Speaking about things: oral history as context

‘Speaking About Things: Oral History as Context’ draws on life history interviews conducted under the auspices of two oral history projects: the Life Story Collection at The British Library National Sound Archive [2003-4] [LSC], and the Voices in the Visual Arts [VIVA] project based at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London [2005-]. Oral histories, while focusing on the singularity of individual testimony, are here understood as creating ‘a vital document to the construction of consciousness, emphasising both the variety of experience in any social group, and also how each individual draws on a common culture: a defiance of the rigid categorisation of private and public just as of memory and reality’ (Samuel & Thompson, 1990: 2). The paper, therefore, addresses the value of life stories (sections within the overall life history) to demonstrate the ways in which interviews with designers offer a ‘thick description’ of the networks in which designers are situated as subjects. How designers talk, rather than write, about their work, and designed objects, in oral history interviews reveals their visual and embodied memories in everyday practice in which designed objects are not autonomous productions but are recollected as arising in a web of recollected images and references which all contribute to the meaning of ‘design’ and the identity of a designer

Speaking of memory...

Article explores how memory is created in narrative focusing on architects' life history interviews

Artists-in-progress: narrative identity of the self as another

Following Paul Ricoeur’s formulation of narrative identity as the dialectic of sameness (idem-) and change (ipse-)identity, this chapter explores the trope of incompleteness in extracts from two artists’ life stories to suggest that the synthesizing totality of the life history is continually interrupted, or broken, by accounts of new creative directions and the search for symbolic expression which mark the ipse-identity of the artist’s selfhood. A coherent identity does not just refer to the singularity of that self but must also contend with the ascription of ‘artist’, the historical and cultural contingency of which is made manifest in the testimony of the life stories. Rather than seeing narrative emplotment leading towards a culmination or conclusion [“I became an artist”], narrative constitutes the means whereby the ‘discordant concordance’ of the temporal aporia of becoming and being an artist is enabled via the reflective ipseity that marks narrative identity’s fractures and disruptions

For the Record: [Un]Official Voices at the V&A

This overview of the historical and affective value of oral history recordings draws on my current research on curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Questions about the changing definition of the title ‘curator’ over time but also about the way the oral history interview as a medium demonstrates this are raised. In telling of their lives, curators’ agency is extended to encompass the construction of their narrative identity. The entanglement of the ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ persona of the curator is revealed. Nevertheless, is it possible to disentangle this distinction? Is it even necessary? Or, is the personal voice the medium for reflecting and transmitting the multi-layered snapshots of experience, and that what engages is this very quality of the life lived as a story

Dangerous Liaisons: Relationships between design, craft and art

The introductory essay [co-authored] examines the background and current interconnections between design, craft and the fine arts. This Special Issue was able to expand the debate by showing how attitudes to materials – from 19C sculpture to current fashion – appropriate craftsmanship to reinvigorate notions of handmaking

John Mallet: 'This is the way that life happened'

Article for festschrift publication in honour of V&A former Keeper of Ceramics, John Mallet, drawing on extracts of his life history recording with Linda Sandino for the V&A Curators Lives oral history project

Open secrets: stories from the V&A Archive

Audio playlist of curators' stories from the V&A Oral History Project based on life history research interviews, conducted by Linda Sandino

Listen to yourself! voice, technology and the self

How the self is constructed through technologies of inscription

Curatorial narratives at the V&A: "but there’s another invisible level only you see"

Discursive event

News from the past: oral history at the V&A

Drawing on a recording undertaken as part of the V&A Oral History project with former Deputy Keeper Barbara Morris, this paper explores oral history as a research methodology that contributes to the meaning and understanding of the V&A through the personal stories of its curators. The paper draws on Morris' account of the discovery, in 1954, of the thefts of Museum Assistant John Nevin. Rather than seeing oral history as a simply a window on the past, the paper suggests how narratives function on several levels: as content, as biography and as thematically-oriented testimony