Panel Collective
Curatorial arts organisation led by Catriona Duffy and Lucy McEachan, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K. Since 2010, Panel has delivered a programme of commissions, exhibitions, publishing and advocacy, presented in collaboration with a range of partners locally and nationally. Our programme is founded on extensive research, focused on re-interpreting Scotland’s local histories, archives and places. It depends upon pioneering and inventive connections, forged with designers, makers, artists, venues and organisations across Scotland and beyond.
Through our work, we create opportunities for people to engage with contemporary design and craft practice, increasing the visibility of Scotland’s design and craft sector to local and international audiences.
www.wearepanel.co.uk
@panel_glasgow
www.makemanifesto.com
@makemanifesto
Q&A
Re-Flecting
Catriona Duffy and Lucy McEachan met in Glasgow during the late ‘90s, having moved to the city from Edinburgh to study History of art at University of Glasgow (Catriona) and Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art (Lucy). After graduating, we both went on to work at The Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City (The Lighthouse Trust), which was established in 1999 as a legacy of Glasgow UK City of Architecture and Design.
We established Panel in 2010 in response to the closure of The Lighthouse Trust in 2009 following the global financial crash of 2008 and our resulting redundancies from The Lighthouse programming team.
With a joint desire– and at a pivotal moment in our careers– we made the decision to pioneer an independent model for curating design and craft in Scotland that could be artist-focused, not with institutional or national remit, but with a distinct and experimental curatorial voice delivered on its own terms.
2. What is the ethos of Panel and how has this evolved over time?
Since 2010, Panel has delivered a programme of exhibitions, publishing and advocacy, presented in collaboration with a range of partners locally and nationally. At the heart of what we do is the desire to explore the boundaries of curating design and craft in a cultural context, working closely with our partners to develop strategies and conditions for the production and presentation of exciting new work.
Panel’s activity is defined by our core values:
We aim to be inclusive: We are welcoming to all. We are committed to equity of access, fair work, environmental sustainability and social justice.
We aim to be innovative: We recognise and build capacity in others and challenge the sector to be bold and ambitious.
We aim to connect: We make connections across artforms and communities and facilitate new partnerships.
We are keen to nurture an organisation and a programme that asserts radical thinking – through how we work, who we work with and who we engage. We want to challenge varying ideas about what opportunity of equality means, and to acknowledge and celebrate diversity through our programme. By facilitating the expression of multiple voices across venues, spaces, organisations and regions, we aim to lay ground for new conditions through which to make and see work with design and making as its focus. Collaboration, partnership- and co-production- is central to our operating model and our programme has evolved organically through conversation and connections and in response to our very particular context and position.
3. This project revolved around community, feminism, decolonialism, queerness, and cripness. What role do these themes play within Panel? How has their influence evolved?
Central to Panel’s work is the creativity, imagination and entrepreneurship of our small core team of three women. Leading an independent cultural organisation, and particularly within the field of design, we are acutely aware of our influence and the responsibility this carries.
We understand that the work we do is relevant and important because of our rigour and because our programme offers a unique perspective and space for supporting design and craft practitioners in Scotland as our social, economic and geo-political landscape evolves.
Panel is set up as a Community Interest Company. Our purpose is to increase accessibility to, and engagement in, design practice and thinking, by strengthening the cultural sector in a positive and meaningful way.
Through our Articles of Association, we describe our work as benefitting the community by:
- Creating a challenging, independent public programme aimed at audiences in partnership with organisations and venues locally and internationally;
- Actively nurturing and supporting the professional development of creative practitioners by creating innovative contexts and sites in which to experiment, develop and present new work;
- Engaging collaborators and project partners to radically redefine ways to present new work and archive material to public audiences;
- Developing important artistic research for publication with writers, artists, designers and cultural protagonists at the forefront of their practice;
- Contributing to a sustainable and a vibrant cultural sector.
