
Our workshops and research days are designed to facilitate an exploration of multi sensory approaches to art. We have worked with academic researchers, curators, and education professionals to help them think differently about their practice and its relationship to senses beyond the purely visual .
Below you will find examples of recent collaborations.
SENSING ART: THE PLACE OF TOUCH IN OBJECT–BASED RESEARCH
April 26th, 2021, 11.00 – 15.00, Online
Is vision the most important sense for analysing an artistic object? How much do the other senses, particularly touch, come into play to increase self-awareness and enhance the experience of an artwork? What is lost from our research when we have no tactile access to the objects we work with? And how can we reconcile the increasing popularity of working with objects, with the fact that those objects are so often unreachable, when tactile interaction is more often than not, impossible?
This workshop presents an opportunity to explore the concept of tactile interaction with artistic objects, and to think about how we might develop new tools to overcome a lack of touch in our work and construct a more rounded sensory approach. We aim not only to address these questions but also to pilot a new approach, one which might provide us with a different way of describing the artistic object by means of a language that is not centred on vision and which defy and challenge the sensory hierarchy.
This workshop is open to PhD students of all disciplines, focusing in particular on those who work with artworks or artefacts where tactile interaction is impossible or who are interested in object-based research. The workshop will be participatory and discussion-based and will include the analysis of objects that will be sent out in advance to participant’s homes. This being the case, the workshop will only be accessible to people currently based in the UK.
This event for doctoral researchers was organised by Martina Borghi, Kate Devine,and Cristina Matei. It was funded by the Techne Doctoral Training Partnership and supported by the Centre for Visual Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London.