Twist by Dorothy Black

Today’s From the Art Collection has been selected by our new Museums Galleries Scotland intern, Colette Bush. She writes:

I started last week as the new MGS intern for Edinburgh University Museums, moving here the week before from Essex. I will be based both at the Centre for Research Collections, and Musical Instrument Museums Edinburgh at St. Cecilia’s Hall for the next year.

I studied English Literature at Aberystwyth University, which was a great experience. I enjoyed living in a new place and studying subjects that I found interesting. I am now looking forward to getting to know another new place, and the opportunities and challenges that I will face over the coming year.

The MGS internship programme appealed to me due to the many training and development sessions throughout the programme; I will be taking advantage of everything I can throughout this process. I was initially drawn to this internship because it was a collections based one. The collections care side of museum work has interested me since finding out more about it during a voluntary placement I had at The British Postal Museum & Archive.

I decided to apply for this specific internship over the others because of the prospect of working with two very different collections with very different needs. The work at St. Cecilia’s will give me the opportunity to discover musical instruments, a topic which is quite new to me, whilst also working at a museum as it prepares for a large renovation project will provide an incredibly valuable experience. Working with the art collections, I will gain knowledge of Scottish artists and art movements and how exhibitions and learning material are put together.

I began my first week by meeting many of the people that work at the CRC and have been finding out about what their roles entail. I have also taken a look at some of the collections the University holds and visited some of the museums and galleries.

On Thursday I attended the MGS conference in Glasgow. This was a good opportunity for me to meet lots of the other MGS interns and people who work within museums and galleries across Scotland. I enjoyed the conference, and was interested in hearing about different projects and strategies being run in Scotland to get people involved their local museums.

I have also been looking at some former ECA students’ prints in the collection and trying to identify the artists. I have then started to collect information on the artists, what they are doing now and started to create a fact-file on them. This has been an interesting challenge and introduced me to some new artists.

Of these prints, I have chosen Twist by Dorothy Black for From the Art Collection.

First published 16.9.2013