I am Assistant Professor in Art History in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities (MAH).

I completed a BA (Hons) in Art History at Sussex from 1983-6.

Research:

From 2010-14, I returned to Sussex to research a collaborative PhD with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). My research thesis was the first published historical study of the scientific invention, industrial art and design applications and commercial development of electo-metallurgy: Elkington & Co. and the art of electro-metallurgy, since 1840.

Since completing my doctoral research, I have taught Art History and History at Sussex and worked on a series of curatorial research projects at the V&A, funded by the AHRC, Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, and V&A Americas Foundation.

My primary research interests, activities, and outputs are aimed at altering assumptions about copies.

From 2010-19, my curatorial research helped develop the V&A's major FuturePlan project to refurbish the historic Cast Courts. My work informed the concept and creation of displays, interpretations, and new digital media exhibits in the Cast Courts and Chitra Nirmal Sethia Gallery, which reopened in December 2018. To accompany the reopening, I co-wrote, with Angus Patterson, the book, The Museum and The Factory: The V&A, Elkington and the Electrical Revolution (London: Lund Humphries / V&A Publishing, 2018).

My work at the V&A has also reassessed the art historical context of slavery, colonialism, and empire in gallery displays, interpretations, and the Collections Information System. That has involved identifying contested histories and has helped the V&A to develop a new approach to reinterpreting and contextualising discriminatory and divisive images, objects, and texts. It has also led to a number of important acquisitions for the V&A's collections, including: The Maqdala Cup; Diary of the Ashantee War by an Eye Witness from 1873 to 1874, and the Apotheosis of Homer.

I have also contributed academic research and curatorial consultation to projects at museums worldwide, including: Royal Collection Trust, London (2010); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011); Tate Britain, London (2015); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands (2017); Leighton House, London (2017); MNAA-Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon (2023); Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (2024-25).

Teaching:

My teaching interests at Sussex are cultural and natural heritage sites; museums and museology; architecture, especially historic listed buildings, public monuments, and memorials; historic and protected landscape, enclosure, landscape architecture and garden design; maps and mapping practices; decorative and industrial arts; theory of ornament; copy culture, copies, and copying methods (replication, reproduction, rescaling).

I also research and teach the history of the architecture, landscape, and art collection at Sussex and how it has shaped campus life and the social, cultural, and educational history of the University.

I do extramural teaching at Charleston in Firle, Sussex, the modernist home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group.  

Artistic practice:

After graduating from Sussex in 1986, I worked for 25-years as a monumental stone mason, sculptor, and writer.

From 1986 to 1995, I ran a traditional studio-based sculpture practice in Bermondsey, London.

My creative practice focused on commercial gallery exhibitions, and public and private commissions of sculpted relief letter designs of (primarily) my own poetry and prose. Lettercasting in concrete and lettercutting in stone, I specialized in raised work in which the letter is left proud of the background, which is traditional in Scotland.

From 1995 to 2010, I refocused my creative practice on cultural and natural heritage commissions in the public domain. Inspired by the urban design principles of William H. Whyte, Jane Jacobs, Gordon Cullen, et al, my practice specialised in researching and representing previously undocumented histories as part of placemaking, planning design, and tactical urbanism to create heritage sites that foster place-based identity, cultural renewal, and social vitality in public spaces.

Typically, these involved the delivery of (official government-led or grassroots community-driven) projects within S106 Agreements as part of planning obligations between local authorities and commercial developers and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) funds to assist new or improved infrastructure. I used archival and academic historical research to create site-specific permanent and temporary text-based interventions that identified and represented cultural and natural heritage sites within the built/urban or natural/rural environment.