Materiality, Dimensionality, and Embodied Sensation

HOME (Arches) 2 Tony Wilson Pl, Manchester M15 4FN

Arch 1 — 10.30-11.30 Video Presentations

Arch 2 — 10.30-12.00 Come-and-Go Workshop

Theme:

Materiality, Dimensionality, and Embodied Sensation in Contemporary Artistic Practice explores how artistic practices engage materiality, desire, and ethics. Through addiction’s visual language, collage’s dimensional transformation, and sustainable sculptural methods, the speakers reveal how making processes embody cycles of compulsion, intertextual shifts, and ecological responsibility, offering new perspectives on art’s relation to lived experience and environment.

Key Topics Include:

• The relationship between residue, displacement, and embodied perception
• Transitions from two-dimensional to three-dimensional collage practices
• Intertextuality, self-appropriation, and philosophical approaches to materiality
• Re-evaluation of found materials as carriers of memory and value
• Intersections of image, object, and spatial form in contemporary art

Confirmed Speakers:

• Alana Lake — PhD candidate at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University www.alanalake.com
• Bing-Chi Wu — PhD candidate at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University www.bingchiwu.com
• Dr Victoria King — Artist and writer, PhD, Art of Place and Displacement: Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground (2005, UNSW) www.victoria-king.com

About the Video Presentation:

• Alana Lake will present her practice-led doctoral research, Towards a Pathology of Desire, which examines how addiction is embedded, reflected, and reinforced within contemporary society. Her presentation will explore how sculptural processes with glass, metal, and ceramics mirror the cycles of compulsion and destruction that shape everyday life. She will discuss how her methodology of making engages fetishisation, material agency, and ritualised behaviours to create a visual language of addiction, offering an embodied and affective encounter with desire, identity, and cultural conditioning.
• Bing-Chi Wu will outline how her works explore spatial relationships beyond the 2-dimensional surface, mixing 3-dimensional, spatial, and digital platforms to define new interpretations of collage approaches through concepts associated with 'non-sticky.' The outline includes how the transformation of media across different dimensions begins to reflect their change in materiality. These elements become carriers of concepts associated with the theory of philosophy to illustrate modes of oscillation triggered by readings related to materialism, speculative realism, or object-oriented ontologies.
• Dr Victoria King’s doctoral research, Art of Place and Displacement: Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground (2005), informs her recent sculptural work using discarded materials. The experience of living with indigenous women at the remote Aboriginal outstation of Utopia in the arid, red centre of Australia changed forever how she saw art and the land. Displaced to an urban environment after having lived off-grid for 13 years her conscience demands that she have an ethical art practice with a low ecological footprint. 

About the Come-and-Go Workshop:

The workshop will provide a practical extension of the presentations, encouraging participants to engage with the combination of residue as three-dimensional materials and two-dimensional media such as images or drawings. Participants are encouraged to explore questions of dimensionality, material transformation, and the re-imagining of material and experiential relations. 

Event Highlights:

• Academic presentations addressing materiality, dimensionality, and philosophical frameworks in artistic practice
• Critical discussion of residue, displacement, and embodied sensation
• Interdisciplinary engagement with image, object, and spatiality
• Practical workshop integrating theory and artistic experimentation
• Opportunities for participants to generate and document creative outcomes

Alana Lake

Ring of Fire, 2024

220 x 200 x 120 cm

Steel, glass, silicone

Image courtesy of the artist

Bing-Chi Wu

Re-Materialised Solitude, 2025

Dimensions variable

Mixed media, collage

Image courtesy of the artist

Victoria King

What Remains, 2025

Dimensions Variable

Discarded materials, found objects

Image courtesy of the artist