Creepy Creepy Museum Dummies

(N.B. for the really creepy bit skip ahead to the bottom...)

My first museum sported a ploughman dummy which, after repainting by a volunteer, resembled a boiled Nigel Mansell. I remember well (usually around 3 a.m.) the feeling of removing his flat cap and discovering there was NOTHING underneath, the face ending in a sheer cut through moth-eaten expanding foam. (N.B. I refer to the dummy, not the volunteer. I'm not in the habit of touching volunteers' headgear). 

There are broadly two schools of thought regarding the value of museum dummies (that's in the exhibitions, not staff). They can be either valuable interpretive assets which breathe life into a display by giving a sense of past people's interaction with their world, or... they're effing creepy and OH MY WORD WHY WOULD YOU EVER PUT SOMETHING LIKE THAT IN YOUR MUSEUM KILL IT KILL IT!

I have a real soft spot for museum dummies - admittedly to a great extent out of a love of the absurd rather than a desire to put them in my exhibitions (with exceptions, see below), and I tend to photograph them on sight to add to my ghoulish gallery. 

For instance, from the excellent New Lanark Mill here is Anne of Green Gables re-imagined as a ghost ship figurehead. 

The depths of despair indeed...

The Rounce Taxonomy of Fake Museum Humans is as follows: 

1) Tasteful Torso 

I have and will continue to use these as to my mind they are the best way to display costume and the absence of recognisably human-ish features such as faces and hands avoids a lot of the chill factor. This example is from Gairloch Museum and what particularly appeals about this approach is that the costume is displayed in a natural position, but free of distractions from supporting apparatus. 

The void between the neck and cap invites the visitor to imagine themselves filling the gap and wearing the costume, adding a layer of immersion to an otherwise static glass-case display. 

Looking for them sea legs...

2) Bespoke Dummy (often ageing)

Decent museum dummies are expensive. Like very expensive. As in 'you can have two interactive exhibits or one dummy' expensive. Given how tight budgets are, dummies tend to be purchased for specific projects and expected to last many years/decades. They can be hard to maintain if damaged without specialist skills (I refer you to the repairs to our shabby ploughman - boiled Nigel Mansell...) and so it is common to find admittedly well-formed dummies which are a little past their prime. This example comes from Bury Transport Museum.

Erm, you've... you've got something on your...

3) Ex-Shop Window Dummy Rescued On Its Way To A Skip 

Quite frankly, it's a shame these dummies' skip-ward trajectory was interrupted... Examples are typified by their odd poses, a hangover from whatever item of clothing they were originally modelling, and their highly prettified faces - honestly you could cut yourself on some of the cheekbones out there. This old example from Glencoe Folk Museum illustrates both these attributes but with the bonus creepy feature of THAT NECK. If you encounter anyone with a neck like that you might enquire a) if they're feeling ok and b) whether their parentage includes any giraffe.

Necks were longer back in't day, y'know.

4) Thinking Outside The Box

From the Museo Etnologico de la Huerta de Murcia (Ethnological Museum of the Irrigated Lands of Murcia)

Ok, so this category is a bit of a miscellanea-catch-all, but whatevs it's my system. I actually really like this approach - for this example from an agricultural museum the use of a cereal crop-ish material (I visited in 2007 so can't recall exactly what it was made of) is nicely in keeping with the subject and, importantly, the dummy has a sufficiently non-human appearance so as to avoid the creepy factor. Estupendo! 

There's a straaaaaw maaaaaaaan sitting in a case...

AUTONS!

Truth be told, it's very rare to find a museum dummy which doesn't either hail from the uncanny valley or look actively monstrously inhuman. And that's when they're static. Imagine if they moved! 

Well, you don't have to, courtesy of the National Brewery Centre. Turn the sound up and look below...

Don't have nightmares!