What's it like to work as a museum curator?

Emma Smith collects weird and wonderful objects for the Science Museum, often with some difficulty

Science Museum curator Emma Smith

From tracking down ivory dildos to 3D printed guns and the first spacecraft flown by a woman, Emma Smith’s job is never boring. The curator is responsible for collecting objects from around the world for the Science Museum in London, and is often faced with strange requests in order to acquire them. “The whole time my job feels so surreal,” she says.

The most exciting project she’s worked on is finding one of the world’s first 3D printed guns, which had broken into bits during test fire. Declared unfit for purpose in Finland, when she brought it to the UK the Met Police said it was still possible to use. Unsure how to get it across UK borders, she eventually found an expert to decommission it. Despite working as a curator for six years, she says she’s still “often learning as I go”.

For her most complex loan, Smith travelled to Russia to collect the Vostok 6, the rocket flown by the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. After being given an exemption by the Russian government to transport it, Smith faced her next challenge when her team discovered asbestos inside. “We all almost burst into tears when we found this out.” They solved the problem by wrapping the rocket in “layers and layers of industrial strength cling film,” practising on a giant inflatable Tesco ball in London beforehand.

But Smith doesn’t always have to go to foreign countries to track down unusual objects. She has previously found a 18th century ivory dildo, a birthing chair and Japanese ornaments with miniature models copulating inside in the Science Museum’s own 300,000-strong collection.

With such a varied job, it is often hard to explain to people what she does for a living. “I can’t actually describe it in one sentence. Even my family can’t believe what I do.”

"Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age" runs at the Science Museum until 13 March 2016.