New Materialism in Artistic Practice

This series will explore how artistic research can fruitfully engage through practice with New Materialist philosophies.

Series conveners

Scott Mc Laughlin (School of Music); Joslin McKinney (School of Performance and Cultural Industries); and Maria Kapsali (School of Performance and Cultural Industries)

Project overview

Bodies, textiles, instruments, tools, props, surfaces, spaces, buildings, landscapes, and so on.

Matter is, of course, a constant in art and performance, sometimes tacitly underpinning the overall process, sometimes explicitly engaged and revealed in the final product.

Recent generations of thinkers have developed a tradition of ‘New Materialism’ Philosophical engagement with matter that has manifested in theories which flatten the relationships between human and non-human, and / or foreground both the perspective of matter and the thinking/doing ‘with’ material (Ingold).

Haraway’s post-humanism, Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy’, Jane Bennett’s ‘thing power’, Andrew Pickering’s ‘dance of agency’, Karen Barad’s ‘intra-agencies’, all these and more provide fertile but often inert and (necessarily) generalised readings of material.

Complementing the theoretical, this series will explore how Artistic Research can fruitfully engage through practice with New Materialist philosophies.

It will examine how the techniques and epistemic objects of practice engage with the material world, both implicitly and explicitly and how these philosophical writings offer the artist a set of complex tools with which to reflect on their practice and help elucidate the relationship between matter and making.

The aim of the series is both to generate possibilities for the enrichment of practice-based research, and to invigorate the pathways that connect practice with other Humanities research: to find more common ground between what are often very different methodologies and sensitivities, and to speak back to philosophy via practice.

This Sadler Series is a trans-disciplinary research initiative which brings together practice-researchers from across the spectrum of performance arts to examine how new materialism can speak to knowing through doing, and how knowing through doing can contribute towards the development of the existing theory.

The seminar will mix lectures and participatory workshops to facilitate a broad discussion on how materiality is implicitly and explicitly accessed through practice, and to situate this in relation to writings on new materialism.