Dr Claire Todd gained her doctorate in 2016.

Movement and Making: Creating kinesthetic narratives through applied art practice.

The material applied art making processes of ceramic, glass and woven textile support a focus on body movement and what that body movement may reveal. By attending to body movement within the making process and by inscribing motion in art objects – the artist advances material based methods of recovering and eliciting intangible and invisible knowledge.

Through art practice and contextual research the project produces new artworks and documents the co-motion of body and materials. A multidisciplinary analysis of applied art synthesizes modal approaches to anthropology and new materialist theories of animate inorganic matter. The applied art object is established as a forum for description, storytelling and means to access the life world of an other. These narratives are held and generated through the implicit and explicit motion of the art object. The object created as a space to encounter movement based knowing. This practice-led research contributes an understanding of applied art as imminently performative, as a space for self and social advocacy, improvisation and dialogic encounter.

The project has generated new material practice based knowledge into applied art object making as:

• the experiential production of shared contexts;
• physical (kinesthetic) processes and sensible matter that originates insight through movement.

These findings maybe used and taken forward by artists and researchers working in the fields of applied art, arts and health and modal anthropology.

This AHRC research project defines art objects in performative terms as systems of action, in order to examine ceramic and glass as perceptual and intuitive conduits of movement, that have the capacity to elicit corporal acts of beholding and embodied remembering. The research situates objects as extensions of pleasure surfaces with the potential to attune our senses to interconditional states