In her project Sticky Correspondence, Taylor Downard asks how adopting a neo-animistic worldview might enrich our experience of interconnectedness and material agency.
Through conversations with materials, we can open the imaginary to an interconnected world where the boundary between object and subject becomes obscured, and the animated qualities of materials reveal themselves.
This research project explores the sticky cosmos of the Greek Orthodox Wedding Ceremony, where the wedding ring’s material animacy performs and subject/object relations manifest. Downard seeks to understand how the elemental narratives of materials materialise through ritualised making and the design of sensory spatial encounters (devised in ritualised installations and spatialised artefacts). She explores how attentive material understandings (immersive and sensory conversations with sugar, wax and metal) are conceived by listening to the whispers of materials; and how attending to material vibrations unearths a sensory crescendo. This allows her to begin to understand the sticky interrelatedness of all things.
Congratulations to Digital Design Major graduate Varvara Solovyeva whose animated film ‘USO’ has been selected in competition for the International Programme at the Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF 2023).
‘USO’ was Varvara’s graduating film for her Bachelor of Design in 2022. Varvara is currently undertaking her Master of Design studies at the School of Art and Design.
The ninthWavesound project, produced for Laura Marsh’s doctoral thesis, fuses feminist activism and a DJ practice to generate an installation and participatory art practice aimed at corporeal, low-frequency, sound-oriented experiences.