Contexts of Making: Materiality and Situation

This course provides students with a broad view of contexts that underpin and continue to shape discourse in contemporary crafts, visual arts and critical design practices. The course theme, "Materiality and Situation", addresses how meaning is constructed through choices of materials, material processes, modes of display and presentation. Students will engage in speculative experiments with making and display to create and subvert perceived value and to shape audience interpretations. A series of seminars and research projects will introduce students to wide-ranging works and installations of contemporary art, craft and design as examples and references for their own projects. The overarching theme encourages trans-disciplinary, practice-based responses in which students interrogate their choices of materials, processes and display to make intentional decisions . Students will demonstrate and apply critical thinking and studio theory to projects through independent and/or collaborative work. This course does not provide workshop-based demonstrations or direct studio supervision.