Jenny Brownrigg
Exhibition Director, The Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
Her enduring research question is: How can curatorial methodology and exhibition making bring understanding to the overlooked practices of 20th Century women photographers, filmmakers and artists in Scotland: Exhibitions include: ‘Bet low: An island on your doorstep’, (Reid Gallery, GSA / Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, co-curated with Andrew Parkinso, 2025); Sandra George, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (2024, 5 Florence Street Glasgow); the survey exhibition ‘Glean: early 20th century women filmmakers and photographers in Scotland (City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 2022/23); ‘Early Eardley: Selected works 1940-1950’ (Reid Gallery, GSA, 2023, co-curated with Professor Susannah Thompson); and Franki Raffles: Observing Women at Work’ (2017, Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art).
From 2002-9 she was curator at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee. Other previous posts have included: Project Officer at Grizedale Arts, Cumbria (2000-2); and Gallery Co-ordinator at Changing Room Gallery, Stirling, Scotland (1998-9). She graduated with a BA (hons) in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art (1990-4) and an MFA at DJCAD (1996).
Re-Flecting
Jenny’s Reading List
I wanted to speak with Jenny specifically about the relationship between curatorial practice and educational infrastructure. What does it mean to curate within a higher education institution? How can curatorial work create conditions for others rather than simply produce exhibitions? And how might this invisible labour, administration, access, support, adjustments, and listening become part of curatorial methodology itself?
Throughout our conversation, Jenny repeatedly returned to the idea that curating is not solely about producing exhibitions, but about creating conditions for others to develop their practice. Reflecting on her role within GSA, she explained:
“It’s about supporting people to take the next step in their practice, whether you’re a student or a staff member or an emerging or somebody that’s been an artist or a designer or an architect for years. You’re supporting people to take the next step in their practice. And that’s been really important as an ethos for me in how I work as a curator.”
What becomes increasingly apparent through the conversation is that Jenny understands curating as something far wider than the gallery itself. Rather than position the exhibition as the singular outcome of curatorial labour, she describes an interest in “the invisible sort of parts of the structure that people wouldn’t see if they were coming to the gallery.” In this sense, curatorial practice becomes infrastructural: concerned not only with what is visible to the audience, but with the systems, conversations, and forms of support that make participation possible in the first place.
This becomes especially clear when Jenny referred to access and institutional care. Discussing working processes developed through MOTHER CURATOR [1], she described how artists and participants are asked about their access requirements from the beginning of the project:
“We’ve got a form which asks, you know, what do you need? What's the way you like information? [...] and for some students, that’s the first time they might have encountered the fact that they could ask for something.”
The significance of this statement struck me. The exhibition, here, begins long before installation or public presentation. It begins by asking someone what they need to participate. Jenny positioned these moments of recognition and support as equally important to the material outcomes of the exhibitions themselves:
“If they’re having a lightbulb moment about their experience of making work for a public situation and that they feel supported in that, that’s just as important as the material output.”
Within this framework, curating becomes relational and pedagogical. The work is not only the exhibition, but the conditions created around it: emotional support, accessibility, communication, and institutional hospitality. Re as methodology emerges here through attentiveness and responsiveness, a recursive process of listening, adapting, and restructuring conditions around the needs of others.
Jenny also spoke extensively about the specificity of curating within higher education institutions. For her, educational environments offer a distinct context because they hold multiple overlapping responsibilities: to students, staff, audiences, research, and institutional strategy simultaneously.
“I’ve really enjoyed my work within higher education because the coordinates of that are like, you’ve got the educational community, like the students and the staff, but also you’ve got the public. It’s an outward-facing part of the institution.”
Curating within these structures requires negotiation between institutional frameworks and creative practice. Jenny described how programming often emerges through identifying absences within institutional and cultural structures:
“The ideas come about through thinking about what isn’t there [...] what’s the gap?”
