Projects and case studies

Residencies and Creative Practice at the Victoria and Albert Museum

V&A Museum Ceramics Residency Studio featuring Toshiba Japan Ceramics Resident Keiko Masumoto, June 2013.
Photo: Ruth Lloyd

Cultural organisations who host residencies, invite artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and other creative professionals to spend time with their organisation to develop new work and in many cases share their practice with a public.

Residencies and contemporary creative practice (art, design, music, digital media) for interpretation purposes is of special interest to me. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is the Worlds greatest museum of art and design in London.  I set up the V&A Museum Residency Programme in 2008 and continued to manage it until 2013.

The aim of this Residency Programme was to enable creative practitioners to use the outstanding museum collections for research; engage the public in the process of design and making; interpret the collections and creative disciplines through creative practice and promote contemporary art and design.

V&A Residents mined the collections for inspiration, led educational events and workshops, debates, held open studios for visitors, created gallery installations, live performances, and exhibitions. My role was to oversee the whole programme and deliver many of the events. I worked closely with each Resident to support their own learning experience and professional development.

I was also responsible for fundraising, leading partnerships and reporting on the programme.During this time I advised and supported a number of arts and heritage organisations in the UK and internationally in setting up art, design and science residency programmes, studios for artist and public use and developing a creative industry audience.

These included programmes at Museum of London, V&A at Dundee, Science Museum (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Kensington Palace (London), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford), Rijks Museum (Netherlands), with a specific focus on socially engaged art and design practice and contemporary art and design as collections interpretation.

I have conducted my own academic research into creative practice residencies for interpretation, and worked with teams and associate consultants to undertake visitor evaluations, audience development research, project reports and investigations. Associate consultants I have work closely with include Dr. Ben Gammon, Dr. Gaby Porter, Flow Consultancy and Morris Hargreaves McIntyre.

I have regularly presented on this subject at conferences, symposia, festivals and with working groups including: