Dr Hayley Mardon
V&A East Researcher / De Beers Fellow
h.mardon@vam.ac.uk
I am a visual artist with a practice in jewellery and collaborative work through jewellery in social enterprise. Working closely with the V&A East team and V&A jewellery curators, I am scoping and developing new ways to share museum collections with young audiences and test how the museum can engage with the moral material histories of its jewellery collection. Prior to this role, I was a Visiting Lecturer at Northumbria University where I completed a university-funded PhD. My doctoral research questioned the positioning and handling of Southern African artefacts/jewellery at museums in Britain. I have done extensive fieldwork in Zimbabwe and South Africa and qualitative research in Britain involving key museum professionals, archival research, and object analysis.