The cap woven from spider silk

Here's the RAMM fact that stopped me in my tracks. The Royal Albert Memorial Museum is Exeter's largest cultural institution, holding more than a million objects gathered from every part of the globe, an overwhelming collection by any measure. But it's one small, strange item that stuck with me more than the giraffe or the mummy.

Somewhere inside sits a cap woven entirely from the silk of golden orb spiders, kept in a Renaissance-style wonder cabinet near the entrance, built specifically to evoke the curiosity cabinets Victorian collectors filled with the odd and unexplained. It's the kind of object that makes you stop reading the label twice, a genuinely rare textile that just happens to share a room with an Egyptian mummy and a bull elephant.

I painted RAMM in watercolour and ink, that grand Gothic facade. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: RAMM, Exeter · Travel Poster