Iona is a writer living in London. She loves to write about the relationships between memory, objects, place and biography. She is continually inspired by folklore and the natural world.

Iona studied History at the University of Edinburgh, with a particular focus on the history of travel and cross-cultural relations during the British imperial period. Her undergraduate dissertation ‘Orientalism and gender in the photography of T E Lawrence and Gertrude Bell’ was published in the T E Lawrence Society Journal in 2019.

She has been published online by DearDamsels, Project Myopia and Girls on Tops’ Read Me blog celebrating women in film.







ARTIST COLLECTIVE BM

‘It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform.’

_____John Steinbeck

The British Museum is a space that surrounds you with narratives of history, culture and humanity from all over the world. You are surrounded by us too, members of staff who are exceptional artists and great minds. When we are not working our full-time jobs in the Museum, we deserve to be seen (as such).
We wear a black, unobtrusive uniform, that makes differentiating ourselves as individuals and creatives difficult. Once we step out of our stifling shirts, loosen our neckties, we actively become artists, curators, designers, writers and photographers. This change isn’t just physical, we transcend from being indiscernible shadows, to beings brimming with the energy to create.

The aim of this collective, is to promote the artists that cannot afford to practice full-time, whose talents are fascinating, the very reason we admire each other and have united as a group. This is a significant way that we can create our story. We are artists from around the world, who come from different cultures with different ways of life, we find different ways expressing ourselves through art. But we have the same feelings and concerns, under the same roof, that of the British Museum.

Has working in the British Museum inspired or affected the way that you look at, or make art now? Let’s build a monument to our own talents, to stand amongst those that continue to inspire us all.