collection high-lights

The 2022 Tour of Britain bike race takes place from 4th - 11th September, with Stage Seven seeing the riders pass through MoDiP’s local area. In anticipation and in celebration of this exciting event, we have put together a pop-up exhibition exploring the increasing role of plastics within the...

Last week I finally completed the catalogue records for a number of OXO kitchen utensils that MoDiP received as part of a generous donation back in November 2021. A total of 163 objects made their way into the museum’s collection, and I have already written a couple of blogs about some of the other...

MoDiP provided the perfect solution to my ’90 year plastics quandary’! My late father, Graham Shelswell, was born in 1932 and was brought up in Wellington Street, Oldbury, which is only a stone’s throw from the British Industrial Plastics factory site. He lived there with his father and mother...

As you may have seen on our Instagram feed, MoDiP has had the great pleasure of loaning objects to an international exhibition curated by Vitra Design Museum, V&A Dundee, and maat. The exhibition Plastic: Remaking Our World, which will be hosted by all three museums (Vitra Design Museum in 26.03...

“Can I really drop it?” “You should, it’s Boontonware” Be Carefree with Boontonware. ….. “I bet she’s dropped our Boontonware a hundred times and not a piece ever broke.” ….. “ – don’t worry, it’s Boontonware” Guaranteed against breakage, it’s molded of Melmac. Set a beautiful table and relax…so...

Welcome to my final blog post where I am pleased to show my final outcome, ‘Hidden Workings’ for this project working with the MoDiP collection. I wanted to continue my previous practice using augmented reality for the work and have focused on three items from the collection. I chose these on the...

Following on from last week’s blog post about the BIC 4 colour pen, this week Tracey Pawley, from AUB Finance, has written about her recollections of this classic plastic design. I owned my first BIC 4-colour pen in the mid-80s. My family moved house just before my ninth birthday and with that came...

I really enjoy using my BIC 4 colour pens. My collection of BIC 4C pens. Image credit: Katherine Pell They are incredibly useful when you need a quick change of ink colour, which I do often as I am forever writing colour-coded lists of jobs that need to be done in the museum. And I am not the only...

Hello everyone! Welcome to the third and final blog post and conclusion to my time with MoDiP as one of the ‘Student creatives’ for 2021-2022. In the last 21 weeks, I have had the chance to orchestrate my own project, one that reflects both my own practice as an illustrator as well as MoDiP’s...

We have a number of large objects within the collection that are too big to fit into our museum display cases. This means that we are rarely able to display them within our exhibition programme, but it doesn’t mean that they are never used. One such example is our wonderful Hawker Sea Fury cockpit...

With Earth Day coming up on April 22, MoDiP has a session today with students from our Creative Writing course in support of Dr Kevan Manwaring’s ‘Writing the Earth’ Programme. Many discussions across the world this week will explore the negative impacts that plastics and the products they are made...

Following on from my blog post about the Input range, designed by Conran Associates, manufactured by Crayonne Ltd (a subsidiary of Airfix Plastics set up in 1972) and sold through Habitat stores, this week’s post introduces some additional pieces from the series: the LP record and cassette racks...