Master of Arts in Art History (Critical Curatorial Studies) (MA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last month a customer brought a small screenprint into the framing shop where I work and asked me to make it look important. The print was a rough two-colour poster for a 1980s tenants' meeting, folded twice, with a faded staple hole in one corner. We talked through options: a wide cream mount and gilt moulding, or a plain oak frame floated so the fold lines and staple hole stayed visible. She chose the second, and when she collected it she said it now looked like what it was. That exchange is small, but it captures the question I want to study at postgraduate level: how display decisions shape what an object is understood to be, and who gets to make those decisions.

My undergraduate degree in History of Art gave me a grounding in the conventional survey, but my strongest work came when I looked at material that sits awkwardly in galleries. My dissertation examined photocopied newsletters produced by community arts groups in the 1970s, held in a local studies library. Many were stapled, hand-lettered and partly illegible. I traced how their layouts borrowed from protest posters, and I compared the few that had later been exhibited, flattened under glass, with the bundles still kept in box files. I argued that exhibiting them as single sheets removed the sense of circulation that gave them meaning. The research taught me to read catalogue records critically, to notice what a finding aid leaves out, and to be honest about the limits of an argument built on an incomplete run of documents.

Reading alongside that project shaped my thinking. Brian O'Doherty's essays in Inside the White Cube made me see the neutral gallery as a historically specific setting rather than a default, and Carol Duncan's Civilizing Rituals helped me think of the museum visit as a structured performance. I am interested in testing those ideas against exhibitions of ephemeral, collective and amateur work, where the white cube's assumptions about authorship and singularity seem least comfortable.

Alongside framing, I work two evening shifts a week on a public library desk. Much of it is routine: renewals, printer jams, helping people find local newspapers on microfilm. It has given me a practical sense of how people approach collections, which is often sideways, through a family name or a street, rather than through the categories institutions use. I have started noting these routes into material, and they are part of why I want to think about curating as interpretation for real audiences rather than for specialists alone.

On Saturdays I help run a lino-printing table at a community centre. I prepare blocks, clean rollers and keep children away from the cutting tools, and occasionally I help adults who have not made art since school. Last spring the group pinned up a wall of prints for a open afternoon, and I was asked to arrange it. I grouped them by the stories people had told me rather than by technique or skill, and several makers stood in front of their own work explaining it to neighbours. It was not a formal exhibition, but it showed me how much arrangement can invite or close down conversation.

At framing work I have also become careful with materials: acid-free mounts, UV glazing, and the conversations about reversibility that a good framer has with a customer. I do not claim conservation expertise, but I understand that care for an object is a set of choices with consequences.

I am applying for postgraduate study in critical curatorial practice because I want to develop these instincts into rigorous research and responsible exhibition-making. I would bring archival patience, practical handling experience and a habit of listening to how ordinary visitors use collections. I hope to leave with the theoretical tools and curatorial judgement to show community-made and ephemeral work in ways that respect how it was originally made and shared.