4. What values guide your decision-making when developing a programme?
Panel’s programme is founded on extensive research, focused on re-interpreting Scotland’s local histories, archives and collections. It depends upon pioneering and inventive connections, forged with designers, makers, artists, venues and organisations across Scotland and beyond.
We are proud to position creative practitioners and audiences at the core of our practice. Through our programme, we define a position for design and making in Scotland that is confident and inherently international, presenting a pluralistic version of Scottish identity that reflects our diversity: in people, places and ways of making, whilst also reflecting Panel’s connectedness: across art forms and networks.
Our decision-making is guided by our Business Plan and our connecting strategies, plans and policies. Woven through all is our Mission, which underpins the values of the organisation:
‘We believe that design, craft and the creative industries are interconnected cultural, social and economic concerns and as such are relevant to everyone.
We believe that people should have the opportunity to engage in the processes of design and making, raising awareness of the value of creative activity and its role in improving health and well-being, and local and national economies.’
5. When you work with archives or local histories, how do you approach questions of omission or absence?
We have a curatorial and programming approach that centres on developing projects about design and making in relation to particular histories, archives and collections. Uncovering and layering narratives from public and private archives and collections, our projects subjectively examine, through design and making, the dynamic ways in which alternative viewpoints and perspectives can be presented and recast through culture. We do this by facilitating the production of new work by artists and designers in response to their own archival research, which we support through exhibition making and other forms of public programming.
One such example is a publishing project and collaboration with the artist Jasleen Kaur: Be Like Teflon. In developing a recipe book for Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) as part of the ‘From Glasgow Women’s Library’ commissioning project, Jasleen’s research focused on GWL’s existing collection of cookery books, and on the voices and recipes that she found missing. Through Be Like Teflon, which is also a set of reflective memoirs, Jasleen questions the position of collections and archives as truly representative. She foregrounds lost experience and uses acts of communal cooking to ask questions: Whose stories count? Who speaks for whom? Whose stories have been collected over time at GWL, whose have not?
6. Whose histories do you feel have traditionally been prioritised within Scottish design and craft narrative?
The stories that are told through archives and collections within our national museums conform to the dominant systems of power and often focus on design and craft through the lens of the industrial revolution and Scotland’s place within it. Connections to making and place are also explored within our museums, especially local municipal institutions.
There is an increasing critical awareness of the role of these institutions in perpetuating histories of empire and colonialism, and the narratives presented around the display of objects, particularly around ideas of identity and ‘Scottishness’ in design and craft.
We don’t believe there is one fixed or linear narrative around Scottish design and craft. Through our work we are interested in reconsidering archives and collections in relation to under-represented social histories, subjectively examining, through design and making, the way in which value is assigned along social, political, cultural and gendered lines.
7. Are there mechanisms in place to address bias or exclusion in commissioning?
Panel has a Business Plan which incorporates and intersects with our EDI Strategy (and annual plan), Audience Development Strategy, Fair Work Strategy and an Environmental Sustainability Strategy (and annual plan). We report quarterly to Creative Scotland on the delivery of actions in these areas and discuss planning around all at our quarterly team strategy meetings. We have ringfenced funds dedicated to improving the accessibility of our programme and communications for our participants and audiences.
Through our programme we are committed to creating an environment where all designers, makers and artists are supported and able to make their best work. We recognise that listening and acting on feedback from collaborators, audiences and participants is essential to our organisation.
8. What does meaningful public engagement look like to you?
Panel’s programme aims to engage audiences through meaningful and multi-faceted outcomes, offering a diverse range of people a positive experience of design, craft and making. We work in partnership with communities, organisations and practitioners to deliver benefits for and with our target audiences. Our practice is facilitative, inclusive and innovative. Our approach recognises and builds capacity in others, makes connections across artforms and communities, facilitates new partnerships and strives for equity of opportunity and access for all.
