Category Archives: internships

English student Kate Debling updates us on her internship experience with the Exeter University Heritage and Culture Team

Leave a reply

During the summer of 2020, I undertook a virtual internship with the University of Exeter Heritage and Culture Team as part of the Pathways internship programme. Five months on, I am delighted to be continuing my experience with the department, now interning as a Heritage Innovation Communications Assistant.

My summer experience as a digital content creator for the Exeter Heritage website was extremely rewarding, as it equally enabled me to improve upon my existing skills and learn new ones. In creating news and blog content, I was able to implement editing skills that are intrinsic to my degree in English, while at the same time, I could experiment with new forms of writing. Through collating and adapting information and research pertaining to heritage-based academic research and projects, I considerably expanded my knowledge of the heritage sector in the South West, as well as my awareness of the University’s broad level of collaboration with other heritage and academic institutions. This initial work has provided me with significant basis for my current work, in an expanded new role.

In continuing my internship experience, I am looking forward to being more involved with the Heritage and Culture team, in supporting the Heritage Innovation website and its social media platforms. This year, in particular, there have been numerous new projects that have adapted heritage practice to digitally accommodate the constraints of the pandemic – for example, the aerial reconnaissance project co-lead by Exeter academic Ioana Oltean, that utilised drone technology to photograph previously unknown archaeological sites. I am especially looking forward to researching these new projects and am keen to investigate and present the ways in which academics and heritage institutions in the South West have continued their work during this time. Through the Exeter Heritage website and Twitter platform, I will be able to make both students and wider readers aware of this work.

In supporting the Culture Team, I am looking forward to connecting with other arts across the University. My first priority is to build the connectivity between internal departments and students through the website, in which news and blog items can be posted and made accessible to all departments and students. As a site of interest, the website and Twitter can expose students to research projects within their degree and outside of it and, in emphasising the university’s broad heritage network, students will be more able to seek out heritage and culture opportunities, as well as connect with academics about their research. Building on this internal connectivity, I also intend to improve the visibility of the University’s connections with external partners, featuring updates and news from heritage organisations such as the South West Heritage Trust and the National Trust. In using social media in conjunction with the website, sharing information can be more regular and quicker, and will improve interconnectivity through attached links to articles or sites of further interest.

In the new year, I am looking forward to continuing my work with my summer colleague, Frank Allen, and our collaboration in discovering new projects and publishing them on the Heritage website. In working alongside my degree, in my final year of study, I am keen to further improve my time-management skills, balancing my academic work alongside my work as part of the team. In working virtually, I aim to build upon digital skills which are becoming increasingly important as industries become more digitised.

I hope to gain even more skills than I did during the summer and am very excited for the work to come.

Heritage Internship #3: a student’s perspective

Leave a reply

In the third blog about the Heritage Internships we hosted over the summer, Archaeology undergraduate Ellie Speechly reflects on her experience…

Going into 2020, I was fortunate to have been involved with the University of Exeter’s Professional pathways scheme, an internship programme designed to give students an authentic workplace experience, along with specialist training in a field of their choosing.

As an archaeology undergrad, I was over the moon to have been accepted and was waiting with anticipation for a heritage-related placement! But much like the rest of the world, all these plans were put on hold thanks to the covid-19 pandemic. Thanks to the efforts of the PPS team and the wonderful collaborating organisations, remote working positions were arranged so no-one missed out on gaining from this worthwhile and professionally enriching experience. I was privileged to have been offered a role at the University itself with the Heritage Innovation department, a team that ensures the University has an extensive pool of partnerships and collaboration networks, operating on an international scale.

I gained infallible insight into the networking skills required within the heritage sector, in addition to learning how many large-scale organisations such as the National Trust operate. Myself and a fellow student were entrusted to assist in researching and constructing a compressive report, containing all ongoing and completed partnerships, operations of memorandum and projects that the Humanities department were/are undertaking, in addition to the staff involved. This will later become a digital tool for students, staff and external parties to consult in order to better understand the vast number of projects the University has had a hand in. I was particularly proud of the sheer quantity of information my colleague and I managed to read and research; it was all so interesting and engaging that I could easily have spent days at a time reading about a single project, such as those ongoing with Powderham Castle or the fascinating upcoming project on Vivien Leigh being untaken by the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. The internship proved to be great practice in contacting those within the heritage field, in attention to building relationships with those in the sector that has proven valuable as a new graduate, particularly in these difficult times! Although it wasn’t what I was expecting, my internship was a wonderful experience as it provided me with realistic skills needed in the heritage sector today, such as effective communication and research through more innovative means. I’m now fortunate enough to be involved with the SS Great Britain as a direct thanks to my wonderful employers, who have continued to support, mentor and provide invaluable insight and advice into the world of work.

