Abstract
The PhD examines how exhibitions create multi-form and multi-modal stories, bringing together the voices of artists and diverse communities alongside academic and curatorial expertise through audio guides, digital and public programmes, guided tours, and curatorial texts such as interviews, panel discussions, and essays. It explores the role of museums and cultural organisations as spaces that co-cultivate nuanced and complex stories that contribute to progressive social narratives.Surveying a shift from object-centered interpretation to a visitor-centered approach, it focuses on approaches to productively harnessing curatorial authority and community expertise to enrich exhibition stories. It concerns itself more with the why and the how, expanding to the broader impact of storytelling, often in the context of triggering and traumatic experiences and histories around wellbeing and the lived experience of illness and disability. Using completed works that chart this journey, I will interrogate terms such as storytelling, narrative, community, knowledge, commoning and interpretation, mapping this terrain through deeper analysis.
Through a mixture of critical analysis and reflection, I propose a series of curatorial strategies that draw from my own experiences to emphasise a form of interdependent curating that places inclusive collaboration at its heart. These interdependent strategies counter historical models of museology and traditional notions of curatorial expertise. The PhD, drawing on my curatorial practice across museums, galleries, and the university sector, explores the shift from curatorial care for objects towards a strategy of caring with subjects, articulating a move towards multiple authorities.
| Date of Award | 2 Apr 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Sarah Perks (Supervisor) |