Art Curating in Practice MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A customer once brought a small linocut into the framing shop where I work and asked for 'whatever makes it look expensive'. I laid three mount boards around it on the counter: a narrow border, a wide one and a wide one weighted slightly at the bottom. The wide, bottom-weighted mount made the print look calmer, as if it had room to breathe, and she chose it at once. Moments like this happen several times a week, and they are a small, practical version of the question that has shaped my interest in curating: how much does the way something is presented change what people think it is?

I studied Art History, and my dissertation looked at how a regional museum has displayed its collection of trade union banners since the 1980s. Using exhibition photographs, old gallery guides and object files that staff kindly let me consult, I traced a shift from banners shown flat and high, almost like heraldry, to lower hangings with longer labels about the branches that carried them. I argued that the later displays treated the banners less as decorative textiles and more as records of organised communities, but that this sometimes came at the cost of talking about how they were painted and made. The project taught me to read a display as an argument, and to look for what a hang leaves out as well as what it says. It also made me aware of the practical limits curators work within: one file noted that a banner could no longer be shown vertically because of the weight of its silk, which explained a change I had first read as purely interpretive.

For the past two years I have also invigilated on Saturdays at a small artist-run space. The job is mostly quiet, but it has given me a close view of how exhibitions are actually put together on a tight budget. I have helped artists patch and repaint walls between shows, written condition notes when works arrive, and drafted a few short introductory texts that the committee then edited. The most useful lesson came from watching visitors. During a show of large photographs, people repeatedly walked past a small video piece in a side room. After I mentioned this at a volunteers' meeting, the artists moved a single still from the video into the main room with an arrow pointing to the doorway, and visitors followed it. It was a modest fix, but it showed me that a sequence of rooms is something visitors experience with their feet, not just their eyes.

Outside work I print risograph zines with two friends, usually short collections of drawings and found photographs from car boot sales. Deciding which images face each other across a spread has made me think about juxtaposition in a hands-on way, and selling them at small fairs means explaining the selection to strangers in about thirty seconds. I also keep an allotment, which has nothing to do with art except that it has made me patient and good at planning around seasons and weather, both of which turn out to matter when scheduling installs in an unheated building.

I am now looking for postgraduate study because I want to move from helping with exhibitions to being able to conceive and argue for them. I would like to develop a stronger grounding in curatorial history and theory, and to test it through practical projects where I am responsible for decisions about selection, interpretation and audience rather than only carrying them out. In particular, I am interested in how exhibitions can present objects with working-class or community histories without flattening their material and aesthetic qualities, the tension I first noticed in my dissertation. I bring careful research habits, practical experience of handling and presenting work, and a habit of watching how people respond, and I am keen to build on all three.