We believe in the capacity for design thinking and practice to engage and influence people from
different backgrounds in positive and meaningful ways. We understand the value that different cultural experiences can bring to our work, and we actively seek to remove barriers for our staff, artists, participants and audiences to enhance and grow the activities of the organisation in a
positive and inclusive manner.
For example, Panel was invited by V&A Dundee in 2022 to develop an exhibition project that would explore the Valentine’s postcard company’s place in Dundee's industrial story – a narrative overshadowed by the city's famous "jute, jam and journalism" identity. Founded in 1825 in Dundee, the family firm Valentines was once Scotland’s most successful commercial photographers. Best known for popularising the picture postcard, in the early twentieth century Valentines capitalised on developments in photography, printing and tourism to create a fascinating body of work and a vibrant industry in Dundee, quickly becoming one of the city’s largest employers.
Through our research, together with graphic designer Maeve Redmond, we focused on the archival silence of the factory workforce. While the photographic collection at St Andrew’s University was extensive, it couldn't tell the complete story of how the business functioned or capture the experiences of the people who worked there.
Working with filmmaker Rob Kennedy, we developed a new film work, which was intended to augment the archival collection and tell a story of the political, cultural and social impact of a company that had been such a significant local employer.
Working with V&A Dundee's communications team, Panel issued open calls through local media to connect with former Valentine's employees. Initial responses came primarily from men who had worked in design and artistic roles, prompting a second, targeted call specifically seeking women's experiences – reflecting the gendered nature of factory work where women often handled finishing and packing. This approach built meaningful public engagement into the research and development of the project as well as through its presentation and connected V&A Dundee to new local audiences that it had, hitherto, found it difficult to reach.
9. How do you measure or understand who your audiences are, and who might be missing?
By developing our programme through artistic and community partnership and collaboration, we are committed to better representing everybody in Scotland.
To date, the majority of our audience data has been collected by venue partners using their own practices which means that we have had less control over scope and methodology. We have also collected some online survey data, however our sample size has been relatively small and we recognise that positive bias is likely to result from self-selection.
The majority of our sampled audience are female, white, aged 45-65. Despite the limitations of our existing data collection methods, evidence suggest that we have a small and homogeneous core audience.
Gaps exist in our audience data in terms of:
1. a greater depth of data from onsite audiences, particularly quantitative data,
2. a better understanding of ‘non-users’, particularly those more representative of Scotland’s population, and
3. a better understanding of our engagement with online audiences.
Through our developing programme we aim to grow the following audiences and participants:
1. Local communities who may experience reduced cultural provision,
2. People from diverse cultural backgrounds,
3. People from underserved socioeconomic backgrounds, and
4. Primary and secondary school-aged children.
We are working in partnership to develop this engagement, collaborating with organisations, institutions and networks that have established relationships and connections with the communities and individuals representing these audiences.
10. How does Panel engage with questions of representation and power in design and craft?
We work with artists, designers and makers who are interested in engaging with design and craft histories to draw attention to underrepresented subjects.
For example, Finishing the Edges: Fringe and the Paisley Shawl is a forthcoming book that explores Paisley Museum’s historic shawl collection through the research and material practice of Mhari McMullan. Developed through a new body of printed textiles, the project shifts attention to the edges of the shawl – the warp fringe, borders and finishing processes – as both subject and method.
Bringing together essays and conversations, edited by McMullan and Panel, alongside documentation of McMullan’s practice, the publication explores themes of status, piracy and design reform; processes of adaptation, imitation and innovation; and the role of fashion and materiality in reshaping textile traditions, pattern and meaning.
By turning to the details of fringing, Finishing the Edges also reflects on the nature of archival research itself, revealing how its triggers and traces can disrupt dominant narratives and draw attention to under-represented histories, overlooked labour and the conditions that shape access to the past.
11. How do disability and access inform your curatorial or spatial decisions?
We embrace accessible exhibition design and interpretation approaches with our partners. We work with venues with robust building accessibility to ensure that our projects are welcoming and can include everybody. We also provide resources and collaborate with consultants with lived experience of disability to support visitor experiences that offer engagement in the work across a range of access points.
