Brickwrecks – sunken ships in LEGO® bricks

Given the chance to work with ‘Brickman’ Ryan McNaught, the museum was quick to jump aboard

01 Too beautiful to sink? The LEGO® Vasa enthralls visitors All images courtesy Rebecca Mansell, Western Australian Museum

02 LEGO® model showing Vasa being raised from Stockholm Harbour 01

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A long-distance collaboration

The current pandemic has impacted our lives in countless ways. We have all had to adapt and find new ways of doing things. Em Blamey, the museum’s creative producer, reveals how to collaborate under COVID-19 restrictions.

MANY OF YOU will be experiencing this at the moment: the challenge of connecting with people you can’t meet with in person. Zoom helps but it’s not the same, especially when you’re trying to create and collaborate. I’ve just returned from Western Australia, managing to get in and out by the skin of my teeth as borders slammed shut behind me. While there we completed and opened a new exhibition: Brickwrecks – sunken ships in LEGO® bricks, which we developed in partnership with the Western Australian Museum (WAM). I’m so glad I managed to get there, as I finally met face-to-face with people I’d been working with since mid-2019. It was great to share the crazy final week of fabrication and installation with them, and see the first visitors enjoy our creation.

When WAM approached us in June 2019 to see if we’d be interested in partnering on an exhibition with the working title LEGO® Shipwrecks, in collaboration with ‘Brickman’ Ryan McNaught, we were pretty quick to jump aboard. The exhibition would tell the stories of a number of shipwrecks from around the world from a maritime archaeology viewpoint, using a unique combination of LEGO® models, hands-on interactives, audio-visual experiences and real shipwreck objects. In February 2020, Rachael Hughes from WAM and Brickman met with us in Sydney to agree on the stories and models to include.

Real artefacts, interactives and a stunning LEGO® model tell Batavia’s story. ‘It was great to share the crazy final week of fabrication and installation with them’

The project continued, but all face-to-face brainstorming, design and development sessions were cancelled. LEGO® factories shut down, so brick supplies were delayed. Did you know all brown LEGO® , which is crucial for ship models, is made in Mexico? We all became expert Zoomers. We shared ideas via file share websites, held sketches up to webcams and filmed home-made prototypes in loungerooms. We devised COVID-safe ‘hands-on’ interactives and researched cleaning LEGO®. Melbourne’s multiple lockdowns stopped Brickman’s builders building, and the COVID renovation boom swamped cabinet makers so they couldn’t build our plinths. Plus, there were all the usual challenges of any large-scale exhibition project, especially a collaborative one. But in spite of everything, and unfortunately without the still-stuck-in-Melbourne Brickman, we launched the exhibition on 25 June. Brickwrecks – sunken ships in LEGO® bricks is now open in Fremantle. It will tour regional Western Australia next year, before coming to Sydney for Christmas 2022. It features 11 stunning LEGO® models, telling the stories of eight shipwrecks, from the Bronze Age Uluburun, to Rena which wrecked in 2011. The Queensland Museum lent us some fabulous objects from the wreck of Pandora, which had been hunting the Bounty mutineers, and Parks Canada shared their stunning model of the Erebus wreck from Franklin’s doomed expedition. Visitors can try different archaeology techniques, sink Vasa, rebuild the portico from the Batavia wreck, pilot a remotely operated vehicle, see if they’d survive the Titanic, clean oil pollution from a penguin and, of course, build their own LEGO® models. As the final graphic panel says: We learn a lot from shipwrecks. About people and trade and technology. About tragedies and responses and long-lasting effects. Models help us explore and explain aspects of ships and shipwrecks. And LEGO®models of ships and shipwrecks are super-cool! I’m glad that COVID didn’t sink us. Em Blamey is the museum’s Creative Producer – Interactive Projects