Lethaby

Echoes

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Lethaby Echoes *

Lethaby Echoes is a digital curatorial project developed in collaboration between the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection and the MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise department. It reimagines the archive of W.R. Lethaby as a living, interpretive space—bridging past pedagogies with present-day questions of education, design, and institutional memory.

As a co-curator and researcher, Singh helped transform Lethaby’s dense, often unpublished archives into an immersive, text-rich sound journey. She played multiple roles across the project—from content producer to project co-manager—coordinating collaborative efforts across writing, editorial, design, and audiovisual integration.

Reflecting Lethaby’s ethos of collaboration and experimentation, the team repurposed archival materials into a layered digital dossier that combines creative writing, interviews, and speculative curation. The result is a reflective and forward-looking experience that activates the archive as a site of living dialogue.

- Reimagine W.R. Lethaby’s archival writings through a collaborative digital platform, breathing new life into his ideas for a contemporary audience.
- Bridge Lethaby’s early 20th-century vision of art, craft, and education with present-day debates on technology and creativity, highlighting the continuity and evolution of these discussions.
- Archival research: Delved into Lethaby’s papers – including Scripts and Scraps and a 1917 Principal’s report – to extract key themes and lesser-known poetic reflections.
- Practice-led inquiry: Employed creative experimentation (or “contextomy”) by rearranging historical texts into a speculative dialogue, treating the act of curation and content creation as a form of research.
- Interviews and collaboration: Integrated multiple voices by interviewing experts like Dr. Ramanathan and by sharing authorship across our team, ensuring the project’s scope spanned both archival insight and lived contemporary perspectives.
- Educational philosophy: Lethaby’s progressive ideas on learning-by-making and collaboration in art/design education, examined alongside today’s educational challenges and opportunities.
- Art, craft & industry: The Arts and Crafts movement versus the Industrial Age context – exploring Lethaby’s responses to mechanization in his era and drawing parallels to the digital/AI revolution now.
- Technology & labor in creativity: How technological change (from steam engines to algorithms) disrupts and transforms artistic labor and practice, reflecting Lethaby’s concerns about the “relationship between man and machine” and our own questions about AI in art.
- Archival poetics: The emotive and philosophical side of Lethaby’s writings (his random musings about arts and crafts) as a resource to spark new creative thought and critical discussion.
- Creative contextomy: Collaged fragments of Lethaby’s original texts into a new narrative, essentially “co-writing” with Lethaby across time. This speculative script allowed to extrapolate his ideas and pose fresh questions by remixing his words.
- Poetic interjections and critical framing to shift the archive from object to experience.
- Interview-led narrative construction to bring together past and present.
- Curatorial writing and academic report writing.
Sound-based digital curation: A web-based exhibition where visitors navigate an hour-long sound journey through Lethaby’s world. The site combines audio narration with synchronized archival references and visuals, inviting users to listen, read, and reflect in parallel.

By selecting distinct fragments from Lethaby’s text-heavy archive, each researcher contributed a unique aspect to a shared curatorial framework. The archive became a central hub—our work, its radiating spokes. Incorporating voice brought affect and accessibility, animating the digital platform with presence, rhythm, and reach.

Hand-drawn diagram illustrating the relationship between private and public spheres, including elements like academics, nature, sound, ethics, poetry, and education. Key words such as 'privacy,' 'sound journey,' 'ethics,' and 'philosophy' are highlighted and connected with arrows.

Vintage typewriter with crumpled sheets of paper on a white table, a printed document inserted, and a plain off-white wall in background.

Handwritten notes on paper discussing Maddelana, her attitude towards education and nature, and her influence like childhood influences and cultural background. Highlighted themes include nature influence, education, labor, and craftsmanship. Additional points mention a case study on Westminster Abbey and the influence of childhood and youth life, with colored arrows and annotations.

A woman with long, wavy brown hair wearing a black leather jacket, a dark blue dress, and black combat boots, leaning over a table and looking at a laptop with a group of paper documents, crumpled papers, a marker, and a sticky note on the table. She is wearing headphones.

W.R. Lethaby

Private | Public | Transcending in-between

“We speak often in the college executive about being leaseholders... Not ownership, but sort of, caretaking, facilitating and reflecting on the purpose of education...And I’m very keen on how histories can help us build futures.”

— Dr Rathna Ramanathan

Individual Archival Outcome

Read Transcript

Lingering, Dreaming emerged from a process of speculative writing, selective poetic reconstruction, and digital design. As co-curator, Nayanika explored how archival fragments could be revoiced—visually and sonically—by integrating her own voice into the narrative, creating a dialogue with the past. The work is a quiet undoing of boundaries: between past and present, language and image, voice and space.

Interview with Dr Rathna Ramanathan

(Head of Central Saint Martins, UAL, London)

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A core contribution was Singh’s leadership in proposing and conducting a pivotal interview with Dr Rathna Ramanathan , whose remark—

“I’m very keen on how histories can help us build futures”

became a curatorial anchor for the project’s ongoing relevance within the CSM archive.