Expanded Material Boundaries: Risk taking and Process-led Textile Research

This paper portrays the journey of a collaborative research project between the authors Rebecca Hoyes and Anne Marr, both educators and researchers at BA Textile Design at Central Saint Martins. The project started as an open-ended research investigation exploring existing material boundaries in the hope to develop new hybrid ceramic – textile materials.

The Material Boundaries project was designed to start first steps into these new territories, to consciously experiment beyond the unknown, generate a deeper understanding of future craft processes and open up further opportunities for co-design with other disciplines.

The paper outlines an investigation into where ceramic begins and textiles end and the transitional space in between them. The findings of this paper identify risk-taking and co-design as essential strategies to invite valuable set-backs, disasters as well as happy accidents and outlines the essential key stages of an open – ended research process: Mapping New Terrain, Material Investigation, Trans-disciplinary Feedback and Critical Evaluation.

The project took risk-taking to the extreme by firing material hybrids in a kiln, often ‘producing’ not even a trace of dust left-overs. This paper presents a visual journey of the reflective mapping process, illustrating the key stages of the research. Trans-disciplinary feedback from colleagues supported the progression of the project applying ceramic and textile thinking to the journey.

For full-time educators, time to develop new research is often very limited, which makes it challenging to develop deeper knowledge and risk open-ended new research questions, as tweaking existing techniques guarantees a “successful” research outcome in a short span of time. At the same time textile design has rapidly expanded into a more interdisciplinary practice and educators need to keep a breast these new directions if they want to teach their students valuable future skills. In particular the broadening of disciplines in which the methods and concepts of textile design are taken as catalyst and vehicle for new collaborative ways of making. This paper suggests methods and processes to invite more risk taking into textile research curricula and investigates how tacit knowledge about materials can be integrated and communicated within the framework of research.