Though working remotely had its set-backs, with interaction being limited to the video chatting format, with which we are all so familiar with now, I couldn’t have asked for better employers or co-workers. I cannot express in words how unbelievably enriching both personally and professionally this internship has proven to be and I would highly recommend to anyone to apply and give it your best shot.

Good luck and all the best in all your upcoming endeavours!

What Stays and What Goes? ‘Curated Decay’ and Heritage in a Post-Covid World

Leave a reply

In her 2017 book Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving ‘(University of Minnesota Press)’, Professor Caitlin DeSilvey argues for a new approach to heritage conservation. Find out how her argument may have a strong influence in a post-COVID world…

In the wake of a global pandemic and recession, how will we preserve and maintain our country’s heritage? Caitlin DeSilvey may have an answer. In her book, Curated Decay, she proposes that we need to embrace nature in some cases, and allow it to take its course. Some may argue that rather than spending thousands of pounds on heritage upkeep in a time when money is scarce and climate change is inevitable, it may be appropriate to manage the decay of certain sites instead of preserving them. On the surface, Professor DeSilvey’s approach presents an attractive option in a time of recession.

However, Curated Decay and its argument goes much deeper than this. The book is not just concerned with managing the decay of our heritage, but with the ethics behind allowing this transformation to happen. In a conversation with Professor DeSilvey which I was lucky to have, she stressed that the material ‘letting go’ element of the book is often over-emphasised. Embracing the approach in Curated Decay, DeSilvey mentioned, does not mean freely abandoning our material heritage to save costs. In fact, significant investment is required, both in money and in time, if we are to allow heritage assets to transform gradually while carrying out ongoing monitoring and interpretation of the process. We should be cautious, then, in how firmly we stress the decay of heritage as a material approach alone.

What is worth much more weight, particularly in a world altered by COVID-19, is the debate surrounding our attachment to heritage and the ethics behind loss. In a podcast conversation between Professor DeSilvey and Dr Peter Ekman of Berkeley University, they specifically discuss the third chapter of Curated Decay, which is devoted to managing heritage at Mullion Harbour in Cornwall. DeSilvey noted how the chapter was an internal ‘argument with herself’, trying to understand how the harbour’s history could be used to support both its preservation and its natural decay. According to DeSilvey, Mullion Harbour revealed the tensions and difficulties in facing up to loss and change within heritage. In this regard, this tension is relevant now more than ever. In a world where the prospect of economic, personal, and cultural loss is becoming increasingly common, it is time to evaluate the attachments we hold to our heritage as well.

Loss is never a comfortable subject according to Tanya Venture, who is currently working on her PhD with Professor DeSilvey, Dr Bryony Onciul and Dr Hannah Fluck at Historic England. In a recent blog post, Venture stresses the devastating impact COVID-19 will have on British heritage. We should accept this loss and transformation, she argues, so we can change our relationships with heritage. Tanya Venture provides a crucial argument for rethinking heritage management in our current times.

Perhaps, though, we are already changing these relationships on a large scale. As we see statues of slave traders and colonialists being toppled, Britons are being forced to re-evaluate their relationship with their history, land, and heritage by extension. Added to the discussion about allowing material transformation in the wake of a recession is the evaluation of what heritage represents to us. Curated Decay’s prescient argument about allowing for this loss must be considered now more than ever as our public actively engages in a discussion about the fate of its heritage.

By Frank Allen

Visiting Cornwall’s Museums the Green Way

Leave a reply

Through the Professional Pathways programme at the University of Exeter, intern Nick Collins spent a week in June with Cornwall Museums Partnership…

For many people, working in a museum might sound like a dream job. I was one of those people (and indeed I still am), but in June I was lucky enough to find the only job that is even better – working across several museums, for the wonderful Cornwall Museums Partnership (CMP). My name is Nick Collins and I was with CMP for an all-too-brief secondment from the University of Exeter as part of their Professional Pathways programme. I visited museums and galleries across the county, and below I’m going to share my thoughts on the amazing exhibitions they were running. There’s another theme I’d also like to share. I’ve been trying to show how we can be greener in our museum visits, and help to reduce congestion on Cornwall’s roads, which were as busy as ever this summer. I travelled to all of these exhibitions using nothing more than public transport and my trusty steed (a bicycle, not a horse). But more on that in a moment…

On Monday, I started at Penlee House to see Munnings in Cornwall, an exhibition taking regulars there from the familiar territory of the early Newlyn School into the perhaps less familiar territory of the later Newlyn School, whilst also introducing new visitors to the beauty and humanity of this school of painting. It is that humanity which really shone through in this exhibition – perhaps ironically, given that its principle subject, Alfred Munnings, is best-known for painting horses. But, whatever the paintings show, we have to remember that it was people who made them, and this exhibition told those people’s stories with touching sensitivity. Often, the glimpses we get of artists’ lives are startlingly intimate. Munnings’ painting coat, palette and brushes were there, as were examples of his letters and sketchbooks and his beautiful poem to Jessica Heath. Harold Knight’s portrait of Munnings dominated the entrance to the exhibition, portraying only a few hints of the alleged tension between the two. It is one of three portraits of Munnings, another being a self-deprecating, caricatured self-portrait. Munnings’ contemporaries dominated the next two rooms, with Harold and Laura Knight, Samuel John “Lamorna” Birch, Frank Gascoigne Heath and Charles W. Simpson particularly prominent. They gave us a wonderful insight into the world of the Newlyn School’s less-famous later stages.

