I am a 23 year old from South London. I lived in Brighton for 3 years when I did my Undergraduate Degree at the University of Sussex in Art History and English Literature, but in the last couple of years I have moved back home to South London so I can study on the V&A/RCA course. I am a lover of second hand clothes hunting, coffee, arts’n’crafts, consuming chocolate, interior decorating, music and movies.
At undergraduate level, I became increasingly interested in different types of art, design, and literature that we encounter in everyday life – packaging, posters, tv shows, advertising and music. I began writing about pop art, street art, and the lyrics of pop music, becoming more and more interested in the democratic and DIY nature of these mediums. I decided to take the ‘Theatre and Performance’ pathway on this MA course, so that I could focus more on popular music and the designed objects associated with it. I have written about the experiences of the listener in consuming pop music in its audible sense, but also visual, sensory and material dimensions. I have always been fascinated with, and personally feel a connection to, the material culture of the 1960s and 70s – and so my research has tended to focus on this time period.
I am interested in ways in which art and design history can become more accessible to a wider cross section and society, and become less elitist. In line with this, I partook in a range of ‘Widening Participation’ projects at Sussex whilst studying there at Undergraduate Level – reaching out to local schools to talk about the discipline of art and design history, and careers involved. I volunteered on V&A’s Theatre and Performance Festival in Spring 2019, where I assisted the team in organising and hosting a week-long range of events themed around comedy and music – especially becoming involved with a Weekender celebrating the history of Decca Records. I have volunteered for the Museum of Youth Subculture, assisting them with research projects, as well as spending time tagging the vast number of photos in their archive with metadata in order to make them more easily searchable. I set up an Instagram account called ‘The Museum of Popular Music’ at the outset of my dissertation research, as a more fun companion project where I could post images of pop music memorabilia I came across in my research, and feature collections, with a short blurb. Currently, I am volunteering on the V&A Theatre and Performance Department’s Glastonbury Database project, which hopes to create a publically accessible database which covers 50 years of Glastonbury Festival. The Database will include archival material that the V&A already holds, as well as memories and photographs sent in by the public.
Contact
Email: eve.macneill@network.rca.ac.uk
Instagram: @evemacneill and @museum_of_popular_music
Twitter: @evemacneill