Christmas with the scent of wood – 2009

Date: 28th November 2009 – 3rd January 2010
Place: Bethlehem chapel’s basement

The “Christmas with the scent of wood” exhibition is successfully behind us now and we hope you liked it and you will come to visit us next year too. If you missed it or you would like to recall it we can offer in our SHOP a DVD – Christmas with the scent of wood. Below you could find more than 80 photos from the exhibition and its installation and the best of our guestbook.

Invitation

In 2009 the leading motive for the exhibition invitation was The Prague nativity scene from Mr. Jiří Lain. If you take a closer look at the nativity scene you can recognise in some of donors well known persons from both real and written world such as a novel writer Božena Němcová or Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová or a character from Mr. Svatopluk Čech’s book Mr. Brouček.

Intro

Wood belongs to materials which the man has been using forever. When you stop to thing about this fact only then you can recognise what wonderful things wood brought to the mankind. Let it be when the man grabbed a wooden stick to defend him or when he tried to hunt down his pray or made his shelter or made fire and light with it.

Tools and basically every object which men used were made from wood or connected to it in some way. Without wood men would not develop to metal, ceramics or glass. Wood was indispensable for almost the whole human history until recently when it has been replaced by plastic on a larger scale.

Our goal was to show how our ancestor’s life was dependable on wood. We gathered as many objects and tools made of wood or with which wood was shaped as possible. Many kinds of axes, chisels, planes, lathes etc. And much like in the last year’s exhibition we had a functional water driven wooden mill wheel in our artificial pond there.

For a tenth time we held a woodcarver workshop. We tried to have various kinds of handicraftsman working with wood: carpenters, cabinet makers, coopers, wheelwrights, hatchetmakers, lathemen, musical instrument makers, etc. Another occasion, already became a tradition, of our exhibition is a laceworkers workshop. Visitors could find it very easily because of the clapping sound of laceworker’s bobbins, which have to be made from very hard wood (which can be better polished).

All of above mentioned made it easier for us to try to create an atmosphere of classic Czech folk Christmas.

Pictures from the exhibition 2009 – we added new pictures to this section. However many of those photographs are still lacking a legend with the name of the exhibitor and the exhibit.