DR. JANE WILDGOOSE NESTA Fellow

KEEPER OF THE WILDGOOSE MEMORIAL LIBRARY

ARTIST, WRITER, BROADCASTER, CONSULTANT

'Jane Wildgoose reads me a story written by her daughter, a dark fairy tale set in her home, populated with her mother and other creatures. She then paraphrases Proust to me, "Memory is sharper than intellect." I take this as an admonition of my inability to remember the specifics of our prior conversation, or what parts of the story constricted my chest and hitched my breath. Perhaps it's because I was remembering instead of listening.'
Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book (Volume III of V, 2022) accompanying Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Singapore Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2022)

'Jane Wildgoose, curator of the remarkable Wildgoose Memorial Library and a designer of memory theatres. Wildgoose had recently convened an Oxford conference on the business of the flesh, and had thus become fluent in both the poetics and the ethics of private body parts.'
Gregory Whitehead, Cabinet magazine

DR. JANE WILDGOOSE works across a wide range of disciplines exploring the values, narratives, and memories that become attached to remains of all kinds. Whether devising complex cabinets and installations combining hundreds of museum objects with specially devised handicrafts; researching, writing and designing a medical/musical performance based on a curious piece of Baroque music describing surgery to remove stones from the body; or co-devising a broadcast for BBC Radio examining a hair from the head of Horatio Nelson bought on eBay, Wildgoose's appraisals of the past are transported into the present with a strong appeal to the senses and the imagination, underpinned by detailed research and thorough knowledge of the history of collecting.

(See also Jane's Current events and Portraits, videos & online talks)

As Keeper of her own collection, The Wildgoose Memorial Library (WML), she presides over an ever-evolving "memory theatre" of evocative found and hand-crafted objects, documents, photographs and books, that takes a central place in her practice. Beyond the WML, Wildgoose works to commission with high-profile public and private collections in the UK and USA - eg Sir John Soane's Museum, London; the Yale Center for British Art and Yale University's collections of natural history and decorative arts (Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship, & The Order of Things), the Portland Collection, Welbeck, and Waddesdon Manor (Rothschild Collections/National Trust) (Beyond All Price) where her long experience of leading and participating in ambitious collaborative projects informs her close working relationships with curators and collections managers.

Wildgoose is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King's College London, and was Artist in Residence in association with Neil Jakeman, Senior Research Software Analyst in King's Digital Lab, during 2021.

In 2025 she led Seeing Truth in Museums in partnership with Nick Kaplony, Senior Programme Co-ordinator at Artquest - a UK-based iteration of the Future of Truth / Seeing Truth project commissioned by Professor Alexis Boylan and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation - bringing together artists, curators, and Indigenous knowdege holders to offer critical perspectives on visual and material culture historically collected for museums in situations of unequal power, in often violent and/or coercive circumstances, during the British colonial era.

Jane Wildgoose successfully completed a practice-based PhD in the School of Art & Design History at Kingston University London in 2015 (supported by a PhD Studentship from the University) with a thesis entitled Collecting and Interpreting Human Skulls and Hair in Late Nineteenth Century London: "Passing Fables and Comparative Readings at The Wildgoose Memorial Library"; An artist's response to the DCMS "Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums" (2005): focusing on the histories of medical and natural history collecting, physical anthropology, and mourning, in late Victorian London.

Wildgoose's abiding concern with the "social life" of things has led her to take an active part in debate about ethics concerning human remains in collections as a speaker at both art and science venues (including the ICA, the Royal College of Physicians, the Science Museum and the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Dresden), and as co-convenor of the multidisciplinary conference The Business of the Flesh: Art, Science & Access to the Human Body bringing together artists, pathologists, medical collection curators, ethicists and legal experts, in association with Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford University.

She was commissioned as artist in residence/consultant by the Natural History Museum, London, to report on their human remains collections in light of changes to law relating to them following the introduction of the Human Tissue Act (2004). When subsequently commissioned to write/present a Sunday Feature for BBC Radio 3 (A Tale of Two Skulls), Jane Wildgoose brought questions raised in her researches at the Natural History Museum to the wider public by focusing on two human skulls in her own collection: examining the complex issues surrounding the possession, scientific analysis and public display of human remains.

Wildgoose's scholarly - though poetic - hunter-gatherer approach has also brought commissions to write essays to accompany exhibitions and publish articles/reviews in the academic, specialist, and national press. In 2023 she launched the first in a series of Wildgoose Memorial Library pamphlets in collaboration with Roelof Bakker and Negative Press: Passing Fables & Comparative Readings: Soundings from the Lost But Not Forgotten Archive of The Wildgoose Memorial Library (WML Pamphlet No. 1, Negative Press, 2023); 'Lovely Objects' & Natural history Specimens: Jane Franklin's 'Civilising Experiment' of Pan-Imperial Significance (WML Pamphlet No. 2, Negative Press, 2023); and published Janice Ross, These are Our Living Stories with Afterword by Jane Wildgoose (WML Pamphlet No. 3, Negative Press, 2025) to accompany Seeing Truth in Museums in 2025.

Jane Wildgoose's publications also include chapters in Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating (Ed Juler & Alistair Robinson, ed., Intellect, 2021), and Wonder in Contemporary Artistic Practice (Christian Mieves & Irene Brown, ed., Routledge, 2016); she was co-editor of a special issue of the European Journal of Life Writing (Vol. 9, "Life Writing & Death: Dialogues of the Dead," 2020); selected other articles include "Beyond All Price: Victorian Hair Jewelry, Commemoration and Story-Telling" in Fashion Theory (Vol. 22, 2018); "Strong Room: Material memories and the digital record" (with Roelof Bakker) in European Journal of Life Writing (Vol. 7, 2018), and "Ways of Making with Human Hair and Knowing How to 'Listen' to the Dead" in West 86th (Spring/Summer 2016), the Bard Graduate Center Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History & Material Culture published by University of Chicago Press.

Jane Wildgoose is a regular speaker at conferences; she convened the Seeing Truth in Museums conference - exploring colonial legacies in museums and repatriation, in conversation with Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Janice Ross - in partnership with Nick Kaplony at Conway Hall in London in 2025. She co-convened the conference Life Writing and Death: A day of explorations in association with the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King's College London in 2018, and receives invitations as Keynote Speaker (Working Wonder conference, Newcastle University, 2013; Concept and Context in Practice conference, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, 2011). As a consultant her clients include the Strandlines project at King's College London, and the Wellcome Library.

Wildgoose is a NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology & the Arts) Dream Time Fellow, and was a Museumaker selected maker in 2010.

In 2001 Wildgoose received a Wellcome Sciart R&D Award as project co-ordinator and artist/researcher/writer, working in collaboration with a consultant gastroenterologist and an opera director; the project resulted in a medical/musical performance that toured the UK supported by an Arts Council Touring Project Award, and featured as a chapter in Experiment: Conversations in Art & Science (Wellcome Trust, 2003). Wildgoose was co-recipient of two Arts Council 'Year of the Artist' Awards in 2001.

Wildgoose is an experienced lecturer and tutor (including co-leader of the Material Thinking & Creative Practice Module, MA Museum & Galleries Studies at Kingston University in 2011) as well as a mentor to mid-career artists.

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