At the weekend, James & I headed to Bristol to meet up with Hayles and go to the FREE Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibit.

We met up with Hayley & her friends outside the museum, and went to join the sizeable queue.. two and a half hours later after queuing in the pouring rain we were allowed into the museum. I’m really not complaining though (ok, I am a little bit). It was completely, utterly, unquestionably worth the wait. Plus, we entertained ourselves in the queue by being silly and taking photographs…

Yea, I do goofy well, huh?

Did you know that going round a museum and looking in every room is really tiring though!? I didn’t. I think maybe we were a little tired from the excessive queuing we did first though!

There were two rooms dedicated to Banksy – ‘Art of Banksy’ and ‘Unnatural History’. The first was a collection of his paintings & drawings, and the second a marvellous collection of animatronics.

Art of Banksy

A fabulous collection of satirical paintings, full of ironic statements such as a parliament full of chimps and Dorothy wailing “I don’t think we’re on canvas anymore…” – fab, fab, fab.

Unnatural History

Supurb animatronics. This video says it all…

The Art is in the Detail

My favourite part of the whole shebang was the little details. There was a ‘treasure hunt’ of Banksy pieces scattered about the whole museum, where they had taken away ‘real’ works of art & substituted his amusing/provoking/nonsensical pieces instead. These ranged from a bong in the family tea set cabinet, to a windows system error in a painting. It became almost a game to us to go through each section with an eye open to find his hidden treasures.

Even the map that we were given had been ‘banksyed’ – ‘Pottery & Ceramics’ had become ‘Boring Old Plates’, and ‘World Wildlife’ was rather accurately renamed ‘Wildlife in glass boxes’.

The exhibit is still there until the end of this month, so you should definitely go if you can. After all, it doesn’t cost anything but a few hours queuing! Trust me when I say you are well rewarded for that inconvenience.

After Banksy

We spent the rest of the day having lunch with Hayley & Co, settling into our B&B and then we headed to Hayley’s flat for a quiet evening of chinese food & my favourite recent Disney film, Enchanted. Love it!! Fab time was had by all. Nom nom nom.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

On Sunday, James & I got all touristy and visited the Clifton Suspension Bridge; wandering round the bridge, taking photos of every view of and from the bridge, and reading every board in the visitors centre. I admit, I geeked out over the engineering of the thing. James just wanted to know how they got it up!

Flickr Photo Set

Tags: days out, friends, fun times, holiday

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.