Octagon Gallery taken from ucl.ac.uk
Alternative Title: I first realised I hated Nick when… I became the Exhibition Curator!
Over the next 6 months, I have a new role! I am now the Exhibition Curator of an awesome new space part of UCL Museums and Collections, the Octagon Gallery. In my head, my new title is Grand high priestess of Curatorial Temporary Exhibition Land. I’m on a major power trip. I have access to all the curatorial knowledge and all of the collections available at UCL. That is a lot of objects!
The theme of the exhibition is the vague ‘Frontiers’. I’ve narrowed that down to the stuff I’m interested in, and so it doesn’t stray too far away from my PhD Research… It’s going to focus on Digital and the impact that is having/had/will have on culture and society. However if you think every museum exhibition is about dinosaurs. Yes that’s what it’s about dinosaurs (and perhaps even dinosaurs in space).
I’m really excited to get started, it’s going to be a steep learning curve and a challenge to juggle my PhD write up, exhibition and all the other projects I’m working on.
I’m going to blog the entire process, so will be regularly posting the exhibition’s progress, experiences, successes and, critically, failures in trying to create an exhibition, which not only uses all digital interpretation,but focuses on digital content, and includes digital immersive visitor experiences. The challenge is on! On here, I’ll be talking about the personal experiences, the nitty gritty stuff, what i love, what I find impossible, what random object I want to steal…, on the UCLDH blog I’ll be talking in a bit more of a academic professional tone about the exhibition process and visitor experiences, and on the UCL Museums blog, I’ll probably be having arguments with curators. There have already been insults thrown and its only day 1… it’s all Nick Booth’s fault. You will also get to hear from other people involved in on the exhibition, from the collection specific curators, to the exhibition officer, to the conservators. So we’ve got every perspective covered!
First up on the to-do list is to create a massive list of objects! better get cracking.
Claire Bailey-Ross 
Congrats Clairey! That sounds like an awesome challenge. I look forward to reading about your adventures.
Thanks Suse, the excitement is starting to recede and now I have the overwhelming sense of ‘uh-oh’! It’s going to be tricky to be both curator and interpreter on this, but I have a brilliant bunch of curators to work with. If it ends up being an exhibition full of objects which I liked the look of rather than a coherent exhibition, I’m sure that will be no bad thing!