12. How do you imagine the future of design and craft advocacy in Scotland?
MAKE is one of our key projects. It grew out of the MAKE Manifesto, which launched in 2019 alongside a set of nine recommendations reflecting the issues of makers living and working in Scotland today. MAKE is also a community, a set of ideals, and an attempt to construct a meaningful representation of the cultural value of craft.
MAKE’s goal is to support makers by pressuring and challenging current policy on craft. Through MAKE, we are championing the value of teaching craft and making skills and advocating for the inclusion of craft within Scotland’s education curriculum.
We are doing this by working in partnership to deliver pilot projects within education that inform our ongoing research and advocacy as well as developing resources for makers and educators working in a variety of education settings.
13. What made you interested in this project?
We are interested in making connections with individuals and organisations who are engaged in critical thinking and research around contemporary curating and creative practice.
As a small-scale, independent organisation we value the opportunity to reflect, self-critique and learn. We are keen to better understand how our exhibitions, events, publications and advocacy can feed into questions of care, access, and equity within wider cultural practice.
Founded in 2010 by Catriona Duffy and Lucy McEachan following the close of The Lighthouse Trust after the 2008 financial crash, Panel emerged from a moment of institutional precarity. Reflecting on this beginning, they explained that they wanted to:
“Pioneer an independent model for curating design and craft in Scotland that could be artist-focused, not with institutional or national remit, but with a distinct and experimental curatorial voice delivered on its own terms.”
What stood out to me was the emphasis on independence, not simply as organisational structure, but as a political and creative necessity. Panel’s formation was rooted in the desire to create alternative conditions for cultural work, conditions that could support experimentation, plurality, and care outside more rigid institutional frameworks.
Throughout our exchange, Panel continually returned to the importance of connection. They described their programme as one that seeks:
“To explore the boundaries of curating design and craft in a cultural context, {while}working closely with our partners to develop strategies and conditions for the production and presentation of exciting new work.”
I found myself thinking less about exhibition-making itself and more about the infrastructures that enable cultural work: the negotiations, collaborations, and relationships that sustain creative practice over time. Their approach understands curating as something facilitative rather than authoritative.
Much of Panel’s practice revolves around archives, collections, and local histories. However, rather than treating archives as complete or authoritative records, they approach them as sites of absence, omission, and contestation. They describe:
“Uncovering and layering narratives from public and private archives and collections.”
Using design and making “to subjectively examine” {how} “alternative viewpoints and perspectives are recast through culture.” What interested me most was this refusal of singular narratives. Archives are understood not as stable repositories of truth, but as spaces shaped by power, exclusion, and selective visibility.
Their discussion of the project Be Like Teflon, developed with artist Jasleen Kaur in collaboration with Glasgow Women’s Library, particularly stayed with me. Reflecting on the gaps within the library’s cookery book collection, the project asks:
“Whose stories count? Who speaks for whom? Whose stories have been collected over time… whose have not?”
I kept returning to these questions afterwards. They extend far beyond archives themselves and instead speak to broader structures of cultural legitimacy and visibility. Whose labour becomes visible? Whose histories are preserved? Whose experiences are overlooked? Through projects like this, Panel positions curatorial work as a method of drawing attention to what institutions fail to record.
This questioning of dominant narratives also informs how they think about Scottish design and craft histories more broadly. Panel argues that institutional narratives have often “conform[ed] to the dominant systems of power,” particularly through histories tied to industrialisation, empire, and ideas of “Scottishness.” Rather than proposing a singular corrective narrative, however, they insist that
“there is [not] one fixed or linear narrative around Scottish design and craft.” Instead, their work seeks to reconsider archives “in relation to under-represented social histories,” examining “the way in which value is assigned along social, political, cultural and gendered lines.”
