Feminist Substrate

Substrate is the key component of making paper. The first part in making the substrate is to break down all that is known into the watery mix to make something new. The argument is that new knowledge materialises with the bonding of atoms that physically mix with the substrate, binding it together to form something new. Tactile, soft, strong yet fragile, paper is the ultimate feminist ideal that should be called ‘her’, ‘she’, instead of ‘it’ in the making of paper. Paper can be made as skin mimicry. She does not stretch like skin does unless other materials are added to the substrate. Otherwise like skin, she easily tears, partly transparent, uneven in texture, paper retains memory and embodies materiality that can move forward into a feminist ideal. ‘It’s good to have a vision. Even if it’s flawed, or turns out to be not what you expected’ Mary Kelly described of her Post-Partem Document installation exhibited at the ICA in the ‘seventies’ (The Guardian, 18th May, 2015). The watery substrate is remixed, remade, out of chaos emerges new knowledge, materialised, chewed, embodied, containing some imperfections. She retains what has gone before and absorbs the new. The arguments are that these meta creations are the purest forms of feminist research, and the potential development of new scientific and creative materiality. Jules Findley PhD Textiles Research School of Desig

Craft, Absorption and Maternal Loss

Friday November 3 2017 Craft, Absorption and Feminism Decorating Dissidence, Queen Mary University, Londo

Fragmentation: materialising mourning from complicated grief

This research by project is asking whether the affect of embodied materiality can be materialised from complicated grief, in an investigation into the relationship between the affect of grief and the creative, embodied encounters with paper materials. In some types of traumatic loss, complicated grief can subsume the bereaved in a way like no other. Mourning can be a very difficult process. The research integrates creative practice, working with fibre-based materials, with the scholarly and cultural exploration of the literature and theory of mourning as a specific psychological state of mind. It is an exploration of the experience of mourning a complicated grief, through the sustained process of an embodied encounter with the materiality of making paper. Paper becomes the metaphor to discuss research questions that connect the maternal with affect in maternal grief, that paper can be the Symbolic and the body that inputs Cartesian culture is feminised using affect of the embodied encounter with materials. This research is not into art therapy, nor into art as illustrative of psychology. I use a hybrid approach to methodology, involving auto-ethnography and subjective experience as a medium through which to reflect on the relationship between materiality and affect. The substrate uses play; judgment is suspended, whilst the substrate is being handmade to create individual materiality. Culture and social theory, which enabled the methods of auto-ethnography and creative practice research to emerge, is the paradigm of postmodern and post positivist accounts of new relations between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’. Moving forward from Glaser and Strauss’s thinking on grounded theory, display, together with reflective practice, is compatible with the emergence of feminist thinking on the significance of subjectivity and affect. The submission comprises a written dissertation, which reflects on the six years of creative practice, making new sense of the conventional silence surrounding complex mourning. The practice itself, connotes affect through the materialities of paper

Sustainable Materials in the Creative Industries: A scoping report for the AHRC (Redacted Version)

This report contains the results of a twelve-month scoping study of current sustainable practice around materials across the creative industries. The project team has explored current and immanent sustainable practice around the sourcing, use, disposal, reuse, recycling, and upcycling of materials, to help understand the creative sector's ongoing responses and its current and potential contribution to the development of a circular economy. It provides a snapshot of practice and perceptions around material sustainability in the creative industries, identifying existing trends and showcasing cutting-edge developments, as well as flagging sector-wide and discipline specific barriers that will have to be negotiated or addressed to achieve widespread sustainably orientated practice