We are Hanneke and Steven, postgraduate researchers at the University of Stirling and the University of Glasgow respectively. We have enjoyed undertaking an SGSAH-funded internship with the Art Collection at the University of Stirling during the spring and summer of 2024. As fully accredited by Museums Galleries Scotland, the Art Collection and the Pathfoot Galleries were set up to make art and culture part of everyday life for staff, students and visitors, enabling exchanges between art, research and teaching. Following its ethos of working to make knowledge visible, we focused on making the Collections’ artist and object archives available online by cataloguing and digitising exhibition booklets, letters, cards, invoices, copyright information, installation instructions, photographs and the odd complaint about student behaviour around artworks!
We have enjoyed learning more about many Scottish artists. Elizabeth Blackadder, Joan Eardley, J.D. Fergusson, Alasdair Gray, Barbara Hepworth, Alberto Morocco, James Morrison, Barbara Rae, Willie Rodger and George Wyllie among others. The correspondence we catalogued and digitised makes visible the otherwise invisible labour of curatorial practices and highlights just how much the work is centred around creating and developing relationships not only with active artists, but with the wider arts community in Scotland and further afield. We enjoyed many stories in the context of social history visible in the personal messages between artists and university employees. Many artists sent the Art Collection season’s greetings, some even handmade. In the 1970s, the wishes were for a happy New Year or Hogmanay. However, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Christmas Cards started to arrive in the Collections with one asking if the curator was “of the old tradition” – being New Year’s greetings in Scotland, or “the new” – referring to Christmas wishes.
(Oil on canvas, 1910)
This work was one of a collection donated to the University of Stirling in 1968 by Fergusson’s widow Margaret Morris.
Not only has the work added to our knowledge of Scottish art, artists, cataloguing and digitisation skills, but we also learned much that may be considered ‘contextual stuff’. Going through the archives gave us a glimpse of wee stories. Initially, pins were used to hold paperwork together, later replaced by large staples. Staples seemed to have become smaller over time. The plasters on our fingers are a testament to a former curator who really did love her staples! The material showed the development of paper, writing and engineering with many handwritten letters followed by letters typed with a typewriter using carbon paper.
We noticed many memos were walked across buildings delivered from post room to post room and office to office spreading a conversation over several days. A letter from Anstruther to Stirling took two months to arrive in the early 1970s. Slowly, the number of handwritten letters diminished and printed documents took over. This was followed of course by the digital age where less physical documentation needed digitisation and more emails and born-digital documents were in folders in a cloud.
Without this archive, the history behind the Art Collection would be, as a former curator rather beautifully puts it in correspondence with an artist, ‘lost in the mists of time’. An especially interesting part of this history is that when men mostly dominated the art world and decision-making processes, the curators of the Art Collection at the University of Stirling have always been women. Their role developed from a more administrative process of acquiring artwork to becoming full curatorial roles in what became an accredited Art Collection and Gallery.
(Exhibition of works by Margaret Mellis, organised by Matilda Mitchell, first curator)
The University’s first Art Curator was responsible for collecting and displaying artworks in and around the campus of Scotland’s new, boldly brutalist, university. Reading through her correspondence gives a real sense of the effort behind the burgeoning art collection. The letters reveal an obvious passion for the arts and a commitment to the university’s founding principles, but they also expose the hidden (and hard) work of curation, in which curators negotiate carefully and kindly with artists, galleries and suppliers, handling everything from finances, shipping, repairs, loans and the organisation of events. Building the Collection continues into the 21st Century, illustrated by the commission of the iconic Iain McColl sculpture ‘Pursuit of Knowledge’, otherwise known as The Blue Boy, that greets visitors to the Pathfoot Building.
(Fibreglass, 2003)
Using the University’s impressively large scanner and photo studio, we captured high-resolution scans of many paintings, prints and photographs from the Art Collection, as part of a plan to update and refresh the images currently used on the university’s website. The impressive quality of the images is difficult to overstate; the scanner is a seriously powerful machine and was bought precisely to facilitate the many ongoing and planned digitisation projects the university is committed to. Seeing these artworks up close was interesting and illuminating, as the scan allows us to zoom in without any drop in quality, uncovering details inaccessible to the naked eye. Some artworks startle in their capacity to withstand this intimate, almost intrusive, scrutiny; Norman McLaren’s vivid pastel drawings are particularly memorable in this respect, the way their surrealist landscapes unfurl with textures, detail and the hazy but controlled blending of colour.
We enjoyed the variety of everyday work that takes place behind the scenes of the art collection. Our internship coincided with the refurbishment of the art store. Wooden shelving was replaced with metal frames reused from a previous life at the V&A in Dundee lined with carpet reused from the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. This showed us what good practice in the use and reuse of sustainably sourced materials looks like. We spent many hours measuring and cataloguing the artworks in the store before we helped package, lift and store them until the renewed store was ready to house them again. In May 2024, award-winning artist Audrey Grant opened her solo exhibition ‘Memoria’ at the University of Stirling, marking the end of her artist residency at Stirling. We learned how to take down the previous Willie Rodger exhibition and clean vinyl text from the wall. Great teamwork was required to painstakingly and professionally mount a vinyl artwork using a spirit level for perfection.
Our internship at Stirling proved to be a fun and rewarding experience to complement the final stages of our respective PhD projects; it has equipped us with a new arsenal of practical skills, provided a crash course in Scottish contemporary art, and helped widen our professional networks in the museums and heritage sector. We would encourage anyone interested in working with the Art Collection (and the lovely people responsible for its operation) to take full advantage of any future opportunities.
