Curator/Collections Researcher

Headley Fellowship

Role
Research Fellow
Date From
March 2022
Date To
August 2022
photograph album page with six black and white snapshots of women with the caption 'Somali'

I was awarded a Headley Fellowship from the Art Fund to work with Powell-Cotton Museum on a project looking at how the museum records and shares the stories of people who were involved in the Powell-Cotton family’s collecting.

The Situation

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Since 2020 the Powell-Cotton Museum has been undertaking a project to reimagine the museum, with the mission statement ‘people matter’. The people that the museum was built by, and who they have historically focussed on, are the Powell-Cotton family.

The Action

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Focusing on two case study collections of photographs, one from south west Somalia in 1934-5 and one from British East Africa in 1903, I have been working on reimagining how the Powell-Cotton Museum records information about their collections and the people that they represent.

The Result

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Although the period of research and cataloguing has now finished, I will be sharing reflections on the project through the blog on this site. The newly digitised photographs from the Somali archive can be seen on instagram at @PowellCottonSomaliPhotoArchive and on the Powell-Cotton Museum site.