.LynEve

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My Last Post . . from the Te Papa exhibition :Gallipoli:The Scale Of Our War

This is a shot of one of the painted backdrops in the exhibition.

Some of you have asked if the figures are 'waxworks' . no, they are not. Each sculpture has a fibreglass body, built in sections that bolt together, the skin is silicone, molded and hand painted. The clothing was all made to exact (enlarged) patterns from geuine uniform fabrics. The scalp and the facial and body hair is human hair..Each head of hair took between three and six weeks to install as each strand of hair was punched in by hand . Some of the smaller items (e.g. flies on open tins of corned beef) were created with 3D printers. The figures are 2.4 x normal size. Weta Workshop spent more than 24,000 hours creating the eight figures, along with the associated exhibition elements of their lives and stories, including countless hours researching their histories.The triptych of machine gunners Carkeek, Hawkins, and Warden took the longest to build, requiring nearly 9,000 labour hours from early creative inception to completion. Each sculpted figure is between 90 and 150kgs in weight.
The exhibition cost eight million dollars to create and will run for four years. Admission is free.
Lead curator Kirstie Ross of Te Papa said the exhibition challenges certain myths around the eight month Gallipoli campaign. "Our job as historians and curators is to uncover the human stories, and not shy away from the tough realities."

I also visited another exhibition called 'The Great War' by Sir Peter Jackson at our War Memorial Museum. I will post some pictures from there at a later date.