My object-based PhD explores the objects and archives of Leicester Museum and Art Gallery’s Dryad ‘Handicrafts’ collection, with the aim to illuminate what linkages with the global and imperial context this new material culture history can reveal, and how it relates to museum studies and practice today. The collection is extremely diverse in manufacture and global in scope, ranging from basketry to textiles, carved wooden objects, and raw materials, and comes from ex British colonies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, as well as from Eastern Europe. It was purchased by Harry Peach of Leicester between 1918 and 1936 in missionary exhibitions, Empire expositions, international shows, and from his substantial network of relationships of field collectors. The rationale of the collection was educational: to provide good examples of ‘handicrafts’ from the world for the local School of Art, and to develop practice-based education by circulating the objects and related instructional leaflets in classes around Britain. With this end, the idea was to improve the educational system in the country, encouraging the formation of a new generation of designers capable to consider objects of foreign cultures in raw materials for a better national trade. For these reasons, the collection represents a case study to examine global and colonial collecting at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how contemporary exhibitions fostered European imperial culture and concepts of nationalism.

“Unpacking the Dryad ‘Handicrafts’ collection” seeks to generate substantial new research to explore what the Dryad collection reveals about the linkages between Leicester and Empire, and about changing understandings of Empire over the twentieth century. With a networking approach, my scope is to investigate collecting strategies and practices for the Dryad ‘Handicrafts’ collection: why and how the collector gathered specific objects? What is their provenance and manufacture? What do their past curation and display say about changing post-colonial environments and relationships?

The project will contribute to three key areas of historical enquiry. First, it will offer a new material culture history of the British Empire, through analysis of a little-known but voluminous and important global and colonial collection of objects (ca2,000 items). Second, it will offer a means of changing current meanings and interpretations of the Dryad objects, by foregrounding the history of Empire in their development and interpretation. Third, it will build on and contribute to the dynamic field of global material culture history and histories of imperial collecting and display, by tracking a diverse and understudied collection through its hitherto unused set of archives.

As part of my research, I work with the collections department at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. New insights will bring a different perspective on the use and interpretation of the Dryad objects today, encouraging good practice based on the history of the collection, and considering matters of mission and cultural value within the institution. The aim is to give new light and life to the objects, which are kept in storage. The final outcome will be not only the thesis, but also an exhibition on – and with – the Dryad collection of basketry, emphasising aspects related to the global and imperial context in local collecting.