Preksha Kothari is Programme Coordinator at Shrine Empire Gallery in New Delhi, and also a graduate of the Curating Collections and Heritage master’s programme. In this blog post, she reflects on her current professional priorities, and how the discussions and texts she encountered on the MA Curating helped sharpen her aims for the sector.

Currently, I am working as the Programme Coordinator at Shrine Empire, one of the leading contemporary art galleries of India and their non-profit venture, the Prameya Art Foundation. Located in New Delhi, we are working towards critically expanding and engaging with emerging contemporary art practices through our programming.

Almost a year into this position, I work on multiple avenues, including working closely with curators and artists for exhibition set-up, creating content for social media, and coordinating the various grants and awards that the Foundation offers to artists and curators in South Asia. Working in the contemporary arts in India has given me a deep insight into research, the history of contemporary arts, and its usage politically by minoritised and marginalised communities to reclaim spaces denied to them.

As the Programme Coordinator, I constantly recall and utilize the various concepts and debates that I studied in my MA Curating Collections and Heritage. One specific notion that is ever present is to make the institutions as accessible as possible, which was introduced to me for the first time while studying the Museums and Collections in Context module. We recently went bilingual for all exhibition texts from our September exhibition onwards. We will also be getting an accessibility audit in 2025 to take further steps to open our space to a diverse variety of audience, because ultimately, art is meant for sharing.

My favourite part about working as a Programme Coordinator is conversing with the visitors and giving them walkthroughs of our exhibitions. Also, working directly with curators and artists has immensely helped me in figuring out my own research interests, the nuances of exhibition making, and how the South Asian context applies to this.

Prameya Art Foundation is a nomadic institution, a direct response to the lack of institutional spaces in the region. With an objective to expand and collaborate with alternative practices and an expansive approach to arts, the foundation engages with arts organisations across the South Asian region and globally to foster critical conversations surrounding the arts. At the foundation, I primarily coordinate the many grants and residency programmes we have for emerging creative practitioners, and undertake curatorial research and writing for projects. Studying the MA helped me put into practice critical thinking and writing, which we were always encouraged to pursue through modules like Critical Perspectives on Exhibitions.

My recent projects have been completing proposals for international art fairs, assisting in curatorial research for a video exhibition programme, and creating a new Instagram series called ArtFridayFeature, that focuses on our gallery artists and highlighting their artistic practice for a particular work they want featured.

Image caption: Installation view, Debris Collector,  a solo exhibition by Anoli Perera, Shrine Empire

MA Curating Collections and Heritage student Ellen Hume ambles along Brighton’s seafront in search of heritage

As part of my Heritage in a Global Context module with Eliza Tan, I took a self-guided seafront walk on a sunny Friday afternoon to immerse myself in the pilgrimage of Brighton’s long history as a seaside resort. As a new student, this is my first ever time living in Brighton, so I felt this walk would be a great way to experience the sites and well-known beachfront that is iconic to the area. My walk started at a famous landmark: Brighton Palace Pier: a vibrant space bustling with tourists and locals alike. Along my route, I was recommended to look out for key landmarks: The Madeira Arches, Volks Railway Track and the Steve Ovett Statue, but overall, the walk was to be taken at your own pace and direction. I documented my walk via note-taking and photographing the environment.

One of the first things that caught my attention was the amount of original architecture still surviving from the Victorian era! From the beginning you are immersed in the elegant, forgotten opulence of fading buildings and walkways – underneath the seafront wall are shops, cafes and businesses galore, a clash of the modern and the old-fashioned. It was interesting to see the old buildings being used for new purposes rather than left to decay and crumble, to bring new life to an already bustling area.

What is sadly decaying and crumbling are the Madeira Arches, just a couple of minutes’ walk further on. These intricate Victorian arches have been listed as a Grade 2 structure and are closed to the public due to deterioration, however local love for the arches shines through the restoration campaign with aims to restore them! As an avid history lover, it is very exciting to see locals and council come together to save such an integral part of the seafront. Signs placed by the council (across from the arches) explain more about the project, from the history of the arches, technical details and their vision for the future, as well as how you can get involved. This demonstrated to me how much love the locals have for their cultural landscape and how much it means to them, to preserve it for future generations.

Within this immediate area is the Steve Ovett statue. As I am not a local, I was interested to learn a little more about the community and discovered that this statue (a replacement for the original, that was stolen) commemorates the Brighton born Olympian on his 1980 gold medal, show of community pride and heritage. Time and weather have started to take its toll on the monument however, with the stone base becoming weathered and harder to read.

