Just Keep Digging

Research for the exhibition, and forthcoming biography, continues apace. Mary Emett's filing cabinet has had an initial scan and turned up a wealth of images and information. We now have good, clear pictures of many of the machines including some that no longer exist. We have negatives of drawings of some of the machines both as they were finally built and in earlier forms. We also have pictures of a machine that we didn't know existed!

We had a suspicion, of course. The clues were in the titles of two of his later machines. The SS Pussiewillow II in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and the CC Pussiwillow III. The natural question was; what about Pussiewillow I? Emett, of course, was not averse to assigning 'Things' numbers alluding to an earlier work that had never been built. The Featherstone Kites are all Mk.II. All three of them. The Mk.I was described but never built.

We hadn't yet come across anything to explain the absence of Pussiewillow I and now we know why. There is, or at least was, one. But here the mystery deepens. It is labelled as HMS Pussiewillow I and there is some indication that it may have been in Chicago at some point. The photographs mostly show it in the same unidentified, collonaded public space forming the backdrop to a fashion show. One photograph appears to show someone in British Mayoral robes and some have a Canadian Studio's name printed on the back. One shot shows it as the centrepiece to some sort of 'British' trad

e promotion with Union Jacks very much in evidence. This doesn't make it easy to locate and we have not yet found any reference to it in the media archives. Strange.

If you have any information about it please contact the Society.

A trip to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery archives has turned up a collection of black and white photographs of some very early Emett paintings.

The ten images are a still life, and a series of oils and watercolours of landscapes in Scotland, Wales, the south-west of England and the countryside nearest to his home which at that time was in Alum Rock in Birmingham. The dates on the images indicate that they were painted around 1930 and, at long last, we now know what the 'Cornish Harbour' looked like. This was the painting that was 'hung on the line' at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1931. It has been referred to often in brief biographies but  ow we have an image. The mystery here is, why does BMAG have these photographs?