When designers reach into archives for inspiration, they are touching more than fabric and silhouette: they are engaging with lived histories, forms of labor and systems of power. I’ve long been fascinated by the moment a utilitarian garment becomes a runway prop or a luxury capsule — and how...
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Heritage
I’ve been watching the surge of virtual exhibitions from grassroots...
Arts
I’ve spent years working between museums, independent presses and community...
Heritage
I remember the first time I stood in front of an object whose label told me...
Arts
When I first encountered a community-led language class in the Highlands of...
I remember the first time I stood in front of an object whose label told me almost nothing. A carved figure, beautiful and worn, with one sentence: “Unknown origin. circa 19th century.” I felt cheated—not because I wanted every forensic...
When I first encountered a community-led language class in the Highlands of Scotland, I thought I was attending a local revival project: elders teaching syllables to kids, a few hand-stitched primers on the table, the hum of tea and conversation....
When I first encountered the slim pamphlet on a rainy afternoon in a secondhand bookshop, I almost missed the name of the press on the back cover: Hearth & Margin Editions. The pamphlet itself—an uncluttered chapbook of poems by a woman I'd never...
When a group of community musicians, archivists and cultural workers sat around a scarred kitchen table in east London two years ago, we didn’t set out to change council funding. We wanted to make visible what our ears already knew: that diasporic...
Handling sacred objects from other cultures is not an abstract curatorial puzzle — it’s a set of human relationships, obligations and risks that I have learned to take seriously through years of research, fieldwork and conversations with...
When I first encountered a stack of refugee-crafted zines at a small pop-up in a Parisian community centre, I thought I knew what I was looking at: homemade pamphlets, photocopied pages, hand-drawn covers. Aesthetically they belonged to the long and...
When a single carved mask returns to a village after decades — sometimes centuries — away, the ripple effects are rarely limited to the object itself. I've watched this happen in places where I’ve researched collections and oral histories: a...
I still remember the first time I stood alone in a reading room, a stack of colonial-era glass plate negatives before me. The images were beautiful, infuriating, and utterly opaque in different measures. Like many objects of empire, photographs...
I have spent years watching cities argue with themselves over paint. A wall that one group calls an act of vandalism can be, to another, a living archive of community feeling, a landmark of identity, or a potent political statement. The friction...
When I first began researching collections for museums and independent projects, one encounter changed how I think about authority in museums. I sat in a cramped community centre with a woman who had spent thirty years working in a food-processing...