Continuing further along the walk, I encountered more tourists and locals enjoying themselves in the sunshine. Whether it was relaxing on a bench, walking dogs, meeting friends or exploring the seaside area, everyone seemed to be connecting to the area in their own way. Bygone architecture follows you along the entire walk, surrounded by the past you can’t help but wonder what it was like and if you were following in the same footsteps as a Victorian tourist? Some buildings appear to be disused, but still stand watch over the seafront as remnants of time gone by, but another interesting feature I noticed were the lampposts. Down the length of the seafront are the original lampposts, likely from the Victorian or Edwardian era, some of which have been fitted with newer lamps or left as they were; opposite these are the new modern lampposts, I found this to be an interesting contrast – an act of preservation and modernisation, keeping the old amongst the new and trying to continue the immersion.

Another feature of the seafront is the Volks Railway. I discovered this was the world’s oldest electric railway, built in 1883! It’s a stunning example of Victorian craftsmanship and continues to be a draw for tourism to this day, with 3 stops along its mile long track, which I passed on my walk. The enthusiasm and joy surrounding the attraction was evident from riders and staff, enjoying the quaint journey along the tracks, taking a step back in time to take the same route as tourists from decades ago.

The end of my walk to the Sea Lanes, Kemptown, was nearing and I began to reflect on everything I had seen. Surrounded by historical architecture and living history, I looked to the modern architecture that spanned the seafront. New business, clubs and cafes seem to be modern continuations of past practices that the seafront has been used for: exercise, health, pleasure and relaxation. After all of these years, the joy and love from this community and tourists alike has never dimmed for this beautiful area, with signs to guide you through a specific route to explore history and culture or objects dotted along walks to give you a glimpse into community history, the welcoming and vibrant feelings of the area encourage you to explore. Throughout my walk I also took photos with my polaroid camera, to try and capture Brighton through my own eyes while using an older style of documenting.

To finish my walk a took a seat on the beach to look back on the route, which took me just over an hour, and to reflect on what I had experienced. Brighton beach is truly a beautiful place to explore and I’m so glad I chose here to do my master’s degree! Heritage is all around, and the sense of a welcoming, proud community is evident in their encouragement to explore.

The walk was very enjoyable and helped me develop my investigation and fieldwork skills for my Heritage in a Global Context class, which I look forward to continuing. I also look forward to exploring more of the Brighton and Hove area, as well as its rich history and community connections!

[All photographs were taken by Ellen Hume]

MA History of Design and Material Culture student Pippy Stephenson describes her current work as volunteer coordinator at the Imperial War Museum. 

Alongside my part-time History of Design and Material Culture MA, I’ve been working as a Volunteer Team Leader (volunteer coordinator) at the Imperial War Museum. I began the role as I was going into the second year of my degree and still living in Brighton. So, the first few months involved a lot of early winter morning commutes. I moved back to London fairly promptly when I realised how unmanageable this was! But it was really exciting to have my first paid museum role after several years of volunteering in various museums such as the Garden Museum, Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft and a zero hours retail job at the Natural History Museum.

In my first year at Brighton, I’d taken Claire Wintle’s, ‘Museums in Context’ module, which introduced me to ideas of community engagement and museums as places for people, not just collections. After that I was drawn to museum roles which went some way to bringing people into museums who might otherwise feel unwelcome and in providing a sense of ownership of these institutions to local communities. Working in the volunteering department at the Imperial War Museum I’ve been able to learn more about this type of museum practice and develop my own programmes.

On a day-to-day basis my role involves providing operational and administrative support to volunteers, hosting training and development sessions as well as advocating for volunteers throughout the museum. This can mean ensuring they get tours of new exhibitions, a workshop with an expert or simply a higher cap on their expenses. Throughout the last year, I’ve worked on two programmes that sought to improve the volunteering offer at the museum. Firstly, I led a research project with a group of students from a local university, setting them the task of finding out why relatively few local people volunteer at the museum. I felt that it was important to increase the number of local people engaging as volunteers, in order to foster a closer relationship with the local community. The project lasted six weeks and resulted in the students producing a list of recommendations, one of which was to offer short-term skills based programmes in order to engage local young people.

