Southbank Bristol Arts

A story about the Tiger Museum, by Tony Eastman

For the 2003 Southbank Bristol Arts Trail, we opened our house and garden to 11 artists. My birthday present for that year was a summer house to which I had added new red barge boards, window details and several brass inserts. My contribution to the Arts Trail weekend was to exhibit my collection of tiger sculptures, masks and toys in the summer house.

Our daughter, Amber, had recently sent a large box of tiger ‘artefacts’ from Guatemala. Those, plus a few other unique pieces from a friend in Japan and a relation travelling back from India, made for a good exhibition. I wanted to make the weekend event special and to give visitors to the Tiger Museum an experience to remember.

We are lucky in this area of having a huge reservoir of talent in every art form and I was very fortunate and very grateful to Sheila Hannon, Gill Loats and Alice Meason from Show of Strength who ‘supported’ the Tiger Museum by playing the roles of ‘cleaner’ and ‘curator’.

We estimated that over 600 people (many with families) saw the Tiger Museum over that Arts Trail weekend. This number of enthusiastic people confirmed to me that the idea of a Tiger Museum was a project with great potential.

I realised that as well as continuing to collect tigers from around the world, I could on occasion commission artists to make new pieces for the museum. Dave Cox and Tony O’Hare have already contributed work and Philippa Royle at Potstop is currently creating some exciting new work. As well as physical objects I would ideally like to commission short artists films, filmed performance, animation/puppetry, etc.

Venue recently interviewed me by phone and the interview was published in the Venue that ran from 26 September to 5 October. Any feedback would be most welcome.

If you would like to see the virtual museum, please visit www.tigermuseum.com.

Tony Eastman, September 2008.