Fiona is Professor of Museology in the History of Art department at Birkbeck, University of London. She did her PhD at Keele University between 1993 and 1998; it was called “Artwork and the boundaries of academia”. Fiona’s was one of the first art practice as research (or theory/practice) doctorates in the UK and she admits to finding the whole process a very difficult experience because of this. Her grounding was a degree in fine art from Leeds where social and feminist history informed her studies, a Masters in critical theory at Sussex, and years of working in Tate Liverpool organising educational art programmes.
Fiona regards all aspects of research as practice, from reading to fieldwork, and from analysis to writing-up. Her latest small museums investigation is a case in point, and she describes driving around the country in a camper van, dropping in for conversations with museum owners/curators, the re-iterative nature of classification modelling, and developing a database through working with computer scientists.
Links:
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8005280/fiona-candlin
https://museweb.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/browseproperties
Plus, Fiona's video of the final days of the Bakelite Museum in Somerset in 2018 can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/375988349