Using this advice, I designed the IWM Summer Volunteer Programme, running from June to September. We aimed it at 18-25 year olds from South London looking for careers in heritage. The programme consists of weekly or twice weekly skills sessions with staff members throughout the museum, alongside front of house shifts. The idea was to provide an insight in a wide variety of museum roles along with practical experience, as the behind the scenes of museums can feel like a bit of a mystery. It can also be very tricky to start a career in heritage, so I hoped this experience could help those enrolled on the programme secure their next opportunity.

We had sessions with curation, operations, archives, preservation, retail, marketing, events, learning and with the Director General, among others. The feedback we gathered at the end of the programme proved that the volunteers found these sessions immensely rewarding. Alongside this, volunteers could sign up for flexible front-of-house shifts, starting out with an experienced buddy. The buddy programme at the museum has been running for several years now and it means that every new volunteer starts out by shadowing a friendly, welcoming volunteer. We had a lovely group of twelve volunteers enrolled on the programme, all but two have chosen to stay on as volunteers and we have received really positive feedback.

I’ve had a really great time working as a Volunteer Team Leader so far. Alongside studying and working, I’m also an Ambassador for the Design History Society. In that capacity I’ve written a blog post about Elephant and Castle and I’m currently working on a seminar series about utopia, which will draw upon ideas discussed in my dissertation. I was lucky enough to attend the Design History Society conference in Canterbury this year, where I had a great time on an architecture tour of the city, watching some really interesting research presentations and getting to know some new people, including my DHS colleagues. I’ve now finished my degree, so look forward to working more with our volunteers and developing in my roles at IWM and the DHS.

Rosie Hughes recently graduated from the Curating Collections and Heritage master’s programme and is now Historic Objects Co-ordinator at West Dean College. On the MA, for their final research project, students can choose to write a traditional dissertation or a report designed for industry. In this blog post, Rosie reflects on how she met the challenges of writing her final research report on how museums can respond to the climate crisis.

As a graduate in environmental science and Environmental Researcher at a sustainable solutions company, I decided to write a report on How can UK Museums be Activist in Addressing the Climate Crisis? I was drawn to using clear language and a visually engaging format, rather than academic writing. As an environmental researcher I am used to using lots of jargon and abbreviations in my work and as I chose to write about climate change, I knew my report would need a glossary!

Studying part-time meant I had the luxury of longer to work on my report, but I was also concerned that I would become bored of my topic. I settled on writing a report between February and May of 2022 and began compiling my literature review and reading widely around the topic. I set up a Padlet board as I am a visual learner and found it useful to make links between different fields and concepts. A word of warning: it can be very easy to get distracted by finding nice images and colour-coding your posts instead of writing your report!

Rosie’s padlet, developed during her research

To maintain my motivation, I decided to answer questions which occurred to me as I was researching museum activism, climate change and ethics as well as globalization, world heritage, storytelling and climate change legislation. The paid work in sustainable solutions that I did alongside my MA complemented my study too, as I was asked to work on a report for a local council’s pathway to net zero. I found that even university modules which did not seem obviously linked to my topic, such as Exploring Objects, were invaluable and covered extractivism. I also worked on an exhibition on the Balcombe Fracking Protests that I created on a placement at the Old Police Cells Museum. I found that if you think holistically enough, almost anything has links to climate change.

My course leader advised that interviews are often a better way to gain information than surveys and I decided to interview Hedley Swain, CEO of Brighton and Hove Museums. This was very interesting and gave a real feel for the complex challenges facing civic museums. I also spoke to the gardener at the Royal Pavilion and gained insights into the operational side of becoming a more sustainable museum group. As a Museum Association Member, I was invited to an online meeting with their Climate Change Trustee, Sara Kassam and took the opportunity to ask her a couple of questions based on my research. Afterwards, I followed up by e-mail, checking she was happy with the wording and gave consent so that this could be included. This was not planned very far in advance, but by keeping my approach flexible I manged to include a range of different perspectives. I would add that using different approaches and types of interview does add to the complexity of writing them up!

From working commercially on reports, I had seen matrices used to summarise large amounts of information and give weight to different aspects. I suspected that I could use one to help with my wordcount and chose to display 3 case study museums which had adopted various standard and activist/next level ways to address the climate crisis. I chose 3 case studies in London and Brighton with varying approaches to the climate crisis and visited them between summer 2022 and spring 2023.

