Material Legacies
Timeframe: 2013 – 2017
Material Legacies is a five-year collaboration with The Hospice of St Francis that uses practice research methods to co-create a collection of experiential artifacts, four documentation films, a series of specialist talks and two public exhibitions with three bereaved makers. This research creates novel practices that redefine the role of artistic collaborations with the bereaved, creating alternative spaces for a person’s physical and digital legacy. It expands continuing bonds theory by combining situated design methods and co-design methods that explore how crafting hybrid artifacts construct a new kind of durable biography for the deceased. The locus of this design research incorporates the agency of the dead to connect people, things, stories, materials and making. Exhibiting co-designed artefacts also provides discursive knowledge for hospices and the healthcare sector to review their own artistic care structures.
