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Material Imagination

Activity: Talk or presentation › Lecture and oral contribution

Description

The theory of material imagination recognizes that there is an oneiric dimension to materials deeply within our individual and collective psyche; that we ‘dream’ with materials. Pioneered by the French philosopher-chemist, Gaston Bachelard, this inner life is discovered by moving beyond our visual account of materials: "The eye assigns them names," he wrote in 1942, "but only the hand truly knows them."

This lecture recounts a recent research project into the material imagination through the example of marble, one of architecture’s most fascinating materials. Drawing from historical-cultural sources, field work, and workshop-based experiments, we focus primarily on ‘marbles from the north’, with cases from Greenland and Norway. Under the framework of the material imagination, connections are made between contemporary, digital tools, material reveries in marble’s translucency and crystal interior, and remote quarry landscapes.
Period10 Nov 2022
Held atUniversity of Limerick, Ireland
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • material imagination
  • stone

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