Exhibitions

Torre Abbey 3 March – 3 June 2018 In another exciting first for the Museum, the groundbreaking and award winning exhibition Tattoo: British Tattoo Art Revealed began a three year tour of museums and galleries in the UK opening at Torre Abbey in March 2018, where it was on show for three months before moving…

Hevva! Hevva! This horn looks quite ordinary, but it played an incredibly special role in Cornish history. It belongs to a period where the pilchard industry was one of the keystones of the Cornish economy. The seasonal pilchard fishery supported communities across the county and provided a key export of fish to Mediterranean countries, as…

“Pilchards! Whose bodies yield the fragrant oil and make the London lamps at midnight smile!” Peter Pindar 1783. Cornwall once relied upon the sea for nearly everything: food, transport, trade, defence and contact with the outside world. Fishing was always a vital part of the Cornish way of life and in the 18th and 19th…

Where we introduce you to some of the stories behind objects in the Museum… This model is a scale replica of Slippen, a Cornish pilot gig built in 1830. Gigs were used in the Cornish harbours to row a pilot out to the incoming ships. The pilots knew the local waters and could navigate the ships…

Claes-Göran Wetterholm gives insights into our exhibition Meet collector and guest curator Claes-Göran Wetterholm as he introduces major new exhibition Titanic Stories. The exhibition examines the stories of the Titanic’s momentous sinking on 15 April 1912, re-appraising many of the myths, controversies and assumptions that still linger around one of the most well-known historic events…

Watch Dan introduce his installation In addition to the many historic objects in the major exhibition Titanic Stories, the National Maritime Museum Cornwall commissioned a visually-stunning representation of the iceberg suspended over the lifeboat by Cornwall based Dan Arnold. The sculpture is formed from 2208 monkey’s fist knots, each hand made by members of the…

Introductions from our guest curators A video introducing our major exhibition Titanic Stories examining the Titanic’s momentous sinking on 15 April 1912, re-appraising many of the myths, controversies and assumptions that still linger around one of the most well-known historic events of the 20th century. Here guest curators Dr Eric Kentley and Claes-Göran Wetterholm introduce…

As part of the Titanic Stories exhibition, we’ve launched a concurrent exhibition exploring the subject of migration past and present.

A genuinely ground-breaking and comprehensive history of British tattooing, featuring cutting edge designers, leading academics and major private collectors. This is the largest gathering of real objects and original tattoo artwork ever assembled in the UK featuring over 400 original artworks, photographs and historic artefacts.