This thinking led to the development of the Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship, which Jenny described as a response to the lack of sustained opportunities available for emerging curators in Scotland. Rather than simply creating a training scheme, the fellowship was designed as a paid opportunity allowing curators to realise a public exhibition project of their own.
“The only way you can change institutional structures is through supporting a next generation through real opportunities.”
What interested me here was the scale at which Jenny understands curatorial work to operate. The fellowship is not only an exhibition project, but an attempt to reshape institutional conditions and future possibilities. Curating becomes policy-adjacent: a way of redistributing access, resources, and visibility.
Alongside institutional programming, Jenny discussed her long-term archival research into early twentieth-century women photographers and filmmakers in Scotland. What began as a chance encounter with photographs in a ferry waiting room gradually evolved into years of voluntary archival work, research, and eventually the exhibition Glean: Early twentieth century women filmmakers and photographers in Scotland (City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 2022/23). Recounting this process, Jenny described seeing photographs of Margaret Fay Shaw and thinking:
“Who did those photographs? I’d never heard of her.”
This moment of curiosity became the beginning of an expansive feminist curatorial project. Jenny’s description of this process felt deeply connected to autotheoretical modes of research knowledge emerging through personal encounter, intuition, and sustained curiosity: She explained:
“That’s the freedom in having a curatorial mindset in a way, this is an interest, how can I formalise that?”
What emerges through this approach is a form of curatorial methodology grounded in attention and persistence. Research develops not through detached objectivity, but through following encounters, questions, and absences over time.
Toward the end of our conversation, Jenny reflected on the realities of curatorial practice itself: funding limitations, institutional constraints, collaboration, and adaptation. She described curating as fundamentally iterative:
“The wheels come off at one point and then you have to restick them on.”
Importantly, she resisted framing this process negatively. Although she acknowledged the language of “compromise”, she suggested that curatorial projects evolve precisely through negotiation and responsiveness:
“If your idea remained as the idea in your head [...] it’s still in your head.”
I found this particularly resonant in relation to Re as methodology. Curatorial work here is not linear or fixed, but recursive and adapting. Ideas shift through conversation, institutional realities, collaboration, and material conditions. Rather than weakening projects, these adjustments often expand them beyond their original form.
Throughout the conversation, Jenny repeatedly returned to the importance of implicit forms of curatorial intervention. Speaking about technicians, students, and institutional hierarchies, she reflected:
“Curating can be implicity as well as explicit.”
This statement stayed with me after our conversation ended. Much of the work Jenny described does not necessarily announce itself in exhibitions, yet fundamentally shapes how exhibitions are experienced and produced. Care, support, access, listening, and infrastructural labour operate quietly within curatorial practice, often remaining invisible to audiences.
Leaving the Snug space, I found myself thinking differently about curating altogether. Rather than understanding curatorial practice as the organisation of objects within a gallery, Jenny’s reflections positioned it as the construction of conditions: conditions of learning, for participation, for experimentation, and for future possibilities. In this sense, Re as curatorial methodology becomes less about resolution or outcome, and more about an ongoing process of adjustment, attentiveness, and relational care. The things before the gallery that nevertheless hold it together.
NOTES:
[1] Mother Curator, curated by 4th year Fine Art student Emma Scarlett, 10th-31st January 2026 in Reid Gallery, GSA. This project was selected from a GSA Staff and Student Open Call.
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'Selected Maria Lind writing' (2010, Sternberg Press), Edited by Brian Kuan Wood
Selections and responses by Beatrice von Bismarck, Ana Paula Cohen, Liam Gillick, Brian Kuan Wood, Tirdad Zolghadr
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'The Other Observers: Women Photographers in Britain 1900 to the present', Val Williams (1992, Virago Press)
- 'Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s-90s Britain (editor Joy Gregory, Associate Editor Taous R Dahmani. Co-published by Mack books and Autograph, 2024)
- ' Attending, listening, taking time: the quietly radical ethical filmmaking practice of the filmmaker Jenny Gilbertson', Dr Shona Main, PhD thesis (2023)