A young Aussie expat in London, she was working with a sense of mischief, and just wanted to see what would happen if she upended the role of the traditional, deferential tour guide.

"The first tours were very much undercover - we met outside, we were very sneaky about it, it was all very under the radar," she says.

"But I've always been able to get away with running the tours because I've worked in museums, and I knew the protocols."

Museums and galleries in London are free, with no restrictions on guided groups. But the tours gained momentum, she kept on taking them on the sly, and it was six months before anyone picked up on what she was doing.

By then, her message had well and truly been noticed.

"By the time that it was public knowledge, they'd gone far enough that you couldn't really stop me, which worked out very nicely for me," she says.

Not only has she been running Uncomfortable Art Tours in six major British institutions ever since, she has also written a book, The Whole Picture, a kind of guided tour on the page and a manual for "deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art", filling in the blanks with stories that have otherwise have been missing from the art history canon for centuries.

Divided into four chronological sections, the book looks into the enlightening and often shocking stories of how art pieces and displays have been selected and viewed over time.

It's an interesting time to be talking about museums, colonialism and - judging by the fact that she is holed up at her parents' London flat while I am working from my living room, anything art-related at all - really.

Procter's book came out just as coronavirus brought the world to its knees, and, speaking through my laptop screen, she says it feels somehow "alien" to be writing and thinking about art. Not that we let this stop us.

Procter comes to her way of seeing the world of museums and galleries as an art lover first, and an agitator second. But she has vivid memories of being taken to museums as a kid growing up in Singapore and England, and being taught early to question what she was looking at.

"My parents worked very hard to make sure that my brother and I did understand the context that we inherited, the fact that we were coming from Australian historical imperative, that our ancestors had been in the UK but the process that had led to where we were now was something that was really important," she says.

"I was always coming at this with an understanding that there was a multiplicity to the stories I was getting in school.. my parents did the best that they could to try and provide some balance to that, and some nuance to that and ensure I understood the limitations of it."

Now, as a young adult - she's just 25, and has spent the last two years immersed in writing her book - she sees these limitations everywhere she looks, and wants others to at least acknowledge them as well.

"It's not just about the objects, it's never just about the objects, it's also about everything else that's shaping that space and informing that space, and how the overall narrative of that history is being presented and interpreted, whether it's through popular culture and fiction and film, or the selectiveness of the history curriculum," she says.

Britain, she says, has a peculiar tendency to see itself and its institutions as the keeper of history, above all others. But perhaps it's more of a western thing. We talk about the current - as yet online only - exhibition at the National Museum of Australia, marking the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook's landing on Australian soil, told from the perspective of both Cook and the aboriginal communities who first encountered him. Procter reckons such an exhibition would, even today, be unfathomable in Britain.

"If you suggested that in the UK, people would absolutely lose their minds," she says.

"I think the thing with the UK is that there's been this overwhelming tendency to treat the history of empire as something that happened 'over there'. It's very 'elsewhere', it's not something that people recognise as actually impacting on their modern-day lives and experiences for the most part, unless you're a person of colour, a descendent of a colonial subject or someone who's made a living studying these things.

"And that's the thing that I've found so frustrating, because so many museum workers and educators and exhibitions fall into this trap of basically saying, 'Well, we don't deal with it in Britain because it's something that happened in the colonies, there was never slavery on British soil', for example. So this idea of having multiple perspectives in an exhibition is still quite controversial."

And why is it, we ponder, that so many august institutions are so sensitive about the provenance of some of the items in their collections? As Australia marks 250 years since Cook's arrival in Botany Bay, one of the shields taken from an Indigenous man and carried back to England remains in the British Museum's collection, despite an Indigenous descendent asking for its return just two years ago.

It's an item highlighted in The Whole Picture, and one that neatly sums up one of Procter's main messages.

"I think with a lot of these institutions, they've swallowed this foundation myth that they can tell the whole story of the world," she says.

"And as soon as someone says, 'Actually, we can care for these things better than you can, or we can do a better job of caring for this narrative or representing this narrative than you can', that starts to fall apart, and it causes this kind of identity crisis of well, if we aren't the keepers of everything, what else have we got wrong?

"And so as I see it, it's quite a greedy response, it's a very insecure response for museums to not recognise their own limitations.

"It's not about saying to curators that you have no value to contribute to this conversation, or to an academic that there's nothing interesting that you can tell us about this object. To me it's about also then being able to say, you have interesting things to say, but so do other people. It's so unempathetic to say, 'We have the whole story, we are the only people that can tell this story'."

In the meantime, the book has made its way into a world in which museums are, incredibly, all closed. What can this be doing, she wonders, to this highly evolved and yet fragile sense of identity, if no one is there to bear witness? Does it even exist?

It's the kind of meta-mindset that a global pandemic can cause, we decide, as we sign off. Of course the museums, and all their glorious objects and artworks still exist. But there's time, it seems, to consider ways to arrange them differently.