Making Ecologies Symposium
A one-day symposium hosted by London Arts and Humanities Partnership and the Victoria and Albert Museum that brought together makers, researchers, and academics across craft, design, architecture, and material practices. The event explored how situated making and material ecologies shape contemporary approaches to craft and ecological challenges.
Through thematic panels and discussions, the symposium created a space to share knowledge and methods, examining how materials carry histories and values, and how making is shaped by place and lived experience. It also considered how craft and fabrication practices respond to ecological and technological challenges through processes of care. From extraction and material narratives to embodied craft knowledge and future material systems, the programme invited reflection on how we make, and how making, in turn, shapes our understanding of the world.
Through thematic panels and discussions, the symposium created a space to share knowledge and methods, examining how materials carry histories and values, and how making is shaped by place and lived experience. It also considered how craft and fabrication practices respond to ecological and technological challenges through processes of care. From extraction and material narratives to embodied craft knowledge and future material systems, the programme invited reflection on how we make, and how making, in turn, shapes our understanding of the world.
Gabriella Rhodes presented her MA research for the first time, Think Like a Mountain: Field Notes from a Shifting Coastline. The project explores how craft and material practice can reveal geological materials, particularly clays and soils, as active collaborators in living systems rather than passive resources. Situated on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales, it engages with a coastline undergoing rapid transformation due to climate-driven erosion.
Through site-responsive fieldwork, embodied practices, and material experimentation with clay unearthed through landslips, the work traces entanglements between geology, ecology, and human histories. It positions craft as a relational, post-extractive practice, grounded in place and more-than-human worlds.
A recording of the event will be published in the future.
Link to event.
Through site-responsive fieldwork, embodied practices, and material experimentation with clay unearthed through landslips, the work traces entanglements between geology, ecology, and human histories. It positions craft as a relational, post-extractive practice, grounded in place and more-than-human worlds.
A recording of the event will be published in the future.
Link to event.
Organisation: Victoria & Albert Museum
Type: Symposium
Location: London
Date: May 2026
Type: Symposium
Location: London
Date: May 2026
