The next Knowing Things: Materiality and Knowledge Production Network Workshop takes place on Wednesday 29 May from 1.30-4.00pm at the The Whitworth Art Gallery Study Centre. I look forward to members of the Knowing Things network coming together again for the event.

Workshop places are free, but limited, so please book in advance with:
lewis.ryder@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Representing Materiality
This workshop draws on the research of three researchers/practitioners – Sarah Casey, Ray Lucas, Uthra Rajgopal – to think about annotation, drawing and inscription as methods to understand materiality. The aim of this practice-based workshop is to collectively explore how materiality research is changed, by line-based artistic practice. To do this we will work with items from the Whitworth’s textile collection and the architecture of the Whitworth and take part in drawing followed by discussions on how material knowledge is revealed.

Highly recommended for all researchers working with materiality and interested in testing new methods for object-based research. Please pass on to PhD students interested in this area of research.

The workshop will be followed by a guest lecture from Sarah Casey at 5.15pm. All welcome. Details to follow shortly.

Programme
1.30pm Arrival at Collections Study Centre
– Sarah and Ray introduce respective practices and approaches to drawing things and the types of knowledge produced.
– Uthra introduces study collections and thinks about looking seeing, and writing to understand collections.
2.00pm Group activities focused on drawing to know with textile collections (w. Sarah) or with architecture (w. Ray)
3.00pm Tea break (refreshments provided)
Followed by feedback, reflection and discussion on the exercise and practice.
4.00pm Finish.

About the workshop moderators
Sarah Casey is an artist and researcher and University of Lancaster. Over the past decade she has taken drawing to a range of challenging environments, working alongside archaeologists, medical practitioners, cosmologists and conservators to see what the activity of drawing may share with these other practices that must negotiate the delicate to reveal the unseen. She uses drawing as a means of exploring what it means to see, touch and feel experiences on the edge of our grasp. This has ranged from items of a dress collection which have been hidden away out of sight to cosmological exotica at the outer reaches of our universe.

Ray Lucas (Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester) is external advisor and associate researcher to the ERC Advanced Grant project Knowing from the Inside. Based at the University of Aberdeen, leading anthropologist Tim Ingold is the primary investigator with a team of postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, colleagues from anthropology and further associates. I am working closely with this group on how and what we can know by drawing and inscribing. Ray is developing Graphic Anthropology as an alternative practice of architectural history. In studying the use of axonometric drawing in the 20th Century, I have conducted a study of five key architects by meticulous copying of their drawings during archival research at the CCA in Montreal. The architects all approach this form of drawing differently, finding alternative affordances within the convention. One aspect of the study is to understand how we can know a thing by drawing it; and also to consider the importance of how conventions operate in architectural thinking.

Uthra Rajgopal is the Assistant Curator of Textiles and Wallpaper at the Whitworth and is a former graduate of York University (BA (Hons) History of Art, 2010) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA History of Art, 2011). With a background in working with museum dress and textile collections, commercial archives and exhibitions, Uthra has developed a specialist interest in South Asian textiles and has been a contributing author to Textile History and Authenticity and Replication: The ‘Real Thing’ in Art and Conservation and is a former lecturer at Manchester School of Art (MMU). Since joining the Whitworth, Uthra has worked on the Islamic textile collection, and has curated the exhibitions Raqib Shaw and Beyond Borders, both part of the New North-South partnership.

Best wishes,

Emma

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