Lara Goodband has over 25 years’ experience as an art curator in galleries, museums and unusual places and spaces. She is currently Contemporary Art Curator and Programmer at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter, a position funded by Arts Council England.
She works closely with artists to curate new artwork inspired by RAMM’s collections. This includes Michelle Williams Gamaker’s film ‘The Silver Wave’ inspired by RAMM’s Arctic collections in 2021 and Joy Gregory’s installation ‘The Sweetest Thing’ (2022).
She is currently curating ‘Earth Spells: Art in the Anthropocene’, which will include new work by Emma Hart, Grace Ndiritu, Florence Peake, and Lucy Stein, inspired by Elizabeth Webb’s (the ‘white witch of Dartmoor’), cauldron.
‘Earth Spells’ continues Lara’s curatorial practice focusing on the climate crisis. She co-curated the exhibition ‘Offshore: Artists Explore the Sea’ for Hull 2017 and ‘Sea Garden’ in 2019, which included Bryony Gillard’s new film made in response to RAMM’s nineteenth-century seaweed collections in dialogue with film and photography by Dorothy Cross, photographs by Susan Derges and collage by Lucy Skaer, amongst other artists.
Lara studied English Literature/History of Art at the University of York before a diploma in Fine Art and then an MA in History of Art at the University of Manchester. She is a Research Associate at the University of Exeter.
Teresa Gleadowe, Director of CAST in Cornwall, is currently her mentor.
You can find out more more here…
‘Fungi may not have brains, but their many options entail decisions. Their fickle environments entail improvisation. Their trials entail errors.’
Merlin Sheldrake, ‘Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures’, Penguin, 2020
Lara Goodband - contemporary art 