Come Tuesday, we made the longest trip of the week, all the way up to Bodmin (yes, by public transport!) to Cornwall’s Regimental Museum. Music was a great morale raiser; the army has known it for centuries – a story told with great insight and originality by CRM’s Citizen Curators, in their exhibition Music, Morale and the Military. There were some fantastic objects, including the D Day dodgers’ banjo, carried by soldiers in Italy in the Second World War in ironic reference to the derogatory nickname forced on them; and a Light Infantry Drum, which tied in very well to the rest of the museum and the superb videos which allowed former members of that regiment to tell its story in their own words. The real highlights, though, were the playable 1920s piano and the new recording of the DCLI Boys Marching Song (a local song probably not heard in almost 100 years), both of which made the exhibition a fantastic place to stay for a while and enjoy the atmosphere. The exhibition was created by the Citizen Curators, a group of five volunteers who put it together over a period of several months. The programme will be running again with new volunteers from October 2019 to April 2020 across several museums in Cornwall. Have a look at this blog post for much more information on that.

The spirit of community curation was alive and well in Falmouth Art Gallery’s exhibition Stuff and Nonsense, which I saw on the Wednesday. There were several pieces of community-curated art, plus the chance for every single person who walked through the door to contribute, with visitors being asked to upload photos of their own “shrines” in response to those created for the exhibition, and also to leave their own found objects alongside those in the exhibition.

The Nonsense half of this exhibition was brilliantly uplifting, featuring illustrations from Quentin Blake, Tony Ross and Edward Lear. There was even a woodblock used in the illustration of Alice in Wonderland, alongside Lewis Carrol’s diary, a real highlight. Several fantastic automata also found their way into the exhibition. The library, housed in the same building, featured more, including an enormous example based on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books.

Uplifting Nonsense

To return to the transport theme, Thursday presented an unusual challenge. Many people would see Portcurno Telegraph Museum as inaccessible by public transport, but there is in fact a bus which stops right outside it. Admittedly, the unusual challenge I mentioned was the fact that said bus broke down in St Buryan on the return journey, but I’m sure that doesn’t happen often… If the owner of St Buryan Caterers, who very kindly gave me a lift back to Penzance, is reading, thanks once again!

The escape stairs from the Second World War bunker at Porthcurno Telegraph Museum

The Telegraph Museum itself is today perhaps more relevant than it’s ever been – as we live through our own communications revolution, it becomes ever more important to understand previous ones. At Porthcurno that story is told not only in terms of the technology (which is covered superbly through working objects and demonstrations) but the people who used and made it, whose lives are shown through their photos and possessions. The highlight is the spectacular Second World War bunker, filled with hundreds of artefacts, many of which are still working. The photo here is the escape stairs, a tunnel leading from the bunker all the way to the surface and beautiful views of the valley.

I finished the week at Royal Cornwall Museum for their exhibition Eye to the Skyexhibition, which told the story of John Couch Adams, who predicted the discovery of Neptune, through Manga. It is an incredible story, and a highly innovative way of telling it. The Manga sat alongside more traditional museum objects, including a large celestial globe and the astonishingly-restored portrait of Adams, which has been transformed from quite literally having a hole in the unfortunate astronomer’s forehead to as good as new. Bringing both of these approaches together created something far better than either style could have achieved alone.

So what did I learn during my week? A lot. More than I can really say. I’ve been lucky enough to work in museums before and if this experience has been an exception it’s because it’s been even better than those other times. Museums tell us stories, entertain us and make us think, but never has it been clearer to me that they can also change lives. From the Citizen Curators who put on such wonderful exhibitions, some of whom have gone on to continued involvement in the heritage sector, to the home-educated children who I saw taking part in a workshop in Falmouth, I have come to understand that museums are about more than probably most people realise. They harness history and the arts as a positive force for the present, and it has been an honour to see how much difference that can make.

I would like to thank the University of Exeter for their part in organising this placement and for the stimulating and enlightening training I took part in. Most of all, I can’t thank the people at CMP and all of the museums in the partnership enough. I hope to see you all again sometime.