Textility and Material Ecologies: Frances Joseph's professorial address
| Date: | Tuesday 26 Mar, 4:30pm - 5:30pm |
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| Location: | AUT City Campus WA Building, WA Conference Centre Auckland Auckland 1010 New Zealand |
| Contact: | sue.chapman@aut.ac.nz |
The perception of materials as passive matter awaiting human use and transformation is fundamental to the problems of waste, environmental degradation and unsustainability. In this context design has become a functional, human-centred process. New perspectives that reposition the designer through processes of ‘making with’ rather than ‘making from’ or ‘making for’, foster a dynamic engagement with materiality as a way of becoming with the phenomenal world. The nature of textiles as complex material systems, made from interwoven or tangled fibres, the conformable nature of fabric and its responsiveness to various phenomena, has been used as a metaphor for the inter-relatedness of material systems, or their textility. In her inaugural professorial address, Professor Joseph will discuss her past and current work as a sculptor, designer and researcher in relation to concepts of materiality, intra- action and collaboration.
Professor Frances Joseph is a professor of Art and Design and Director of the Textile and Design Lab at Auckland University of Tech nology (AUT). She studied Visual Art at the University of Tas mania, and worked professionally as an artist and a designer for puppetry and performance. She has an MFA from the University of New South Wales and a PhD from Auckland University of Technology. Her research is concerned with aesthetics, materiality and intra-action. Frances was the lead author of a successful New Zealand Government grant application to establish AUT’s Textile and Design Lab (TDL) in 2007. She was also the lead author in another government-funded initiative that led to the formation of Colab (2009 – 2017) to support interdisciplinary collaboration.