UCL History of Art welcomes new MSc lecturer, Libby Ireland

Libby Ireland is a practising sculpture and installation art conservator with experience across museums and private practice. She joins UCL from Tate, where she has worked since 2018. Focussing on new acquisitions into the collection, recent projects have included the acquisition and display of Anne Hardy's installation Liquid Landscape (2018) and ongoing work to understand how to safely install Andrei Molodkin's Liquid Modernity (2019). 

Libby worked on the Tate research project, Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum from 2020-22, undertaking practice-based research into the acquisition and display of works by Ima-Abasi Okon and Richard Bell. This work explored the collaborative process of bringing artworks into museum collections, examining the relationship between artist, artwork and museum. Her research looked at how Okon's work shifts this relationship to one of host and guest, allowing for a reframing of the role of the conservator.

Her research interests also include modern materials, with recent and forthcoming publications including an overview of the analysis of found dolls used in Zoe Leonard's Mouth Open, Teeth Showing (2000) and on a documentation template co-created with the Science Museum to aid the acquisition of additively manufactured objects. 

Libby co-founded the Icon Emerging Professionals Network in 2017 to provide support for early years conservators in the UK, before stepping back from the group in 2020. She looks forward to working more closely with students at UCL. 

With a keen interest in improving the sustainability of conservation and museum practices, Libby co-founded Tate's Collection Care Sustainability Group in 2020. The group have collaborated with other institutions and businesses to look at areas such as casing and packing practices. Her enthusiasm for this area extends to her research, where she is interested in how environmental sustainability can be a part of conservation decision-making, and how degrowth theory can be applied to museological practices.

In her first week at Tate, she had to look through the duvet of Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) for used condoms!