PREFIX: RE

Katie Bruce


Curator/Producer, Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K. 
Katie Bruce is the current Curator and Producer at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), based in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2002, she has focused on socially engaged practices, artist residencies, and public programming.  She holds an MA in Fine Art from the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art and an MA in Gallery Studies from the University of Essex. She was a member of the Engage Scotland Development Group and served on the Artistic Advisory Committee for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts (2007-12).

Re-Flecting


Katie’s Reading List









In December 2025, my class and I were lucky enough to attend an in-depth conversation with Katie Bruce in Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). I found myself thinking less about exhibitions and more about labour: the invisible negotiations that sustain cultural work, the emotional balancing act of collaborations, the question of how political practice survives inside institutions.

We learned about the journey of her practice and career, as well as the work they do within their current role as producer and curator at GoMA. I was struck by the political themes throughout her practice and the influence of collaboration and community throughout Katie’s curatorial decision-making. I was also interested in how such a practice functions within an institution like GoMA, which works within Glasgow Life. What stayed with me afterwards was not a singular statement or theory, but a tone, one grounded in care, curiosity, and collective responsibility.

My initial question was why she wished to be involved with this work, why did she want to take time out of her schedule (ever busy) to sit with me in a cafe for two hours and talk. I was struck by her answer.

"I am always quite interested in [...] being taken into conversations where I'm not quite sure of what it is."
I kept returning to this afterwards. The statement suggested a practice rooted not in certainty, but in openness. Conversation becomes a method of thinking. Reflection becomes collaborative rather than solitary. I recognised something within my own practice. I often seek dialogue not for answers, but for momentum, an "Injection of energy". The exchange itself becomes productive.

When discussing the evolution of their practice and imposter syndrome, Katie remarked:

"Like saying I'm a feminist curator now, I probably always was."
I was struck by the temporal complexity of this statement. Feminism is not presented as an identity suddenly adopted, nor as branding retroactively applied to practice. Instead, it emerges as recognition, a naming of values already embedded in the ways one moves through the world. The political exists before institutional validation.

This resonated with my own understanding of feminist practice as something lived before it is articulated. To "become" feminist often means recognising patterns of care, resistance, collaboration, and sensitivity that have always shaped our decisions. Katie reframed feminism not as a curatorial aesthetic, but as an ethics of relation. In this sense, feminist practice cannot be compartmentalised from daily life. It structures how you work with people, how you distribute attention, and how you hold space.

Feminist practices, or living a feminist life, are not something that suddenly appears, or that you associate with, but I believe is embedded throughout your life. Feminist practices here are not a "re-framing" but rather a realisation and legitimisation of what you have always done, naming your work, your politics, your ethics, not as something that can be compromised but something integral to your work and life.

Katie brought up the importance of support from your team when working within an organisation or institution. Bureaucratic systems can be impersonal and work with different bottom lines than those of an individual practitioner. It can be demoralising and unsupported; it can feel like "an upward battle." How do you navigate this if you're someone who is sensitive, or centres care within their work? There isn't an obvious resolution, but what I've seen time and time again throughout these conversations is the importance of community. Having people around you, both in your personal life and work life, who provide you with moments of softness in what can often be hard situations.

What interested me most was that she did not offer a resolution or a triumphant narrative about changing the institution from within. Instead, she returned continually to the community. Again and again, care appeared not as an abstraction, but as interpersonal survival. Katie reflects:


"These humans are being stretched in the same way. So I suppose it's thats the thing of it's like all the same time as being frustrated with the systeming."


Katie also spoke to the necessity of maintaining creative outlets outside of institutional structures and work-life.


"Holding spaces that are important to you in different organisations for all sorts of different reasons."

Later adding:


"I do have creative outlets [...] to make something that was quite sweet at the end sometimes [...] it was a different focus [...] you can go into a different flow state with something else."


I understood this immediately as a strategy of preservation. Institutional work often consumed emotional and intellectual energy without leaving space for experimentation or play. Katie’s description of creative practice as a "different slow state" suggested the importance of parallel practices that sustain the self beyond productivity metrics. It made me reflect on my own tendency to collapse identity entirely into work, to feel valuable only when producing.

Trust also becomes an important consideration throughout our time and other conversations within this project. Having trust in your team, your artists, audiences, etc. This trust has to be reciprocated; the people involved champion each other. In this way, the role of the curator is to be a "sponge", you're facilitating conversations between artist, institution, and audience, using your expertise and skill-set to mediate between people.

“It's about checking in with people, it's if they're asking for something you hadn't thought about before".

Trust, reciprocity, care, it's about listening and being open to learning new ways of access.

Discussing workshops organised through GoMA, Katie explained that she did not feel the need to supervise every moment simply because the institution was funding the activity. Instead, they trusted the artists and freelancers to lead the space independently. Monitoring is often mistaken for responsibility. Katie instead framed trust as a political choice, one that acknowledged the expertise and autonomy of collaborators.

This reciprocal model of working also extended toward audiences. Katie spoke extensively about accessibility, particularly around exhibition texts and interpretation. She described the importance of creating "tether points" for audiences unfamiliar with gallery language or contemporary art discourse. Clear text, large typography, accessible routes through exhibitions, consideration of neurodiversity and multilingual audiences, these are not secondary concerns, but integral curatorial decisions.

I kept thinking about the phrase "tether point." It implies grounding without restriction. Katie clarified that interpretation should not dictate meaning, but should instead allow audiences to feel comfortable enough to engage. This challenges the elitism often embedded within art institutions, where opacity is mistaken for intellectual rigour. Access, therefore, becomes relational rather than merely physical.

Equally important was her emphasis on front-of-house staff. Katie described how conversations between staff and visitors often become crucial moments of engagement. Staff members are not peripheral to the exhibition experience but active participants within it. The institution functions collectively. What became visible throughout our conversation was Katie's insistence on recognising the "dual nature" of workers, understanding that staff members may simultaneously be artists, educators, freelancers, or simply people trying to navigate employment within the city.

I found myself returning to one final reflection from Katie.


"The tough shit moments are where it's slightly unstable, where you're not quite sure."

There is something deeply honest in this acknowledgement of instability. Cultural work often demands confidence, decisiveness, and expertise. Yet Katie continually returned to uncertainty as a productive space. Joy, celebration, difficulty, exhaustion, and collaboration all coexist within practice. Care is not the removal of difficulty, but the willingness to remain present with it.

What I ultimately took from this conversation was not a model for institutional success, but a way of thinking about practice relationally. Katie's approach suggests that curating is less about control and more about stewardship: holding space, supporting people, facilitating trust, and remaining open to transformation through dialogue. Their practice reminded me that political work is not always visible in grand gestures. Sometimes it exists quietly in how one listens, collaborates, explains, or makes another person feel welcome within a space.

This conversation takes the shape of re-cognising what is already there; the conversation is less about becoming something and more about recognising and naming existing structures and methods for feeling and practice.












    I read a chapter of this recently and really resonated with some of the contexts around working with archives and methods of care for this.

    KEELY MCLAVIN
    PREFIX:RE