New Royal Pavilion research by Amy and Alexandra presented “globally”

In December Amy Junker Heslip and Alexandra Loske presented the recent and current research on the Royal Pavilion to an international audience at the virtual forum Global Interchange.

This group of several dozen museum curators, art historians, academics and other people interested in the wider field of Chinese art, has been meeting every two weeks since the first Covid lockdown in 2020. It is now an established New York-based platform for sharing and airing new ideas, projects and developments. Alexandra has presented to this very critical and disconcertingly well-informed audience several times, but for Amy it was the first time. It was a very successful session, with a larger than usual audience, which shows just how popular the Royal Pavilion is.

The joint 45-minute paper was simply titled ‘New Research at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton’

Curator Alexandra began by introducing the book about the Royal Pavilion she has been writing for Yale University Press, which will be published in Summer 2025. She explained its focus and structure and showed some of the newly digitised visual sources, which led nicely to the second part of the talk.

Conservator Amy then presented her new doctoral research project ‘Chinese Wallpaper at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton: A complex collage. Materiality, production, trade, transportation, and (re)interpretation in the context of (de)colonialism’, which is fully funded and jointly supervised by the University of Sussex and Alexandra. The presentation was followed by a lively 45-minuted question and answer session.