Camille Britton

About

I am a curator, researcher, and writer whose work investigates human relationships with nature, how they are formed, and how they are preserved across time and geographical space. I’m particularly interested in how knowledge systems are classified, and the lines drawn around scientific knowledge throughout history. I work across disciplines, combining anthropological, historical, and artistic research methods applied to science, natural history museums and agriculture. I hold an  MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University in addition to my MFA in Arts and Humanities from the Royal College of Art. 

My research focuses on how interdisciplinary, creative curatorial practice could exist within a natural history museum, disrupting the established curatorial logic. Museums of nature and science often define one specific relationship with nature by constructing a single linear narrative. The mission of providing visitors with a science lesson, giving them the tools to understand the processes of the natural world, is an important one. But it also relies on a mosaic of metaphors, artistic renderings, and carefully crafted language. When blind to its own history and subjectivity, a museum can perpetuate vestiges of scientific pasts that are at best not factual and at worst deeply racist and colonial (Haraway 1984; Das & Lowe 2018). Curators that include objects and techniques from art, science, and history together find connections that allow viewers to think in an ecology of many relationships, instead of one single, linear way of perceiving the world. This allows for multiple relationships with the natural world to be represented. And, it is more truthful to how scientific research is conducted: a process of collaboration between many actors, as interconnected as the ecologies they study.

For ‘60 Blows’ an ongoing project begun as part of my MFA at the Royal College of Art, I investigated how an agriculture narrative could fit within the context of a natural history museum gallery. For the work, I am researching how the gradual collapse of the wool industry is felt by small scale sheep farmers in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, and the Cotswolds. The work uses ethnographic research methods to investigate the relationships farmers and sheep shearers forge with animals raised as a resource, their responsibility to them, and the labour it takes to maintain it all. A part of the research was presented at my degree show, RCA2025, as a digital film containing interviews with shearers, and footage of sheep shearing projected inside of a small structure made of a willow skeleton and raw wool that the viewer could enter and sit inside of. Though this was presented in a gallery space, I imagine this work inside of a natural history museum, in conversation with the taxidermy, skeletons, and dioramas around it. 

My research and curatorial practice is highly informed by my ongoing work on farms, and the community I’ve found there. Good farming requires deep contextual understanding of land, and a combination of many different kinds of knowledge (scientific and folk knowledge about pests, soil nutrients, weather, etc) and skills (carefully planting seedlings, driving a tractor, identifying weeds, etc.) to be successful. It also requires collaboration, and a constant desire to learn from one another to be a better steward of the land, and produce better food for people, an ethos I strive towards.