Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Critical Practice and Curatorial Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The card beside a beaded apron in a small municipal museum near where I grew up reads 'Native costume, donated 1953'. It does not name the maker, the region or the occasion on which the apron was worn, and for my honours research project I spent several weeks trying to work out why. The answer, as far as I could reconstruct it, was ordinary: the donor's letter survives in a file, and it is the donor's description that became the label. I want to undertake a dissertation-based master's degree because I have become interested in how such ordinary decisions about wording, placement and omission shape what visitors understand, and in what curators can responsibly do when the original record is thin.

My first degree combined Fine Art and History. In studio courses I made mostly drawings and small printed works, and I learned how much an exhibition depends on practical choices: wall height, lighting, the order in which a viewer meets things. History courses taught me to read sources against their purpose. My honours project brought these together. With the permission of the museum's one part-time staff member, I photographed and transcribed around ninety object labels from three decades and compared them with accession registers and donor correspondence. I grouped the labels by vocabulary and by how they attributed authorship. I did not find a hidden story so much as a pattern: objects made by Black South African women were far more often attributed to a 'tribe' or region than to a person, even where a letter mentioned the maker's name. My supervisor pushed me to be careful about what the evidence could support, and the final project argued for a modest set of revised labels that stated what was known, what was assumed and what was missing.

Reading for the project introduced me to writing on decolonising collections and to debates about the authority of the museum voice. I found Achille Mbembe's essays on the archive useful for thinking about the archive as both a building and a set of status claims, although I am still working through how far his arguments apply to a very small institution with almost no budget. I would like my dissertation to stay close to that scale: the provincial and community collections where most people actually encounter museums.

Since graduating I have worked as a supervisor in an independent bookshop. The job is not curatorial, but it is closer than it might seem. I arrange front tables, write shelf cards and run occasional author evenings, and I have noticed that a three-line card written by a staff member changes what customers pick up. Managing the weekly rota and the stock budget has also made me reliable with deadlines and numbers. On Saturday mornings I volunteer at a church hall where a retired congregant and I are slowly cataloguing a cupboard of programmes, photographs and minute books going back to the 1960s. I have built a simple spreadsheet catalogue and am learning, often from my mistakes with dates, how to describe material consistently so that someone else can use it later.

Outside work I sing alto in a community choir. It has nothing to do with museums, but rehearsing with forty people of very different ages has taught me patience and how to listen before I contribute.

I am applying for a research degree rather than a taught one because I already have a defined question and want the time to pursue it properly. I hope to examine how small South African collections have revised, or failed to revise, their interpretive texts since 1994, using label histories as evidence. I expect supervision to sharpen my methods and to challenge my assumptions, and I am ready for the independent, sustained work a dissertation requires.