DPG Attendants' other lives: Lynne Mcadam – opera singer

Continuing the series of what the attendants at Dulwich Picture Gallery get up to when not guarding priceless paintings.

The story of my life begins at the point where I scandalised my mother by deciding to go on the stage. [slideshow id=1513209474815128091&w=426&h=320]I worked for eighteen years as an operatic soloist, touring the world and singing such roles as the sultry Carmen and the naughty Dorabella, but I finally decided I had had enough of the open road and that I should get a sensible, ’proper’ job…….however, in the end I decided to work at Dulwich Picture Gallery instead!

So, in October 2005, I started there as a gallery attendant. As you might expect with a gallery as small and addictive as Dulwich, I was soon ‘sucked in’ and helping in every department from retail to finance. But it was an invitation from our previous curator, the lovely Margaret Reid, that changed the course of my life. She offered to teach me everything she could if I would assist her in the curatorial department. I started the following week and was tutored in art handling (that’s very posh DIY), managing the collection databases, lecture preparation, label writing, how to wind that noisy chiming clock, and much much more…. and every Monday Margaret and I would sneak into the gallery and swap the pictures around to keep the gallery guides on their toes!

Having grown to love all this, I decided I had better underpin this work theoretically and so that is how I found myself at the Courtauld Institute this year, together with Nicky, studying for the new MA in Curating. It was a marvellous, if exhausting, course in which we (hopefully) learnt everything we will ever need to know about curating, and culminating in our own exhibition Stages and Scenes – a fantastic opportunity to show what we could do in public and, what is more, in the wonderful Courtauld Galleries. Nicky wrote about this on DOV last month.

Meanwhile, I still do the odd performance when the singing bug gets me: I’m off to exotic Weston-Super-Mare next week (I hope I’m not singing on the pier) and somewhere in Wales the week after! I’m also joining the Midsummer Opera Company to do Lucia di Lammermoor next spring and I might even put on another concert for the Education Department Good Times project, if they’ll have me! Oh………..and I had better go and finish that dissertation!