I advise visiting as many museums as you can, even if they seem unrelated to your topic – I wanted to find an example of a museum using the same interpretation to decolonise and decarbonise a display at the same time and eventually found this by visiting the American Museum in Bath – there is no way I could have known this beforehand or from visiting online. A second ‘happy accident’ was going to see an exhibition at the Design Museum and stumbling across a clock counting down the time remaining to keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This made up for the fact that it was sometimes hard to find explicit references to climate change in my case study museums and I read an excellent book called ‘Don’t even think about it’ by George Marshall (Bloomsbury, 2014) which explains how climate change is almost a taboo subject and why human psychology makes it hard to think or talk about.

Climate Clock at the Design Museum

On that note, I found that researching such a potentially devastating topic required self-care and regular time off from thinking about it. Personally, I also find a humorous approach can diffuse tension and anxiety, so I bought a stand-up comedian’s book about climate change. I was dismayed that when I went to a choir performance on a night ‘off’, a piece of music about climate change was performed… but I chose to see this as a positive way of the issue seeping into the cultural landscape.

Ideas and connections between topics often came to me when I was not sat at a desk. Make time to exercise and do low-key tasks where your mind can wander. At first, I was slightly daunted by how few other students had done reports and there were not many examples to draw on initially. Thankfully another student in the year before me wrote an excellent report about museums which gave me a really good basis to make decisions about my own report. Coming from a non-academic background and with a gap of 20 years between my BSc and MA, I found it invaluable to read a book called ‘How to fix your academic writing’ which translated so many aspects of papers and academia in a clear and amusing way.

I would say that the bulk of my writing happened between May and July 2023, with my first draft being submitted before the end of July, to accomodate childcare commitments over the summer. As far as possible, I wrote up notes after each meeting with my supervisor and agreed the actions we would take before our next meeting. I would have liked more time to format my report, but I also tried to keep in mind that my writing was being assessed and not my design skills! I would suggest building in almost as much time for formatting a report as for writing it and to keep the images out until the very end to avoid messing up the structure. I submitted the photographs as a Powerpoint presentation separate to the writing in the final draft I sent to my supervisor. I was fortunate to be given lots of helpful advice by tutors and fellow and previous students who all contributed to the end result.

Recent graduate Rowan Adamson reflects on her degree in History of Design and Material Culture as a springboard for her role as a new Ambassador for the prestigious Design History Society, the leading organisation that promotes and supports the study of design histories, both in the UK and internationally.

After graduating with my master’s degree in the ‘History of Design and Material Culture’ from the University of Brighton in February 2023, I am pleased to announce my appointment as ‘Ambassador’ for the Design History Society. The DHS is the leading organisation that promotes and supports the study of design histories, both in the UK and internationally. My role will be to promote the DHS through engaging content (primarily through the Blog – including reviews, reports, interviews, thought pieces, visual essays etc) and updating social media channels, as well as organising an event for post-graduate/early career researchers and students to engage with the society in an informal and casual setting.

In addition to my master’s degree, I hold an undergraduate degree in ‘Textile Design’ from Gray’s School of Art (Robert Gordon University) in Aberdeen. Grounded in design and craft principles, my educational background has been instrumental in informing my research with a particular focus on utilising the archive through the lens of creative methods and making practices. Making the transition from a practical studio based undergraduate to an academically challenging and theory led post-graduate forced me to reassess my research methods and led to a deeper understanding of object theory, exhibition design and museum processes. For my master’s dissertation, titled “Memory, Materiality, and the Collection: Exploring the relationship between object and artist within contemporary art and craft,” I delved into creative practices involving found objects and archival material as a tool for inspiration and exploration, interviewing 3 artists/designers and analysing their methods. My research interests span a range of topics, including but not limited to the materiality of the archive, the memory of objects, and Scottish textile design and craft histories.

I loved my master’s degree, and credit the department of History of Art and Design and the Centre for Design History for such an encouraging environment in to learn and question our subject, especially through workshops and seminars along with the excellent staff and my fellow master’s students. With this encouragement I am actively pursuing a career within the arts/museum sector and have recently relocated from Brighton back to Glasgow, where I am continuing my pursuits in the field. The Design History Society allows me the opportunity to stay up to date on the ongoing discourse in Design History, and this engagement serves as a valuable resource as I explore potential avenues for further study and career opportunities.

We are looking for an additional Ambassador to join me; it is an excellent opportunity to be involved with Design History and network with other academics and researchers. Open to anyone with an interest in Design History, please see the ‘Vacancies’ page on the DHS website, or alternatively please email me at radamson15@gmail.com to discuss this further.

https://www.designhistorysociety.org/about/vacancies

https://www.designhistorysociety.org/news/view/welcome-to-our-new-ambassador