Trent
There’s a new curator in town.
Dr. Andrew Lawfield recently joined the museum as the new Curator and Collections Manager.
Originally, from England, immigrated to Canada and fell in love with the country. “I’ve spent more than a decade in Canada now,” says Lawfield. “I did my PhD at the University of Alberta. Since then, I’ve been teaching internationally.”
Lawfield comes from a science background. “I come from a medical family, and I’ve always been exposed had kind of science around me. I grew up in a household with things like stuffed mounted birds, a small collection of minerals. My father—being a doctor—had the skeleton and kind of various replicas of body organs and things like that, so that kind of kind of scientific inspiration was always there. And I’ve really enjoyed reading, particularly around biology.
Geology was something Lawfield didn’t discover until he was in his late teens. “We’d go on camping holidays, and I collect fossils during those. Everywhere I go, I always want to explore, to look for things. Paleontology, to me, it represents this ideal kind of combination of looking at the history of life and seeing how that’s changed over time. How the environment has changed over time, how climates have changed over time. And the way the way animals respond to these various kind of stresses.”
While he’s been working in the education system, Lawfield says there is a strong connection in the work done as curator and the work done as a teacher. “I see there being a close correspondence between University-based teaching and a museum position where you’re doing a similar kind of role, but having the general public as the target audience rather than rather than students.”
While the collection is strong, he says, he wants to really focus on bringing a visual focus to the gallery and making the information more accessible for the public.
“I’m inspired by the great potential that our collection offers, presented correctly. A lot of the exhibits that we see in the gallery date back 10 years or more, and the way that the material is presented is quite dry. A visitor coming in can see the bones and the shells. But there’s no real visual material to give context to that. I would like to get things like including illustrations, maps, and replicas of organisms that have been alive in the past to really visually make it more accessible to the public,” he says.
“Particularly looking at modern environments, and how we can use those as analogs for events that we see in the past, how we can look at the activities of modern creatures—things like invertebrates, clams, shrimp, worms—that we see on a modern beach, or along a modern River. And we can relate those directly to things that we see in the in the rock record that preserved as fossils. That’s an area where there’s the significant potential to help illustrate the things we’re seeing and to present those to the public.”
One of the strengths he sees in the collection is the fact that there are rocks here from many different ages. “I’m upgrading the gallery, and presenting that material to present this journey through time, which we have represented with very high quality local material here. We see many different types of organisms, we see many different environments, many significant changes as we’ve had big changes in the position of the continents, the climate, and the types of animals living in the sea living and living on the land through periods of hundreds of millions of years.
While most people focus on the dinosaur bones and tyrannosaurus trackways, Lawfield says the things that excites him is the material from the Triassic, between 200 250 million years ago
“The rocks from that time period reflect these strange reptiles and different fish from this period living in the Marine sea waters at that time,” he says. “There’s the creatures which are very distinct. very spectacular. And we have some examples of those but I would like to do a play place them in a more prominent position.”
This is in part due to his background, which focuses on invertebrate organisms. “These may be less spectacular than things like dinosaurs, but they have enormous potential in terms of helping us interpret the types of environments that would have existed in the past. And they’re also much more common than dinosaurs. So it’s easier to find that type of material. And that’s something that I’d like to increase in our displays.
“We also have material from the Devonian, around 400 million years ago. We have material from fossil reefs that would have occurred in the area, and that’s not something that currently is highlighted in the gallery.”
In the three months he’s been here, Lawfield says he has learned the museum has strong community support. “As I find out more about the organization, this really comes across throughout the entire history of the organization. From its inception, the museum has had a strong community focus in terms of creating the organization. People like the late Jim Kincaid puts an enormous amount of effort into creating the organization, promoting it and seeing it succeed. I would very much like to move forward in a way that honors that and builds on that strength. Looking through the collections, a significant proportion of it—maybe a third—is material that’s either been donated or brought to the attention of the museum by members of the public. So that’s something I’d really like to highlight.
“The longevity of the museum and the success of the museum really depends on that and that’s something I really want to build on. I think it’s very important to have to recognize the legacy of what I’m inheriting as the new curator, and to respect what has been done previously, but moving forward I want bring a more visual focus. A lot of the concepts in geology and paleontology are hard to understand from a verbal or written description. You really need to have pictures, diagrams, models, to bring the subject to life and that’s something I really like to bring forward as far as funding allows. I’m very keen to make it accessible and to present it in a way which is easily understood by members of the general public. So that’s something that I will be emphasizing as I do changes.
Of course, these changes won’t happen overnight. Major changes require major funding and right now, that’s not in the cards.
Lawfield expects it will take at least a few years for the changes to happen. “We enjoy remarkable generosity in terms of organizations providing funding for our day to day running costs. But for things like gallery upgrades, we have to source external sponsors in order to meet those costs. And depending on the time frame over which by that those funds come in, that’s really going to dictate how quickly some of this can be accomplished.
