Liz Bruchet

University College London, Slade School of Fine Art, Honorary Research Fellow

University of Brighton, School of Humanities, Alumna

University College London, Department of Information Studies, Faculty Member

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Dr Liz Bruchet is an independent researcher, archive curator and oral historian. She was previously Senior Lecturer, Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies, UCL (2020-2023) and is currently Honorary Research Fellow, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Her research focuses on the intersections of archives, creative and curatorial practices, and the records and recordkeeping practices of artists and visual arts organisations, including transnational and interdisciplinary art and art school histories, particularly the Slade School of Fine Art, 1945-89.

A concern with notions of care, risk and vulnerability in archives and implications for curatorial practice runs through her research, as does the material, affective and aesthetic qualities of archives and archival records; biographies of archives, ‘orphan’ archival and museum artefacts, and the value of these for critical curatorial and archival practice.

She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies (UBC) and her AHRC-funded PhD in Archival Studies (University of Brighton) examined the tangled interconnections between archives and curatorial practices, and their theoretical and practical implications.

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Papers by Liz Bruchet

Archival finding aids and perceptual frames

Routledge eBooks, Sep 28, 2023

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Archival finding aids and perceptual frames: Extending material contact points through Stephen Chaplin's Slade School Archive Reader

The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context, 2023

Thinking about materiality in its broadest sense, this chapter examines an idiosyncratic finding ... more Thinking about materiality in its broadest sense, this chapter examines an idiosyncratic finding aid for the archives of the Slade School of Fine Art, London. A Slade School of Fine Art Archive Reader (1998) is a four-volume, hand-bound index and unpublished manuscript written by Slade alumnus, art historian and former archivist, Stephen Chaplin (b. 1934). Close analysis of this document demonstrates how thinking materially can enrich and enliven an understanding of the multiple ways in which archives and archival practices can be figured and storied. I propose that by homing in on the material encounters provoked by this finding aid, we can perceive the contingencies, subjectivities, places of ambivalence and points of translation and transformation interwoven through the histories of archival collections as they manifest along a variety of sensory planes and perceptual fields. Part biography of an archival project, collection and its archivist, and part ethnographic arrival story, this chapter addresses these material connections in order to illuminate the layered and multi-sensory vantage points through which archives and archival finding aids evolve and operate.

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