Joanna Norman – The Curator

As director of both the London-based V&A Research Institute and the Scottish Design Galleries’ lead curator, I work across both sites. My brief was to create a gallery that represented Scotland’s design history but which should also come up to the present day and should do so principally through the V&A’s collections. These span everything from furniture and textiles to architecture and digital design, so the starting point was something with breadth that focused on representing Scottish design.

Given the space, we knew we could include around 300 objects. The V&A’s collection includes about 12,000 relevant objects which we gradually whittled down. Textiles and fashion are highlights of the V&A’s collection and a very strong part of Scotland’s design story. We have a large number of paisley shawls and 18th century linen napkins woven in Edinburgh and Dunfermline, so quite localised centres of production. There was a real strength in mid 20th century textiles produced by firms like Edinburgh weavers and Donald Brothers, who had a policy of working with fine artists, and well-known designers to produce modern textiles for the home.

We could have chosen many starting points chronologically, but we chose to begin with the earliest relevant object in the V&A’s collection, a Book of Hours – a devotional prayer book – from the 1480s that was made in Rouen for a Scottish patron and has Scottish saints’ days built into the calendar. It’s a beautiful illuminated manuscript that exemplifies the strong links between Scotland and France.

Our early discussions opened up that sense of how we wanted to place Scotland’s design history in an international context. The more we looked in the V&A’s collections, the more we discovered really interesting things, like the late 19th century plates made by a Glasgow pottery for export to South East Asia and decorated with patterns designed to appeal to that market.

We started to find these threads and narratives that gave this sense of Scotland’s global links. Take Dundee, where the jute industry developed because there was a pre-existing expertise in weaving of linen but also because the whaling industry which – using ships designed in Dundee – provided whale oil that was used to soften the jute fibres. I love those interlinking connections.

Joanna Norman is director of the V&A Research Institute and lead curator for the Scottish Design Galleries.