Katrina Watson
Critical Conservation Studies
Katrina Watson is PhD candidate at the Robert Cripps Institute for Cultural Conservation. She holds a Master of Cultural Material Conservation degree from the University of Melbourne, specialising in objects conservation with an investigation of plastics in Polaroid camera collections. As a conservator, she has undertaken work with the National Trust and Arts Centre Melbourne. With an interdisciplinary background, she holds degrees in Photography, Paramedic Studies, and Music, with undergraduate studies in linguistics and has worked as a professional photographer and paramedic educator.
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Thesis
reMaterialising cameras as conservation subjects for preventive conservation practice
Cameras have helped shape modern visual culture in profound and pervasive ways. As a population of mostly non-functional cultural heritage objects (CHOs), however, they are largely overlooked as subjects of conservation knowledge making and research. Despite their significance, presence in collections worldwide and largely unknown material stability, cameras as CHOs remain almost entirely absent from English-language Conservation literature. This absence is further complicated by a substantial body of literature dedicated to a separate population of cameras operating as tools embedded in Conservation documentation practices. This literature not only defines the camera functionally and relationally to photographic outputs but also serves to further obscure the absence and the camera’s material status as a CHO requiring care in its own right. This research argues that this absence is produced by underlying epistemic mechanisms within Conservation itself, where inherited disciplinary norms systematically privilege a relational and culturally interpretive conceptualisation over the camera’s material and physical properties. Using a critical realist and pragmatic pluralist approach, this research investigates those mechanisms through practitioner survey research, Conservation vocabulary analysis, and the reconceptualisation of cameras through a capacities-informed Integrated Technologies Object framework. The research proposes reMaterialisation as a theoretical and practical intervention, establishing the preventive conservation infrastructure through which cameras can be better managed within current constraints, and to facilitate future camera conservation knowledge generation.
Research interests
- Objects conservation
- Photographic and camera heritage
- Modern and composite materials
- Preventative conservation
- Critical conservation studies