Making Sense

The Making Sense exhibition showed the incredible diversity and creativity of our tutors’ research activities, across a range of disciplines. The projects on display highlighted some of the ways that practice-based research responds to important global issues: asking questions, finding answers (or more questions), and uncovering possibilities. Click on links to read full abstracts from each project.

The work displayed visually ‘explained’ a variety of research processes, the values embodied in these, sharing distinctive research outcomes and works in progress. It aimed to demystify and promote the multiple ways that creative practice might function as a vital method of inquiry, as an embodied way of knowing, and as a conduit to possibility-finding.

Exhibits included national and international projects that preserve, promote and celebrate heritage materials and craft: including the Kotpad project, a collaboration between IML, IM Mumbai, Creative Bee of Hyderabad, and an at-risk artisan community in Kotpad, India; Fashioned From Trees work by IML members of the Barkcloth Research Network, a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and multi-national research team investigating the properties and potential of Ugandan barkcloth; and the Radically Local project, excavating, exploring and reconstructing local fibre, fabric and fashion systems and aesthetics within the UK. It includes work by AO Textiles, a sustainable textile consultancy developing scalable natural dyes; natural accessories by Michelle Lowe-Holder, produced as part of the BioDeepMap research project, in her partnership with the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts; Rafael El Baz’s experimentation with advanced laser technology to create dye-less colour and pattern on metals; Zoe Gilbertson’s bast fibre research, as part of her Churchill Fellowship to examine linen, hemp and nettle fibre production and processing across Western Europe and the UK; Julian Smith’s experimentation with repurposed waste fabrics from drag costumes in fashion; Nick Clements’ use of photography in the construction of speculative histories from fragmented memories in a series of staged re-enactments.

Keywords: thinking through making; making sense; practice research; sustainable futures; people and planet; heritage; local knowledges.

A series of practical workshops, talks and panel discussions took place in the exhibition space and a panel discussion about Creative Practice as Research (recording below).