I found myself thinking here about the relationship between curatorial practice and legitimacy. Panel’s work does not simply add marginalised stories into existing frameworks; it questions the frameworks themselves. The focus shifts from representation alone toward the systems through which value and visibility are produced. In this sense, their curatorial practice feels deeply relational and political, attentive not only to objects and histories, but to the conditions under which those histories become legible.
Community and collaboration repeatedly emerged as central to this process. Panel describes collaboration, partnership, and co-production as “central to our operating model,” explaining that their programme “has evolved organically through conversation and connections.” I was particularly impressed by this idea of organic development. It suggests a practice that resists rigid institutional planning in favour of responsiveness, dialogue, and exchange. Conversation itself becomes a curatorial methodology.
This was especially evident in their discussion of public engagement. Reflecting on a project developed with V&A Dundee around the Valentine postcard company archive, Panel explained how they recognised an “archival silence of the factory workforce.” Although extensive photographic material existed, it failed to capture the lived experiences of many workers, particularly women involved in finishing and packing labour. What followed was not simply research, but a process of actively reaching outward through open calls and community engagement to locate voices missing from the archive.
What interested me most here was how engagement itself became embedded within the research process rather than added afterward as audience outreach. Panel explains that this
“built meaningful public engagement into the research and development of the project as well as through its presentation.”
Public engagement is therefore not treated as supplementary participation, but as knowledge production itself. Communities are not passive audiences receiving institutional narratives; they actively shape and expand them.
Questions of accessibility and equity also run throughout Panel’s work. As a Community Interest Company, they describe their purpose as “to increase accessibility to, and engagement in, design practice and thinking.” They explain that they have “ringfenced funds dedicated to improving the accessibility of our programme and communications,” while also recognising the importance of
“listening and acting on feedback from collaborators, audiences and participants.”
I was moved by the emphasis on listening here. Accessibility is framed not as a static checklist, but as an ongoing and responsive process shaped by dialogue and lived experience.
Similarly, when discussing disability and exhibition-making, Panel emphasised collaboration with
“consultants with lived experience of disability”
Alongside approaches that create “engagement in the work across a range of access points.” What emerges throughout their responses is an understanding of accessibility not simply as compliance, but as a curatorial responsibility that fundamentally shapes how work is experienced.
I also found their reflections on audience development particularly revealing. Panel openly acknowledges that their current audience remains “small and homogeneous,” largely composed of “female, white, aged 45–65” participants. Rather than presenting this as resolved, they identify significant gaps in their understanding of “non-users” and underserved audiences. I appreciated this honesty. Too often, institutional language presents diversity and inclusion as completed achievements rather than ongoing challenges. Panel instead frames audience engagement as unfinished work requiring sustained partnership and self-reflection.
Toward the end of the communication, Panel discussed the future of design and craft advocacy in Scotland through their project MAKE. They describe MAKE as
“a community, a set of ideals, and an attempt to construct a meaningful representation of the cultural value of craft.”
What stayed with me here was the insistence that advocacy itself is a form of cultural practice. Through campaigning for the inclusion of craft education within Scotland’s curriculum, Panel positions making it not as secondary or decorative labour, but as socially and culturally essential.
What I ultimately took from this conversation was an expanded understanding of curatorial practice itself. Panel’s work suggests that curating is not simply about organising exhibitions or interpreting objects, but about building conditions for dialogue, participation, and critical reflection. Their practice continually returns to questions of care, access, labour, and representation, while remaining attentive to the relationships that sustain cultural work behind the scenes.
Most significantly, I was struck by their openness to uncertainty and ongoing learning. As they explain, their programme evolves
“through conversation and connections and in response to our very particular context and position.”
There is no claim toward neutrality or complete authority here. Instead, Panel’s work embraces curating as a responsive and relational process, one grounded in collaboration, self-critique, and collective responsibility. What emerges is not a fixed model for cultural practice, but a commitment to continually rethinking how design, craft, and history might be experienced differently.