This is the 5th event in a two-day programming series of short, interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops at Exposed Arts Projects, entitled 'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD.'

No experience necessary and all materials provided. We will learn how to stitch together hand-made paper to compile our thoughts made manifold. Guided through a series of poetry and creative writing prompts led by poet Orchid Tierney, we may fill the pages with unique creative expressions and critical responses to the previous talks.

About the programming series:

'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD' is a series of interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops instigated by American artist Gina DeCagna.

To paraphrase the late-nineteenth-century British writer John Huntley Skrine, one way to define a ‘manifold’ is as a chosen abstraction that gathers into focus qualities of human duty, experience, and hope. However, the term has varied meanings across context and research discipline. An artist convenes with a mathematician, a poet, and the public to consider varied meanings of the ‘manifold’ and to understand how our internal values and external objectivities intertwine.

Through her interventionist installations of discarded cardboard, American artist Gina DeCagna employs a material and symbolic sensibility of ‘manifolds’ in building improvised organic architectures that resemble geographical strata, tree rings, and plant foliage from discarded cardboard to speculate on the forms and structures of globalised society. While in Baroque times, fabric folds were depicted to speak to a spiritual understanding of the soul, DeCagna seeks to represent the folding collapse of late capitalism, mixing indeterminacy with strength.

She brings into her orbit the topologist Dr Mehdi Yazdi, who finds similar visual inspiration to propel his mathematical intuition around questions of manifolds and foliations — research questions that ultimately could lead us to mathematically understand more structures and systems that underpin the world, including, potentially, that of the Internet and even DNA. Poet and scholar Dr Orchid Tierney brings the metaphorical world of language into researching the representations of waste and its management, most recently completing a poetic work on ocean plastic. Finally, we will critically convene these different disciplinary approaches through philosophy, starting with Kant’s ‘manifold of sense’, that of bringing particularities together through a synthetic process of understanding.

To learn more, visit www.exposedartsprojects.com.