1. Identify your key responsibilities and list the main areas of work you have been involved in. Briefly highlight the skills and competencies that are relevant to this project/work area.

Throughout the Guided Research Project, some of my main responsibilities have been:

• Assist in managing the Outreach and Engagement element of the project. In the second semester of the project I was heavily involved in helping to run Art in Mind Week, a week-long events programme dedicated to the links between art and mindfulness that coincided with the time of our exhibition launch.
• Co-ordinating a mindful creative writing workshop with Lothian Health Services Archive. To do this successfully, I had to use my skills in teamwork, event planning and time management to work with Archivist Louise Williams and Community Outreach Officer Laura Beattie to decide on the best collection to focus on for the workshop; in the end, we chose the Royal Infirmary Hospital collection due to the fact that this is not as well utilised as other LHSA collections despite being the largest, and because of its close historical ties to the university. Additionally, I assisted Louise and Laura in figuring out a time and venue for the workshop to be held, as well as ensuring the workshop itself was a safe space by sharing my creative work and chatting to the other attendees where appropriate.
• Delivering our Wellbeing Stations. These were interactive stands with wellbeing worksheets, CRC colouring in books, art supplies and an interactive comments board for visitors of the Potterow and 40 George Square cafes to interact with during their lunch or study breaks. To ensure that we had the permission to host these stations in the café spaces, I had to liaise with representatives from the University’s Estates Team and the Students’ Association to discuss which of their venues would be most appropriate to host these stations in, along with budgeting the cost of the printing of the worksheets and the art supplies. I was also involved in designing posters for the Wellbeing Stations, including creating QR codes to promote traffic to our online exhibition.

2. Looking ahead, list your key objectives for the GRP. 3-7 SMART  (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timed) objectives should be noted with realistic timescales and focused outcomes. The objectives should cover the project itself and your own role.

The main objectives for the project were:

• Create a list of selected artworks for our co-curators to choose from. Our most important task, as the artworks the co-curators selected made up the basis of our exhibition. We put together a list of around sixty artworks to send to experts in November, who narrowed this down to a list of twenty (by February) for our co-curators to choose from.
• Recruit and meet with our co-curators. A call for student applications was published on social media in November, while we recruited staff members between December and January. Based on the responses, we picked the nine people we thought would bring diverse experiences and backgrounds. We then met with each of our co-curators to ask them to choose their favourite artwork and fill out a questionnaire explaining what they liked about the piece in early February.
• Produce recordings of the co-curators carrying out a mindfulness exercise. This took place in late February/early March.
• Design and launch the exhibition. We wrote the interpretation materials for the exhibition immediately following the final recording session in early March and launched the first four pages of our digital exhibition on March 21st, before uploading the final fifth page the following week on the 28^th.

Some of my individual objectives were:

• Organise the Creative Writing Workshop with Lothian Health Services Archive. I contacted LHSA in January, and together my colleague Hailee and I worked with LHSA to outline the structure of the workshop, coordinate a venue, and advertise the event on social media before it took place on April 1^st.
• Co-ordinate and install the Wellbeing Stations. I contacted representatives from the University’s Estates Division and Students’ Association asking for permission to install Wellbeing Stations in late February, before deciding upon two café venues (Potterow and 40 George Square) in mid-March. Installation of the Wellbeing Stations then took place at the beginning of Art in Mind Week on March 28^th and were taken down at the end of the week/April 1st.

3. Discursive Self-Reflection. Use this section to, 1) Reflect upon the outcome of the project (both as a whole and with regards to your own specific area/role). 2) Critically reflect upon your experience working with the group. Here you may consider your contribution, the value of your specific strengths and expertise, the effectiveness of group communications and your performance in group meetings.  Looking back, how might the group enhance its performance?

Overall, this has been a fascinating project that has been an exciting step in a new direction for the University’s Centre for Research Collections. Initially, I was worried about having a small team for such a large project, as well as the exhibition brief being centred around the Art Collection when my background is centred around historical objects and archival materials. However, this was actually a strength to our project as we have a diverse range of backgrounds. This created an interesting take on how to approach the topic of health and healthcare in an art exhibition in a way that I would not have adopted if I did this project alone. I believe I have made a positive contribution to the group due to my experience working in access, outreach and engagement roles. I am particularly passionate about using my position as curator to facilitate knowledge and amplify voices of communities typically underrepresented in the cultural sector. This is why I was especially interested in utilising a co-curatorial model and seeking out the perspectives of the wider university community, not just the more visible academic groups.

I had a part to play in all areas of the project. For example, along with being involved in managing the outreach and events element of the project as outlined above, I assisted in liaising with our co-curators and acting as a point of contact during recording sessions. While having involvement in many areas of the project was a very meaningful learning experience for me, it also makes it quite difficult to pin down my specific role in the project and fully reflect on my individual successes. Were I to undertake a similar project in the future, I would recommend that each group member were assigned formal role titles. We were loosely tied to specific areas of the project (for example, Frankie was mainly responsible for exhibition design) but I think formalised roles would have assisted in firmly defining the individual responsibilities of each person, as well as avoiding the possibility that one person takes on too much responsibility. While care would need to be taken to avoid a hierarchal system – especially for co-curatorial/grassroots projects, areas of heritage work that I am particularly interested in pursuing in future – I think that more defined roles would allow for more reflection on our progress and by extension more personal/professional development.

We were initially very good at managing our timelines effectively, using collaborative platforms like Miro, but this began to trail-off later in the project as other commitments arose. This meant that we often did not communicate our progress on areas of the project as effectively, nor did we fully hold each other accountable for missing deadlines on tasks. Ideally, we would have continued to update each other on platforms like Miro, maintaining communication and updating each other on developments of areas of the project through more regular meetings. However, we were still able to achieve a large proportion of the things that we set out to do, which is a significant achievement considering our novel approach. My colleagues and I had a very positive working relationship and it was a pleasure to work alongside them.

Component 1.2: Self Appraisal / Guided Research Placement by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0