Another example of how you can’t judge a book by its cover, a visit to the Vancouver Museum with the intention of revisiting the No Place for a Lady exhibit, devoted to the world-wide travels of Western women during the 19th and early 20th centuries, instead became dominated by the new Persian Steel exhibit, a carefully annotated display of hundreds of Persian steel artifacts, collected by Iranian sculptor Parviz Tanavoli.

Perhaps I’m unusually fascinated by practical items as artwork, at least compared to people who may be more interested in strictly aesthetic pieces, but as I circled each display case, I found myself first guessing at each item’s purpose, confirming the accuracy of my guesses, and then reading in detail the particular quirks and points of interest about each.

The collection of items is diverse, including examples of such as:

I’m sure I’m leaving some things out — there were so many things to see. In addition to the workmanship of the items themselves, the integration of Farsi and Arabic script (often passages from the Quran) into the decorative scrollwork and arabesques of the items made the writing almost invisible to anyone not looking for it, until pointed out by the exhibit captions, and proved to be another puzzle-like point of interest.

Upon being herded out of the gallery at closing time, it occurred to me that I probably never would have bothered with the exhibit had I not stumbled into that particular gallery by accident, and I’m thankful that I did. The temptation to return to pick up a copy of the book of the exhibit is still a strong one.

(Incidentally, the item displayed on the book cover artwork above is a surgical speculum. A great example of something practical turned into something beautiful.)