Shropshire Events and Whats On Guide

Shropshire Events and Whats On Guide

Exhibition Review : Rowland Emett’s Marvellous Machines

Chris Eldon Lee reviews Rowland Emett’s ‘Marvellous Machines’ exhibition which is at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Gas Hall until September 21st 2014

My first connection with the whimsically inventive mind of Rowland Emett was in 1968, at a London exhibition entitled Cybernetic Serendipity. In amongst a cacophony of interactive machinery – some of which alarmingly followed you round the room – was Emett’s ‘Forget Me Not Computer’, which in a simple, humorous fashion, demonstrated basic computer functions to a world still unfamiliar with them. I was fascinated. Here was the future … and it looked like fun!

Whether computers are still ‘fun’ is a moot point, but Rowland Emett’s creations certainly are, and this summer’s ‘Marvellous Machines’ exhibition at Birmingham’s Art Gallery and Museum is an absolute joy; especially for those of us who have not quite completed the task of growing up.

Mr Emett was an eccentric cartoonist, designer and inventor; an absolute  ‘one-off’ who graced our planet from 1906 to 1990. He actually looks imaginative, with high cheekbones, dreamy eyes and flyaway tie. There is aged black and white TV footage of him perplexing the heavyweight interviewers of the day. Every penetrating question Alan Wicker and Malcolm Muggeridge pose is gently brushed aside with a casual waft of the hand, a wry smile and a look that says, “it’s all just a spot of fun, really”.

His machines are, like the man, charmingly dotty; and many appeared in the film of ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, posing as Caractacus Potts’ crazy creations.

They are constructed from a seemingly random collection of vaguely comical household paraphernalia; tea pots, strainers, lamp shades, bicycle pumps, golf clubs, gramophone turntables, kilts, toasting forks, mangles, tea trolleys and bed knobs; all meticulously assembled into ‘contraptions with purpose’.

There’s the Clockwork Lullabye Machine to help you sleep at night; the Hot Air Rocking Chair, complete with fitted carpet slippers; the Little Dragon Carpet Sweeper which looks rather like a useful, mechanical pet with bellows; and, more exotically, The Exploratory Lunacycle – a dustpan and bicycle version of an Apollo  Moon Rover, operated by a spindly moustachioed pilot wearing a gold fish bowl and colander helmet (pictured above).

And they all work; their amazingly intricate mechanisms operating in lunatic fashion to a mixture of fairground and music box melodies.

Transport clearly caught Emett’s imagination. He designed a crazy miniature railway for the 1951 Festival of Britain. There is colour film of this long dismantled ‘Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway’ which carried over 2 million people around the festival site. And the highlight of the Birmingham show is the Cloud Cuckoo Valley mechanical railway.

His ridiculous but elegant steam engines have huge spindly wheels, towering funnels and pencil thin boilers. There are bits attached for making tea and toasting buns, and they pull carriages that resemble high-rise birdcages. The HS2 proposal would be a lot more popular designed by Emmet.     

The whole show celebrates British Eccentricity at it’s nuttiest. If Flanders and Swann, Wallace and Grommet and the Monty Python team were to put their heads together, these are the machines they would come up with; proudly pricking establishment pomposity in the process.

As long ago as the 1950s, Emett was concerned about the increasingly volatile instability of our future society. He built his oddball inventions because, he said, machines were life’s one remaining certainty. His was very much an alternative view of how technology should evolve…and the rest of us are still trying to catch up.   

The exhibition is at Birmingham’s Gas Hall until 21st September 2014