Rhona Sword is a freelance curator and writer based in Edinburgh, whose work is accompanied by experiences working within development, evaluation, and fundraising. This has allowed her to consider the relationship between curatorial practice, policy development and public funding, and the ways that these areas intersect with access and care. Across all aspects of her work, she aims to consider how we can collectively imagine the ways that care might become more deeply embedded in how we work with each other and our imagined publics. She has worked with a range of organisations including the Edinburgh Art Festival and Hidden Door, where she curated the Graduate Artist showcase in 2023.
In 2022 she was awarded the Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant as part of work to research the public reclaiming of libraries and archives, looking specifically at museums under the L’Internationale banner.
She completed her MScR by Research in Collections and Curating at the University of Edinburgh in 2023, where she was awarded the Baldwin Brown Dissertation Prize for her work ‘Space for everyone? Reimagining participation and inclusion in state-funded contemporary art institutions’ that interrogated the effects of the Arts Council England ‘Let’s Create’ strategy on institutional curating practices and our understanding of cultural value.
For her Emerging Curators Group research project, she spent time researching how narratives of care and labour might go beyond the artwork or exhibition, but instead can be represented and/or reflected in the methods of presentation and development and is currently developing a publication in response to this research. Along with 3 other members of the ECG, in November she took part in a Group Research Project to undertake a survey of the ground up cultural ecology of Leeds.
Rhona is the ECG Representative on the BAN Steering Group in 2023.
