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Lara Goodband

Lara Goodband is a research-active curator working at the intersection between contemporary art curation and museum collections. She has over 25 years’ experience as an art curator in galleries, museums and unusual places and spaces.

Her curatorial practice begins with concepts drawn from museum collections and the contemporary cultural narratives that intersect with them. She is currently Contemporary Art Curator and Programmer at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM) in Exeter, a position funded by Arts Council England. In 2023 she curated Earth Spells: Witches of the Anthropocene which focused on the contemporary re-appropriation of the figure of the witch as both wise woman and Anthropocene activist weaving spells between the human and more-than-human. Lara selected Elizabeth Webb’s, The White Witch of Dartmoor’s, cauldron from the social history collection and presented this to the artists Emma Hart, Grace Ndiritu, Florence Peake, and Lucy Stein, which was the starting point for making their new work. The exhibition was a critical and popular success, which many positive reviews including in The Guardian newspaper.

Earth Spells continues a curatorial practice that focuses on themes of the interconnected climate crisis and historic colonialism. She co-curated the exhibition Offshore: Artists Explore the Sea for Hull City of Culture in 2017; commissioned Michelle Williams Gamaker’s film The Silver Wave inspired by RAMM’s Arctic collections and curated Joy Gregory’s The Sweetest Thing inspired by RAMM’s Combesatchfield textile and Exeter’s sugar trade. In 2019 she curated Sea Garden, which included Bryony Gillard’s new film made in response to RAMM’s nineteenth-century seaweed collections in dialogue with work by Dorothy Cross and Lucy Skaer, amongst other artists.

Most recently, Lara curated Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape at RAMM which has received many positive reviews, including in Studio International Magazine and Resurgence and Ecologist Magazine.

Lara Goodband is a Trustee for the Bernard Leach (St Ives) Trust and on the board of Richard Chapelle Dance CIC. Lara studied English Literature/History of Art at the University of York before taking a diploma in Fine Art and then an MA in History of Art at the University of Manchester. She is a Research Associate at the University of Exeter, an Associate of the Museums Association (AMA) and is now working towards her Fellow of the Museums Association (FMA).

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