Facing the future through the past

Virginia Teehan's soft façade obscures the intelligence, steel and fortitude ofthe Hunt Museum's new director, writes Mary Leland.

Virginia Teehan has such a substantial CV that, when I find myself confiding that among the reasons I like the Hunt Museum in Limerick are its terrific shop and excellent café, I wonder if she won't think that this is too trivial an approach to her appointment as director there. Instead, she agrees with me instantly. Museums, if they are to matter, must become part of people's lives. "One shouldn't under-estimate the people who go to a museum just for lunch; that's how new audiences can be generated."

The generation of new audiences is going to be a crucial part of her new role as director and as chief executive of the company which runs the Hunt. She takes on the job at the end of June, well aware of the museum's highly-developed educational programme (which won its category at the Irish Museum of the Year Awards recently) but equally concerned that its independence, integrity and indeed its significance as a private collection of international repute, should be more readily understood. The imaginative pragmatism which distinguishes Virginia Teehan's approach to life has already defined her stewardship as university archivist and director of the Heritage and Visual Arts Office at UCC. It may have been always part of her character, which was formed first in her home near Callan, Co. Kilkenny,) and then at UCC where she took her BA in history. This was followed by a Diploma in Archives Administration from UCD and her M Phil from Trinity, she became University Archivist at UCC in 1987. She surprised the authorities and possibly herself with the opportunities she recognised as rightly belonging to the position.

"If one has firm convictions," she says now, "it is important to change a structure in a way which will have tangible results." But not many new 25-year-old appointees imagine themselves as changing the structure which has just accepted them. There's something very deceptive about Teehan: she dresses softly, in flowing, stylish clothes, her abundant hair curls around a face which carries the minimum of make-up, she talks gently and deliberately and her smile, except when mischievous, is almost self-deprecating. This is something of contradiction. And it looks as if the Board of the Hunt Museum saw right through it, because what is wanted there is the steel and the fortitude and the incisive intelligence which are disguised, but not blunted, by the femininity of this disarming façade. It is true, at the same time, that Teehan's style suits her personality, even where it seems to contradict the robust characteristics which have made such a difference to UCC and to the Irish Region of the Society of Archivists, where she served both as secretary and as chairperson. In the latter capacity, she persuaded the Government to enact legislation for the protection of local authority records, which resulted in the inclusion of Section 64 in the Local Government Act of 1 994, which ensures the permanent preservation of such records.

By 1999 her job at UCC had changed to that of archivist and director of the Heritage and Visual Arts Office. One of several key responsibilities of that role is to increase access to the university's collections by encouraging a greater understanding, or awareness, of the value of the institution's possessions among the university community and the public. This experience, and the years of inter-disciplinary teamwork and fund-raising strategies contribute to the expertise she brings to the Hunt, a collection she believes to be, with the Burrell in Glasgow and the Guggenheim in Venice, one of the best private collections in Europe.

Working with the Building and Estates office at the university and with a team led by architects Jack Coughlan Associates, Virginia Teehan was a member of the steering committee producing a conservation plan which examines all the physical aspects of the college property. The aim is to define everything so a balance can be achieved between the increasing physical pressures of an expanding institution and the demands of a good conservation policy.

Expansion and demands are two words which, in varying conjunctions and arrangements, could be said to identify much of Teehan's work at the university - work which led to her appointment to the Heritage Council and, via that, to a recognised international role on accrediting and professional development committees as well as in cultural management.

Again, through the Heritage Council, she reported on the provision of genealogical services in Ireland, but with an objectivity which, while recommending international standards of best practice, caused such controversy within the sector that the report was never publicly launched. She is also a member of the university section of the International Council for Archives. At UCC, her office now includes the visual arts officer and the curator as well as other professional staff, with whom over the last 13 years she has initiated and managed at least 20 projects.

Most of this work is in-house and on campus, but every now and again things do hit the headlines. Big events bring big publicity, like that surrounding her acquisition of the 500,000-item Bantry House archive for UCC, where library archivist Carol Quinn is supervising the massive cataloguing programme which followed. Or the row about the display of the previously discarded statue of the college's founder Queen Victoria which marked the opening of the 150th anniversary Universitas Exhibition in 1995. That same year saw the multi-media installation Oilean an Uaignis as part of the larger exhibition, Mapping the Famine, which was later opened by Senator Edward Kennedy in Boston, where American interest provided opportunities for academic and business strategic partnerships.

Not necessarily the expected spin-offs from archival or curatorial work, economic and financial alliances have taken on an increasingly prominent status within cultural enterprise, especially sharp in the competitive atmosphere of academia. For these and other projects Teehan has worked with dedicated staff within and outside the college and does not hesitate to share either the credit for, or the, excitement of, such engagements. Her approach has always recognised other disciplines and the widening both of attitudes and technologies. Computer literacy in her lexicon is a matter of imaging processes marrying algebra and art, or more prosaically in researching the database for Queen's College correspondence or for digitising the catalogue of 6,000 architectural plans from the Burges Archive for St Fin Barre's cathedral.

Still the classicist, as evidenced both by her work in reminding the college of the unique archive it possesses in the Honan Chapel's splendid Celtic Revival treasury and in the evaluation and preservation of UCC's collection of classical casts, she is currently involved in the restoration of the 19th-century Crawford Observatory. She hopes to maintain her association with this, and with what may be UCC's biggest cultural commitment, the €10 million art gallery designed by O'Donnell and Tuomey.

Team-work defines her life, whether it is project-management, fund-raising, cultural perception and motivation, or family decisions. Facing the future in Limerick with husband Dr Cian Ó Mathúna and their three children, Teehan agrees with the Hunt Trustees' requirement that the director participate in the life of the local community and make the institution integral to the business, social and cultural environment. "We go as a team. I came here for Cian, as I remind him now and then. I will be sad to leave Cork, and yes, we've been having a very happy time as a family living in Cobh, but I remember sculptor Ken Thompson's motto - 'live as if always in readiness to move on'. And I certainly believe that one has only a single shot at life - it' s important not to regret a refusal to take up a challenge."

The degree of this challenge is softened by her own knowledge of, and affection for, the Hunt collection, objects which have a strong design narrative and a compelling visual history. Managing them, funding their conservation and their display and enlarging both their status and their audience: "This does interest me. It seems like an appropriate fit, intellectually."