The Glasgow School of Art

Material Culture in Action: Practices of making, collecting and re-enacting art and design
7 - 8 September 2015
The Glasgow School of Art and Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA)

Register online via the CCA website here.

Keynote speakers: Prof Guy Julier, Prof Esther Leslie, Ian Helliwell

Closing remarks by Prof Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen).

This two-day international conference will investigate new directions in material culture studies by focusing on creative, critical and theoretical engagement with the material culture of art and design, both within and beyond the art school. The material culture of art and design covers a wide range of art practices, from professionally designed works within the art school, to the less official works of the self-taught amateur.

An emphasis on processes means paying close attention to places of production; from the art school, the studio, the print workshop, the pressing plant, the factory, the street, to the discrete ­yet equally significant realms of domestic life. We would like to engage more explicitly and more closely with the sensorial aspects of the object and realms of seeing, touching, hearing, making. By recentering our attention on material practices and processes, on artists and makers, we may be able to reconcile the study of material culture with that of affect and aesthetics and politics.

Visit the conference website for more information and a full programme.