OF DINOSAUR MURALS
and PLASTER STARFISH BY ROBERT MOYES FOUR YEARS AGO the Royal BC Museum had the rare opportunity of hosting a travelling exhibition of priceless Egyptian artifacts belonging to the British Museum. The “Ancient Egypt” blockbuster — from actual mummies and a recreation of a 2,000-year-old marketplace to an eerily beautiful burial chamber that expressed eternity via a dark blue ceiling dotted with a thousand golden stars — was evocative, educational and utterly memorable. And impressive as the 140-plus artifacts were, the impact of the show was largely due to the RBCM’s in-house “art technicians” — the painters, designers and fabricators who created appropriate displays and backdrops for everything from two-ton stone lions to exquisite scarab brooches. British Museum curators, who accompanied the artifacts as they toured a select handful of museums in North America, were impressed with what they saw at the RBCM, saying that the Museum’s team had done the best job of any at creating a setting. And while sellout crowds took a trip through the glories of Egypt, the plaza outside the museum sprouted one of the most notable of the fiberglass whales dotting downtown Victoria that summer. Painted by an RBCM senior art technician named Adrienne Aikins, the whale’s back glowed with a colourful chevron feather pattern echoing designs from King Tut’s sarcophagus. The belly was more simply adorned with a short passage of text. As it turned out, Aikins had learned the rudiments of hieroglyphics while working on the exhibit, and had mischievously written the symbols for: The royal Adrienne made the fish that dances in the deep green sea. “The head curator from the British Museum was able to translate what I had written when he looked at our whale,” Aikins remembers with a chuckle. “We work hard, so we get to amuse ourselves a bit.” I am sitting in Aikins’s dining room — the exact spot where, on volunteered time, she had painted the nine-foot whale — talking to her about a “behind the scenes” career spent creating context and visual pizzazz for the many narratives that the RBCM has told over the years. After specializing in printmaking and photography during a four-year stint at what is now known as the Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver, Aikins spent most of a decade doing displays and maps for numerous “interpretation centres” operated by BC Parks. Then in 1984 she found her niche when she was hired by the RBCM. Her first projects involved helping to complete the Old Town and Chinatown installations. Later, Aikins was lucky enough to do a lot of the fieldwork for the Ethnology and Natural History galleries — a necessary prelude to creating those evocative dioramas that depict representative areas of the province. “The dioramas are all actual locations,” explains Aikins. “The beach was inspired by Bamfield, Long Beach and Triangle Island, while the forest combines aspects of Maple Bay and Cathedral Grove.” Some of the other major projects that she worked on include Ocean Station, which mimics an underwater “discovery gallery” that resembles the submarine in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “I worked on the 12-foot by 18- foot sea wall that depicts successive strata of sea life,” says Aikins. Recently, she spent long hours contributing visuals to the Climate Change Gallery, particularly an ice wall that provides part of the backdrop for a woolly mammoth. According to Tim Willis, the Museum’s Director of Exhibits and Visitor Experience, “Adrienne is an exceedingly meticulous artist with an amazing eye for detail. Her paintings are accurate but they possess a beauty that can transport the viewer.” For the full story pick up the current issue of Boulevard Magazine |