It is a huge pleasure to work alongside Principle Investigator Rebecca Arnold, and the international academics and practitioners involved in our Fashion Interpretations Network, and to have the opportunity to weave together conversations that many of us have been having separately. I am very much looking forward to meeting many of the contributors in May.

The medium associated with my practice is installation: exhibiting historic dress and fashion in both gallery and museum settings. A recent commission by art historian and curator Roman Kurzmeyer for his extraordinary ongoing series of events at Amden, on the side of a Swiss mountain, allowed this process to be extended further into a different kind of installation – creating props for an exhibition environment without objects.

The AHRC Networking Project will allow me to reflect upon this process and the conceptual value of the prop in exhibition-making: the object’s impact when experienced in the round as is always done with dress can question the notion of the frame, and the discreet categories of object and context. I will concentrate on my case study of late 18th and early 19th century studies of mythological ‘attributes’ collected and illustrated for teaching children and their uses for new ideas about contemporary exhibition-making.