The Sedgwick Museum's Pride Rocks

During the Sedgwick Museum‘s Moving a Mountain collections move project, the team encountered many colourful rocks. This encouraged some Sedgwick Museum staff members to create a rock-inspired Progress Pride flag.

Back in 2022, when our collections move project was in full swing, staff members working on the project were packing and thousands of drawers of rocks. While there are a variety of amazing rocks in our collections, sometimes you get a run of drawers full of different shades of grey, and that can get a bit boring. To keep things entertaining, staff would keep an eye out for really spectacular rocks. Some simply wanted to show that rocks can be more colourful than just ‘geology blue’ or ‘geology green’ (read: grey and a slightly different grey), whilst others were looking for specific combinations of colours such as to match pride flags. It didn’t take long to combine these ideas to celebrate Pride by creating our own flags showcasing rocks from the collection. Here is the story of how Sedgwick Museum staff  members created our very own Sedgwick Museum Pride flag:

The first step was deciding which flags we wanted to recreate. We all pretty quickly agreed on the Progress Pride flag but, as long as we could find suitably coloured rocks, we also wanted to make individual flags to raise awareness of some of the lesser-known parts of the LGBTQIA+ community.

With the flags decided, it was then a matter of finding rocks with the colours to match. This was easier for some than others, there was plenty to choose from for green and if in doubt when looking for yellow sulphur is an easy option but finding purples that weren’t too grey or oranges that weren’t too brown was trickier.

After searching through the collection, we managed to find everything we needed, and we deliberately tried to find multiple options for each colour. This was so that we could let the public choose at least the colours for the main Pride flag. Through polls on Twitter, we pitted rock against rock and the occasional cat (unsurprisingly, the cat won) as a fun way to also boost the museum’s public engagement. We carried out these polls over the course of four weeks without letting the public know our master plan, so at the beginning of June we could do a dramatic surprise Pride flag reveal based off the winning rocks.

Brown: Brown laterite lithomarge, from Giant’s Causeway
Blue: Brecciated lazurite, from Lake Baikal, Russia
Yellow: Sulphur encrustation, from the Solfatara volcano, Phlegraean fields, Italy
Red: Franklinite and zincite in calcite, from Franklin Furnace, New Jersey
White: Feldspar (xenocryst of microcline hybrid gabbronorite), from Okhliabinin Isle
Black: Silicon Carbide, from Arendal Smelteverk Eydhhavn Norway
Pink: Marble with spongeforms, from Kilchrist, Skye
Light blue: Wollastonite with calcite, from Crestmore, California, USA
Orange: Ulexite with realgar from Rio Tinto Borax Mine, Boron, California, USA
Green: Eclogite, from Roberts Victor Mine, Boshof, South Africa
Purple: Banded calcite, mica, amphibole, sphene, phlogopite marble, from Moll Valley, Austria

With more than 300 voters across 11 polls and a higher than average engagement rate compared to our usual Tweets, we were delighted by how much the public seemed to enjoy voting for their favourite rocks, even without knowing our full plan. It was fun to see how popular some rocks were. The winning rocks for blue, brown, green and pink all won by a landslide (pun intended), but it seems the real key to being popular with the public is bringing cats and vampires.

And here is our completed flag:

 A massive thank you to everyone who participated and made this project such a success!    

Written by: Karen Banton, Sasha Dennis, Kathryn Draper and Audrey Kennedy