Violet McClean

Violet M. McClean is TheGallery’s Curator at Arts University Bournemouth. Alongside an MA in Museum and Gallery Studies: Culture, Collections and Communication from the University of Southampton, she's an alumna of AUB, where she studied BA (Hons) Art and Events Management (now BA (Hons) Events Management). Her research specialism is the contemporary curator’s relationship to classical museum curation, focusing on the approaches of Alfred H. Barr Jr., which are reflected in her practice, where she favours the museum narrative through salon and cluster hangs and compositions, and the power of placement to utilise the whole gallery space.

With over 25 years' experience in the visual arts, arts education and creative industries, Violet has worked with national and international curators, artists, designers, photographers and makers, including Grenville Davey, Alan Kitching, Mariele Neudecker, Hew Locke, Sir Peter Cook RA, Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA, Philip Townsend, Andy Earl, Simon Beaufoy, Morag Myerscough and Liz Wells. She has also worked with contemporary galleries, museums and collections, artist studios, architectural practices, orchestras, dance studios, film studios and arts councils, such as Arts Council England, National Museums Scotland, Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation, Zaha Hadid Architects, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Hayward Gallery.

Exhibitions that Violet has curated include Gabriel Bush: Lockdown Artists and Artists Returned (2023), Morag Myerscough: We Make Belonging (2020), Suddenly Last Summer (2016–2019), and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize on the years that it toured at TheGallery. She has overall curatorial and management responsibility for TheGallery’s programme of exhibitions, events and publications, and curates AUB’s own art collection as well as the collections it has on loan on campus. She designs exhibitions and creative concepts and manages public art projects happening both on and off-site.

Violet was the joint curator for Professor Sir Peter Cook RA: Drawing with Light (2015) at Poole Lighthouse and was part of the group that curated WHAT’S IT WORTH (2008) at Winchester School of Art. She project-managed four successful touring exhibitions including Lucienne Day: Living Design, which toured two venues in Ireland, and Facing East, an international collection of contemporary landscape photography from Baltic areas curated by Liz Wells. She also worked with performance artist Laura Eldret and writers Sally O’Reilly and Colin Perry to curate the exhibition Power Plays (2012).

Violet speaks and lectures on curation, exhibition design, and arts and event management. She mentors students and staff on curatorial projects and set up TheGallery’s volunteer and intern programme in 2000. She is regularly interviewed, has been invited to external events as the keynote speaker, and sat on panels to discuss the roles of females in art and curation. Violet is the chief editor for TheGallery’s text + work publications and writes copy for exhibition and academic material, as well as for marketing and press purposes.

She was lead on the 2024 AUB Summer Shows, where she orchestrated a new curatorial narrative for some of the shows on campus, redesigned the opening events and reposited the shows within the marketplace for AUB Civic Agenda, working with AUB stakeholders from right across the University.

In 2024, she wrote a chapter called The Curator’s Passage in Time for TheGallery’s text + work publication Ian McKeever – Against Architecture, which is co-published by text + work, TheGallery, AUB and Anomie Publishing, London, 2024.