Valentina Risdonne:
Northumbria University / V&A Museum
Valentina Risdonne was born in Italy and studied her B.Sc. at the Univerity of Perugia and M.Sc. at the University of Parma in Science Conservation. She has collaborated with the Victoria and Albert Museum Science Section since 2015. Her research interests included until now lacquer objects, pigments and plaster casts. She is an objects analyst and a plaster conservator. Her current Phd project concerns plaster casts as historic objects. There is well established literature on the role of plaster casts within the study of the antique, however the topic of plaster reproductions of the art and architecture of later periods is less well served. The subject is touched on in chapters and conference papers, and publications tend to cover the topic more broadly. Specific groups of casts by artists such as Velazquez or Canova have also been the focus of art historical publications. Valentina's PhD seeks to uncover how the presentation of the casts, in the form of their coatings, in the mid 19th century and after, differed from earlier collections, and how this information can support the on-going preservation of the V&A’s collection. Specifically, the project will investigate: What were the original historic materials and methods employed to make the V&A’s 19th century plaster casts, and how did that differ from those in earlier periods? How did these materials influence the reception of the casts in the 19th century? Was the introduction of colour significant and how would people have understood that? How do conservation treatments today perform in terms of improving the appearance of the objects after treatment, whilst minimising the risks of the plaster degradation, and how can these treatments be optimised and how can we best evaluate these treatments? How does a greater understanding about coatings and colour contribute to discussion on the value of the copy in the 19th century?
Abbey Ellis:
University of Leicester / Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Abbey graduated from Merton College, Oxford in 2016 with a first class BA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History. In 2017, Abbey achieved a distinction in her Masters degree in Classical Archaeology, also at Merton. Abbey’s current PhD project is split between the University of Leicester, where she is supervised by Sandra Dudley, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she is supervised by Bert Smith and Milena Melfi. Her work is set in the museum's Cast Gallery and focuses on the value, authenticity, and uses of archaeological plaster casts, namely the exact replicas of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures made from Plaster of Paris. Her project will contribute new ways of thinking about replicas and copies in museums, considering the significance of cast collections in particular. Abbey aims to explore how casts in museums can be understood as what they are, rather than what they stand for. Her research questions include: Do cast collections have their own value, or do they inevitably comprise secondary objects? What right do they have to be exhibited in a museum? Do they have intrinsic value, and if so, what is it? She also seeks to examine the perceptions that Museum visitors have of casts and whether there are alternative means enabling visitors to engage with them. Abbey hopes that her work will impact upon both scholarship and practice around authenticity, object potentiality and visitor experience in museums.
Katherine Clough:
Newcastle University / V&A Museum
Katherine Clough is an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership candidate at Newcastle University and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). She is researching the impact of digital practices on the curation and interpretation of historic museum collections. Her project focus is exploring affordances of different digital lenses on the archive of the mid-twentieth century photographer Maurice Broomfield held at the V&A. Cycles of (re)production, circulation and consumption are significant in her research to help contextualise Broomfield’s work within the wider visual economy, as are the parallel themes of reassemblage, recirculation and reconfiguration in emerging wider research on museum affordances, now that the collection resides in a national institution. Her academic background is in visual anthropology, material culture studies, and art history, and she spent a few years working with photograph collections and archives at the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean Museums in Oxford before commencing doctoral study. Katherine is looking forward to this study day and hearing about other people’s thoughts on the role of reproductions in museums, especially those that touch on themes exploring the hierarchies of value around museum objects, the indexical relationships of copies, and expanding ideas of object networks in the digital age.
Image below: Katherine visiting Mat Collishaw’s immersive artwork Thresholds - an augmented virtual reality installation that recreates William Henry Fox Talbot’s first exhibition of his photographic prints in 1839 - at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, while on a CDP training event exploring the materiality of photographs.
Carolyn Alexander:
Glasgow School of Art / Scottish Cultural Heritage Consortium
Since studying Visual Communication at the Glasgow School of Art, Carolyn Alexander's creative practice has been focused on our social relationships with things, particularly in a museum and gallery context. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD, investigating if the use of contemporary art and design practice can facilitate deeper engagement with restored, or reconstructed, material culture. Using the Mackintosh Building Restoration Project as a case study, she is exploring issues surrounding the aura and authenticity of historical objects or monuments; examining how these attributes are defined and how they may be experienced.
View Carolyn's portfolio
Contact Carolyn at c.alexander1@student.gsa.ac.uk
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