Hi! I’m Ruth and I will be an intern at the Glasgow Women’s Library for the next 4 months.
I hail from the Netherlands, and am now in my fourth and final year at Amsterdam University of the Arts, where I study Cultural Heritage. During these past few years I’ve learned about art history, cultural history, heritage theories, preventive conservation for collections, education in museums, management, creating exhibitions and so on. Last year I did a minor programme that focused on subjects like the public, inequality, diversity, participation and education, and as a result I grew even more aware that these are the subjects that I am most interested in in the world of museums.
So when I was looking for an internship and stumbled upon Glasgow Women’s Library, I immediately applied. You can imagine I was so very excited when they agreed to take me on!
Here at GWL I will be doing work for the Decoding Inequality project, but also for the National Lifelong Learning programme.
Decoding Inequality is going to be an exhibition at GWL and, adding to that, there’s a wish to create a ‘Feminist Interpretation Strategy’, which I get to do research for! Because objects can often be approached from a lot of different angles, it’s very interesting to consider how objects can be interpreted differently. Choosing an angle of course has everything to do with the story you want to tell, so to have a specific ‘Feminist Interpretation Strategy’ for GWL can be very useful.
For the National Lifelong Learning Programme I am going to do different things. I’ve already had the very exciting task of gathering all the materials for the Firebrand Women exhibition, which is about women who created change in the last 100 years by challenging the politics of their time. Rummaging through the archive and museum collection I got to pick out pins, old suffragette postcards, a pussyhat, zines and lots of other cool objects. I also got to help install the exhibition which was a lot of fun – and it came out nicely, if I say so myself! Not to mention I got to handle signed Guerrilla Girls posters!
I’m looking forward to more exciting opportunities over the next few months!
Ruth
