The Materiality of Winter

With her project The Materiality of Winter, Imogen Zino takes us on an exploration traversing the senses and pondering the potentiality of other imagined worlds. It is a multi-sensory audio-tactile installation made up of three-and-a-half-thousand individually handmade ceramic pieces.

Suspended from the ceiling and dwelling in corners, The Materiality of Winter creates a space within a space. It is a structure and an environment to be inhabited. This installation endeavours to elicit a sense of awe and wonder through multi-sensory interaction. The following is an edited interview with Zino about her project.

“As an experience designer, the fact that my background spans across a range of design disciplines has meant that my creative practice and research has often involved bringing different elements of design together and looks at ways of engaging the senses in unique and intriguing ways.

“The piece featured here is only the final outcome of a larger body of research that explored multisensory interactions and that considers the way they could re-forge connections between the mind and body resulting in an altered emotional state. Each ceramic piece is similar in form yet unique and varied, coming together to create a whole. There is a conscious variance in size, with similar pieces clustered together in order to enhance the range and playfulness of the acoustic experience. The smaller pieces produce a higher pitch and the larger, a much lower one. The individuality of each piece generates an organic topography and creates an undulating surface.

“Many hands came together to create the pieces that make up the surface of this work, and while the installation is designed to promote community engagement, it also provides a unique experience in both its fabrication and realisation. The Materiality of Winter is a living space that engages with touch and responds both audibly and dynamically with it. The textures of sound, shape and surface activate our perceptual selves, immersing us in and connecting us to the world. In this state the self is transient and open to feeling happiness.

“With winter in my mind, I have created an immersive experiential work that seeks to elicit a sense of awe-filled wonder. A central aim of this project was to enable a greater sense of connection between the internal sensory world of the participant and the inhabited environment. Tactile, audible and visual metaphors of Winter sparked hidden narratives revealing realms transcending what the eye can see.

“Embodied experiences and performative interactions activate deep and ongoing conversations about being-in and being-within oneself and the space we inhabit. This investigation is a response to the Western world’s obsession with the mind and unequivocal reverence of sight to the detriment of the self and all other senses. It considers ways in which other senses, such as dynamic touch and reactive sound, may be ignited and reunited with sight, to re-engage the self and the inhabited environment. It posits that inspiring a sense of awe and wonder through the art of interaction may just be the antidote to a disconnected world.”

With Winter in my mind, I have created an immersive experiential work that seeks to elicit 
a sense of awe-filled wonder. A central aim of this project was to enable a greater sense of connection between the internal sensory world of the participant and the inhabited environment. Tactile, audible and visual metaphors of Winter sparked hidden narratives revealing realms transcending what the eye can see.

Embodied experiences and performative interactions activated deep and ongoing conversations about being-in and being-within oneself and the space we inhabit. This investigation is a response to the Western world’s obsession with the mind and unequivocal reverence of sight to the detriment of the self and all other senses. It considers ways in which other senses, such as dynamic touch and reactive sound, may be ignited and re-united with sight, to re-engage the self and the inhabited environment. It posits that inspiring a sense of awe and wonder through the art of interaction may just be the antidote to a disconnected world.