The Soapstone Monkey of Silence

There's currently a fascinating pair of exhibitions on at the Wellcome Collection. Infinitas Gracias is a selection of ex-voto paintings and offerings from Mexico, and I spent a very interesting couple of hours there. But it's the other exhibition, Charmed Life, that inspired this post.

I admit the contemporary art in the show didn't hold much interest for me, but I did like the amulets on display. They were collected by the folklorist Edward Lovett in London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They consist of a large assortment of objects, from the everyday to the positively bizarre, that were used by Londoners for various magical purposes: to ward off bronchitis, nightmares or poverty, to ensure luck in marriage or gambling, and so forth.

Among them, I found a little statue of a monkey, 2 or 3 centimetres high, sitting in a praying position. The label under it said, "Jade Monkey of Silence." Most of the other objects had further information about where they'd been collected or what they'd been used for, but this one said simply that: "Jade Monkey of Silence."

As soon as I saw this, I knew I had to find out more. Why? Because in my living room at home, I had this:






My monkey isn't jade -- it's probably soapstone -- but otherwise it is very similar in size and style to the one in the exhibition. I bought it in a charity shop about ten years ago for a pound, figuring it was a tourist souvenir. Now it seems it may once have meant more to someone than that.

I asked a staff member at the Wellcome Collection if she could give me any more information about the "monkey of silence" and what powers it was meant to have. She was very friendly and helpful, but couldn't find anything. Looking through reference books didn't help either. Lovett's own book about his collection, Magic in Modern London, has been out of print for years and hasn't been put online; the price for a used copy ranges from £50 to £150.

Eventually I asked MetaFilter, where the consensus has been that the figurine is a "speak-no-evil" monkey that at some point got separated from the other two Wise Monkeys. MeFi users pointed me toward almost identical monkeys being sold on Etsy and eBay, and I found one that had been posted by a visitor to the BBC's History of the World in 100 Objects site. In each case, the owner/seller of the monkey had either found it or inherited it from somewhere; everyone agreed that the monkey was old, but no one seemed sure how old. At least one (the one on Etsy) has a hole in the base like mine; the finder mentions that it was found "strung on a very old silk cord along with an antique Catholic medal," which suggests it was indeed used as a sort of good luck charm.

If anyone has any further information or suggestions (or a cheaper source for Lovett's book), please leave a comment. I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

I've seen a few exhibitions recently that I've been meaning to write about, but I'll start with the biggie. It was a good year for birds at the 2011 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The winning photo, of course, was Daniel Beltrá's heartbreaking image of oiled pelicans at a rescue centre in Louisiana -- part of a set of photographs documenting the BP oil spill that also won Beltrá the Photojournalist of the Year prize.

But most of the other bird pictures were more cheerful. Oystercatchers were the slightly unexpected but welcome star of two category winners. Fourteen-year-old Mateusz Piesiak scooped the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year title with his photo of a young American Oystercatcher stealing a tidbit from an adult, while Peter Chadwick won the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife with a shot of African Black Oystercatchers caught off-guard by a wave.

Ilkka Räsänen, from Finland, won the 10 Years and Under category back in 2009 with his portrait of a greenfinch; this year, he was Highly Commended in the 11-14 Years category for his stunning picture of a tern splashing in a lake. I loved the way the bird's wings and the water droplets caught the golden sunlight. Also using water to great effect was Petr Simon with his Racket-Tail in the Rain. This hummingbird picture was so detailed that you could see a single raindrop on the bird's bill. Bowerbirds have been surprisingly neglected in past competitions, but Tim Laman made up for that with his cheeky photo of a male showing off his greatest treasure: a pink paperclip.

In several cases, perfect composition turned photos of not-particularly-spectacular species into something astonishing. Coots are so commonplace that I don't know if anyone's even bothered to enter a photo of them before, but Andrew George's black-and-white shot of a group walking on ice was a thing of beauty. There was also Henrik Lund's picture of a Horned Lark framed by dead stems in the Finnish snow. And Thomas Hanahoe's Knot Lift-Off seemed almost surreal. I also couldn't go without mentioning Stefano Unterthiner's geometric arrangements of cranes and swans.

Birds were also a big part of Bence Máté's beautiful portfolio, which -- almost inevitably -- won the Eric Hosking Award. I believe this is the last year that Máté is eligible for the award; he first won it in 2002 at age 17, and it's only for photographers under age 27. Perhaps young Mateusz or Ilkka will step up to take his place.

It wasn't all birds, of course. Two invertebrate pictures particularly caught my eye: sixteen-year-old Jack Salzke's painterly close-up of a honeybee visiting a magnolia flower, and Valter Binotto's Apollo at Rest, in which a white butterfly seems almost transparent among its surroundings. Joel Sartore captured a mountain goat in a jitter-inducing pose, while Louis-Marie Préau contributed the first portrait I've seen of a beaver underwater. And of course, no WPY exhibition would be complete without an adorable monkey photo, this time taken by Cyril Ruoso.