Hard Wear, Soft Wear: Publication launch and discussion

About the event

Drinks and refreshments will be served.

We are delighted to be joined by artist Harriet Morley, curator Catherine Ince and Associate Professor in History of Art, Marta Ajmar for an afternoon of discussion and debate.

This event marks the conclusion of artist Harriet Morley’s Handicrafts Residency at Loughborough University. Her residency has led to the development of a new work, Hard Wear, Soft Wear. This work reflects Morley’s ongoing interest in the connections between the material, the communal and the pedagogical. What is the relationship between an institution, its learning environments, its curricular focus, its teaching methods and its communities? What knowledges persist in the material ephemera of learning? And, in particular, what comes into focus when these relationships are considered through a feminist lens that centres accessibility, collectivity and care? These questions are inherent within the work and will be further explored by Harriet Morley, Catherine Ince and Dr Marta Ajmar. The discussion will be chaired by Dr David Bell, Curator of Loughborough University’s Arts Collection.

Find out more about Hard Wear, Soft Wear

Following this event, all attendees will receive a free copy of the publication. Please make sure you fill out your postal details on the day in order to receive your copy.

Details of the exact location will be sent by email to attendees ahead of the event.

Harriet Morley's Handicraft Residency was generously supported by the Dutch Embassy in London. 

Speakers

Harriet Rose Morley (b. 1994, UK; she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist, builder, and educator based in the Netherlands. Currently, she is researching feminist collective working methodologies through the lens of technical and craft-based education and labour within the arts under the framework of 'Hard Work, Soft Work'. Her maxim is to be ‘always under construction, always learning and unlearning.

Recent exhibitions include I didn’t think it would turn out this way, P/////AKT, Amsterdam (2021), You’re Never Done, Glasgow International 2021, Glasgow, UK (2021), The Headquarters PuntWG, NL (2022), UPS @ BAK (2023) and Fully Worktioning, The Balcony (2023). Since 2023 she is the Co-Director of Platform BK

Catherine Ince (FRIBA) is an independent curator, consultant, and writer with a specialist interest in the intersection of modern and contemporary art, design, and architecture. Her recent positions include Director of Exhibitions and Programmes at ARoS, Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark and Chief Curator of V&A East, a new museum and collection research centre for the Victoria and Albert Museum, currently under construction in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. Between 2010 and 2015 she was a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery and conceived major survey exhibitions including The World of Charles and Ray Eames (2015), Bauhaus: Art as Life (2012), and, in collaboration with Akiko Fukai, Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion (2011). Between 2005 and 2010 she was Curator and, subsequently, Co-Director of the British Council’s Architecture, Design and Fashion Department. Catherine is a trustee of The Jencks Foundation and Cosmic House, London. She writes regularly on art, design and exhibition histories.

Dr Marta Ajmar is Associate Professor in History of Art and Director of Research, School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, University of Warwick.

As a historian of craft, design and material culture, Marta is interested in histories and practices of making and embodied knowledge, transcultural artisanal epistemologies and the historicity of materials.

The Handicrafts Residency

Each year LU Arts invites an artist, whose practice engages with making in different forms, to respond to an interesting history of Loughborough University - The Handicrafts Unit. This was a teacher training college and a forerunner of the current Design School. In 1930 it introduced a two-year course for the training of ‘Handicraft’ teachers. Instead of lecturing students on handicraft methods, students were taught in line with the institute’s philosophy of ‘training through production’. Working in communal workshops, students would construct pieces of furniture for use around the colleges, or for sale by the institution. There are still pieces of 'Handicrafts' furniture in the University's arts collection to this day.

The course was overseen by two of the most renowned British furniture makers of their day: Peter Waals (1935-37) and Edward Barnsley (1937-68). Both Waals and Barnsley worked in what has become known as the ‘Cotswold Tradition’.

Accessibility

If you have any specific access requirements or anything you would like us to be aware of when running the event, please let us know via the booking form or email LUArts@lboro.ac.uk in advance of booking and we will do our best to accommodate them.