R = Reading room

The first time I wandered into the Reading Room at Wellcome, I felt like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory.

Part art gallery, part library, part museum, part lounge room, part classroom: it's a cornucopia for the eyes and mind, an embodiment of the collection's catchphrase: the free destination for the incurably curious. You can take part in a pop-up event to learn more about the world, touch stuff, play games, write or draw your response to Wellcome and pin it up, interact with things and ideas; way more than reading goes on in there.

And if you DO want to read, you can go the conventional path and pull up a chair at a desk, or take up the invitation to plop on a huge cushion, lounge on a sofa, or even recline on a chaise. 

Reading Room Companion
Written and edited by Anna Faherty

I can easily lose an hour buried in the Reading Room Companion, 232 pages of fun facts and bewildering background about the plethora of paintings, sculptures, artefacts and manuscripts housed in the space.

I swear, nobody is paying me to say all this. 
Cross my heart.
I could seriously move into this place.

I'm going to enthuse about just one more thing before I leave you in peace: the mind-blowing bright red object in this photograph.

Fashioned of fake fur, it's called Closing Neural Tube Dress and it's a replica of one from a set of 27 dresses created as a collaboration between artist Helen Storey and her sister Kate, a developmental biologist. 

Each of the dresses represents a stage in the development of a life from the point of fertilisation to recognisably human form 1000 hours later. 
Incredible.

Science and art.
Art and life.
Life and death.
It's all in the Reading Room.

During the month of April, I am participating in the Blogging from A–Z Challenge.

My posts all feature images of and by the Wellcome Collection, Euston, London: the free destination for the incurably curious.