I am a historian of museum’s collecting and collections. My PhD research examines the circulation of global and colonial material culture, along with the histories of collecting and craft-practice pedagogy, to offer an original perspective on how collecting strategies were connected to educational practices and business interests in early twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on the Dryad ‘Handicrafts’ collection assembled by Harry Hardy Peach (1874–1936), the thesis investigates the mobilisation of the objects from various global and colonial contexts to Leicester and interprets the use of the collection as a dynamic entity with a ‘mobile life’ to foster craft-practice education. In so doing, the research places the history of the collection within the broader framework of imperial and global collecting practices. By foregrounding questions of circulation, it illuminates the collection’s linkages with different global and colonial contexts and explores how educational rationale contributed to the success of a local business, including its aspirations on craft-practice education.

The research seeks to generate substantial new research on collecting strategies and practices for the Dryad ‘Handicrafts’ collection: why and how the collector gathered specific objects? What is their provenance and manufacture? What do their past curation and display say about changing post-colonial environments and relationships? The project builds on and contribute to the dynamic field of global material culture history and histories of imperial collecting and display, by tracking a diverse and understudied collection through its hitherto unused set of archives.

Object and archival-based methodologies shed light on two major themes. The first draws attention to the key figures and events involved in the movement of the objects that entered the Dryad ‘Handicrafts’ collection. It reveals the extensive network of relationships of imperial and non-imperial ‘agents’, ranging from missionaries to colonial administrators, educators and dealers. These people facilitated the movement of everyday objects, such as basketry, woodwork, textiles and leatherwork from the world to Leicester, and contributed to the formation of the collection. The second reveals the Dryad ‘Handicrafts’ collection as a medium for practice-based education in its local context. Through circulation in informative temporary exhibitions and photographic reproductions for a craft-practice encyclopaedia, the collection held educational potential as a medium to de-centralise Western European craft education and to valorise ‘primitivism’. The use of a global collection for educational purposes questions the sharp division between the concepts of ‘indigenous’ and ‘traditional’ in design, fostering a process of ‘hybridisation’ of craft techniques and motifs that resulted from encounters ‘in-between’ dominant and dominated cultures. 

As part of my research, I have curated the exhibition “Dryad Basketry: A Global Collection”. The aim is to give new light and life to the baskets and basketry, which are kept in storage, emphasising aspects related to the global and imperial contexts in local collecting.