About me

I am the Director & Curator of the Curatorial Research Centre which I founded in 2018 to support and modernise the profession of curating, particularly in relation to public collections. I am currently also Art Fund Headley Fellow at the Museum of Cornish Life where I am conducting critical provenance and institutional historical research. I am a Fellow of the Museums Association and a former member of its Ethics Committee and Decolonisation Guidance Working Group. In 2017-19 I trained as an accredited facilitator with the Association of Facilitators. I am Research Associate at Swansea University. In 2018 I completed a leadership fellowship supported by Arts Council England called Change Makers.

I am a material culture and collections specialist with a thirst for object-based research and an intense interest in historical and modern materials, construction, design and perception. Following my PhD (2009, University of Southampton) in the material culture of early medieval Southern Italy and the Mediterranean, including jewellery, textiles, dress, ecclesiastical treasuries and household objects , I developed a very keen interest in the history of metals, gems and jewellery. This was complemented by my personal interest in minerals and mineralogy and I have a small and wide-ranging collection, including gem specimens. Feeling like I needed a new challenge in 2021 I enrolled as a distance learning student for the Gemmological Association of Britain’s (Gem-A) Foundation in Gemmology course, which will later be followed by the Diploma.

I am re-launching this blog to focus on my gemmological research and studies. My curatorial and heritage archive will still be available to reference.

In my spare time I play Cornish, Celtic, English and medieval traditional music on the fiddle.

Read my publications on my Academia.edu page.