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Staff Profile

Dr Briony Carlin

Lecturer in Contemporary Art Curation

Background

My teaching and research ask questions about how our understandings of art and meaning emerge in particular moments where space, time, people, things and experiences come together and act on each other. I employ critical feminist theories and creative methodologies to explore topics including photographic culture, and constructed hierarchies of art and craft. I am particularly interested in relationships between archival practices and ontological significance of photographic objects in institutional collections.

As a curator, my work facilitates encounters between objects, artists, audiences and ideas, with emphasis on materialities of photography and artist publishing.

I have taught on art history, curating, museum studies and media studies programmes at Newcastle University, University of York and University of Sunderland since 2018.

I completed my PhD in 2022 at Newcastle University. Before this, I worked as Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. I have a MA in Art Museum and Gallery Studies and BA (Hons) in French, Spanish and Art History.


Research

My research seeks to understand how specific encounters with art objects and other cultural products shape the meanings we come to associate with them. It questions, what are the social settings, emotional textures, rules and regulations that permeate these encounters? And, what role do art objects themselves play in structuring the places we encounter them, and inviting certain responses?

I have explored these questions through my doctoral work on the photobook, as an emergent, experiential, portable, performative and multiple artistic form and commodity. I completed my PhD at Newcastle University in March 2022. My thesis 'Bindings, Boundaries and Cuts: Relating Agency and Ontology in Photobook Encounters' was supervised by Professor Chris Whitehead and Dr Tina Sikka. I am currently developing my first monograph from the research, to be published by Leuven University Press.

My additional projects have considered these themes in relation to popular culture museum collections and paint-by-numbers art. I approach these interests with a more-than-human perspective to look at other agencies and affects in art encounters. In particular, I am seeking to understand how feminist new materialist ethico-onto-epistemologies create new ways of knowing with and about artworks.

My methodology combines ethnographic and auto-ethnographic techniques with interdisciplinary theory to consider what kinds of knowledges are marginalised in academic scholarship and institutions like museums and universities. Through this inquiry, I worked as Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project Inclusion and Safety in Field-Based Environmental Sciences Research, based in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences. 

I am currently Co-ordinator for Ethnographies of the Ineffable, a Knowledge Exchange project with Monash University, Melbourne. The project experiments with innovative, playful methodologies to approach, instrumentalise and remediate some kinds of experiences, feelings and phenomena we find hard to articulate in language. I work with an interdisciplinary group of researchers including scholars of design, performance, curating and poetry.

Teaching

2023-2024

MCH8501 Museums, Galleries and Heritage in Society

MCH8502 Management Practices in Museums, Galleries and Heritage

MCH8516 Museum Gallery Heritage Practice

MCH8600 Museum Gallery Heritage Professional Practice and Research

MCH8057 Media Analysis

Dissertation supervision

Co-ordinator of MGH Futures

Placement Manager for Museum Studies, Curating Art and Global Heritage Management (Semester 2)

Publications