http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/26/wallace-gromit-science-museumWallace and Gromit world recreated in £2m exhibition at Science MuseumA World of Cracking Ideas intended to inspire young visitors
Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 March 2009
The multiple Oscar-winning animator Nick Park had the odd feeling of being about five inches high and made of Plasticine as he stood leaning on the gate of the impeccable garden of 62 West Wallaby Street – a gate he has sketched and modelled hundreds of times but never seen taller than a coffee cup.
The world of Wallace and Gromit has been recreated in a £2m exhibition on the second floor of the Science Museum, complete with mad machines, giant cabbages, villainous rabbits, extensive research library on cheese, improbable collections – one illustrating the evolution of the welly boot – and kitchen cupboards stuffed with the packets and jars fondly remembered from Park's own childhood in Preston, Lancashire.
Wallace and Gromit's world of genius inventions that very nearly work perfectly, and hoarded bits and bobs that might come in handy one day, is very much Park's own, he revealed.
"To this day I find it really difficult to throw away a cardboard tube or a bit of plastic packaging – I think oh, I could use that for something."
He cannot remember a time when he didn't draw, but he was following his father's example and creating inventions, including a bottle that squeezed out different colour wools which he was so proud of he sent it to Blue Peter, even before he started borrowing his mother's home movie camera and making his own animations from the age of 12.
Like the most dazzling creations of Wallace, there was often some tediously fundamental flaw in his inventions. He remembers with modest pride the staggering patent nut cracker he built in metalwork class, working on the principle of a jack hammer and highly likely to remove a finger. Its only practical disadvantage was that it proved impossible to fit even a hazelnut into its jaws. Tellingly, Park has said of Wallace that all his inventions are based on using a sledge hammer to crack a nut.
The exhibition is jointly funded by the Intellectual Property Office, and intended to encourage small visitors not just to fuel the thinking cap with brainwaves, or to hurl bean bags to bring the television set within reach of the sofa – avoiding the need for anything as dull as a remote control – but to come up with and patent their own inventions. It includes the inspiring story of Sam Houghton, who saw his father struggling with two brooms to sweep up twigs and leaves, and raced to find a stout rubber band to fasten them together. Sam is five, but his father is a patent attorney: as of last April, Sam's broom enhancer is registered as British patent number 2438091.
The exhibition ends in Wallace's own museum, selected on his behalf from the Science Museum's vast stores by curators John Liffen and Andrew Nahum: as Liffen is mad on communications, and Nahum on flight, they sensed Wallace would be too. Their assemblage includes a truly Wallacian piece of kit, a home tin can sealing machine. Liffen believes it was one of those paid for at the time of the second world war by donations from American housewives, and sent to rescue their unfortunate British sisters from the archaic practice of bottling in glass jars: the thrifty and houseproud Gromit would approve.
• Wallace and Gromit present A World of Cracking Ideas, Science Museum, London, until 1 November
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