items around me that perhaps I was drawn to at the time of purchase, but to which I have since paid little attention. One such object is a waste-paper basket (see image below). On the face of it, a waste-paper basket isn’t...

We are an AUB student team from the Creative Events Management course and we are running a competition to promote the re-launch of MoDiP's MyPlastic exhibition. The competition is open to everyone, students and the general public, for the chance to win a cash prize of £100. You may not realise that...

Another year, another lockdown so obviously time for another My plastics at home blog! I was thinking about the last blog we had written in this series where each member of the museum team had chosen a plastics object from home that was important to them in some way. It suddenly occurred to me that...

As we are now in the second coronavirus lockdown, I thought it would be interesting to re-visit the My plastics at home blog series. The MoDiP team are all working from home for some, if not all, of the week (staff involved in tasks that require access to the collections continue to come onto campus...

Inspired by a blog written by Carla Flack, Sculpture and Installation Art Conservator, Tate, I decided to investigate some of my own plastics at home, to see if I could identify what materials they are made from and (hopefully) find out more about their history. For my first object, I selected this...