Senses of Purpose

Contribution to Handbook of Cultural Work. Bloomsbury Visual Arts / Onassis Stegi, 2024.
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While what I do is generally situated under the curatorial banner, I didn’t train as a curator at any point, except while doing the job itself. In university, I studied English and French literature, followed by postgraduate degrees in women and gender studies, and after that, critical and cultural theory. The combination of these multiple paths – all rooted in the humanities – alongside a lifelong fascination with biology, genetics and geology, led me, in the first instance, to dedicate part of my professional career to what was referred to at the time, in many institutions, as ‘Public Programming’. Approaches to public programming differ from one art organization to another, but in general, it is a field that can encompass a very wide range of ways of interacting with an art organization’s audiences. Oftentimes (certainly more so before the Covid-19 pandemic), these were live, in-person, time-based encounters. Frequently, they would involve contributions by participants from fields of research and disciplines adjacent – but not identical to – art. Sometimes, programmes could take the form of time-based commissions by artists, which by their very nature, bring about the possibility of collaboration between artists and, say, musicians, designers, choreographers and so forth. That is to say, that the discourses that have surrounded me over the years have been as numerous as they have been different from one another. This example comes from real-life experience: put an oceanographer and a theologian in a room, and what will emerge, in the first instance, will be an attempt at translation across disciplinary language divides. This, in itself, will take time. More →