The word ‘curated’ is everywhere—applied to playlists, menus, even wardrobes. Far from a cliché, this signals aspiration: people are searching for meaning, coherence, and connection. For those developing curatorial skills, it’s an opportunity to shape experiences that go beyond selection, by cultivating literacy in space and place.
At art school, curatorial practice wasn’t explicitly taught. We explored concepts through theory but were encouraged to follow our own research. For me, that meant interrogating space and place through practice.
Many associate curatorial work with galleries and museums—white-walled, neatly organised spaces reimagined for audiences. This is an important mode of practice; one I also engage with. But it wasn’t where I began. Those spaces were largely inaccessible to emerging professionals, so I started working across unconventional sites—cafés, offices, public spaces, empty retail venues, and community billboards.
What I learned was pivotal: curatorial practice isn’t about portable objects slotted into blank spaces. It’s about using space and place as a medium, transforming environments into context-specific experiences for the people who move through them.
This applies beyond cultural work. The spaces we traverse daily are curated to some extent, shaping how we navigate and engage with the world. Curatorial skills sharpen our ability to read these environments and reshape them for meaning, accessibility, and connection.
Curatorial skills are often undervalued outside of museum environments, yet they translate across industries:
🔹 Spatial literacy: Reading and interpreting environments to shape them for accessibility, equity, and representation, so more people see themselves reflected.
🔹 Contextual storytelling: Weaving narratives and ideas inseparably with space and place, anchored in histories and communities.
🔹 Audience-centred engagement: Recognising that spaces are lived and felt, adapting experiences for resonance and connection.
🔹 Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Engaging architectural, historical, social, and cultural knowledge to enrich place-based work.
🔹 Ethical responsibility: Considering whose stories are privileged, whose are absent, and how authority is exercised in space, place, and experience.
For emerging professionals across creative and cultural industries, practice-based curatorial experience is invaluable—shaping context specific physical or digital experiences. It builds adaptability, co-creation skills, and the ability to frame meaningful encounters through space and place wherever people engage with ideas or stories.
In a world saturated with content but hungry for connection, curatorial literacy offers a way forward. For me, it began with transforming overlooked sites. Today, the opportunity is wider: to use curatorial skills to connect people, place, and meaning wherever they meet.
Artwork: Rainy McMaster (in Dunedin bottle store).
