The University of Brighton Design Archives, strongly embedded in the research context of the university’s design practice and history activities, has participated in a number of collaborative higher education initiatives to digitise groups of material for cross-collection searching or in learning packages. Such project-based activities, common to many archives, may not reflect the catalogue hierarchies of the collections from which they are drawn, and consequently the full evidential value of their context. But does this matter when we consider the myriad ways in which an ever-wider range of audiences may now engage with the material, thanks to recent technological developments both inside and outside the archival community?

No abstract

indeed embodies, a turn that reflects not simply the urge to deconstruct, but a more fertile and iterative urge to build in a way that not only is not monolithic but also is inclusive; and in a way that can accommodate the self-consciousness of this age, a self-consciousness expressed through vast quantities of digital documentation that we generate, share and re-purpose or consume.

The phenomenon of artists drawing on their own and other archives is not a new one, but over the past few years there has undoubtedly been a significant increase in attention, among both artist and art historians, given to the archive as part of the creative process, as well as to archive practice. Archives have also become contested territory, caught up in discourses about the nature of museums and individual anxieties about the significance and preservation of documentation. From an archivist's point of view, archives have a positive and fertile role as both a resonant collective memory resource and a site of creative regeneration through revisiting the traces of earlier ideas and actions. Archive theory also emphasizes the importance of context in the assessment of the meaning of a document within a body of archive material. Consideration of the archives of Prunella Clough and Helen Chadwick within this wider context of archival theory and practice reveals in both cases a distinctly archival attitude to the documentation of the creative process, one which provides a rewarding insight into their work

No abstract