Carol Tulloch was first introduced to CHELSEA space’s Donald Smith by Liz Ward, a former librarian, and founder of the Black and Asian Artists Archive which she started at St Martins and later brought to Chelsea College of Art & Design. This important archive became the basis for the book ‘Recordings’ published by InIVA.

The third exhibition at CHELSEA space, curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, concerned the American art magazine Avalanche, a journal which contained art works made especially for the magazine format, artists in their own words and interviews between artists and the publishers. This journal did not contain reviews and was unmediated by criticism. In the spirit of Avalanche, Carol Tulloch and Donald Smith presented their objects in an open discussion with interjections and questions throughout. The discussion moved between the story of the objects and the story of Tulloch and Smith’s approaches to research and display - approaches which are distinct and personal but which uncannily overlap.

In 2007 Donald approached Carol with an open brief to curate an exhibition at CHELSEA space on any subject that she wished, but particularly to draw out something that she was thinking about that was not going to find its way into her mainstream activities in her ‘day job’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

As the Director, Donald designs the overall programme at CHELSEA space and curates more than half of the shows but, as part of CHELSEA space’s research, he occasionally invites outside curators to work at CHELSEA space on experimental projects that might not otherwise be realized, to ask the question ‘what is curating for you?’ and ‘what are you dreaming about right now?’. Some curators explore history and archives, some work directly with an individual artist or designer or other figures of interest, others invent narratives and themes and then find artefacts to fit their premise.

Through this process of inviting curators CHELSEA space audiences hopefully gain useful insights into curatorial working practices and varied approaches to the idea of ‘curating’ and ‘exhibition making’. This approach is becoming increasingly common, even at Museum level - an attempt to reveal something of the genesis of ideas and show things which are normally hidden.

For her exhibition at CHELSEA space Carol suggested that she might like to explore an archive of the Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement accumulated by graphic designers Syd Shelton and Ruth Gregory. Rather than engage in a lengthy preamble, Carol’s approach was to bring some of the archive to show Donald directly and then gauge his response.

Carol Tulloch has said that the best piece of advice she was given about researching archives came from fashion historian Christopher Breward who said “Let the archive speak to you”. This was the approach Carol applied in presenting her idea about RAR to Donald and was the form the two chose to present their talk.