An Elastic Continuum (Symposium)

The ‘New Materialist Research Group’ (NMRG) presented: An Elastic Continuum, an international exhibition & symposium featuring the work of 17 contemporary artists at S1 Artspace, curated by NMRG co-leads Rebecca Howard & Victoria Sharples.

Arriving from the proposition of ‘skin’, An Elastic Continuum offered an interface with skinnings: surfaces, architectural structures, organisms, membranes and embalmings. The works on show presented a plethora of intersectional readings that transected ontologies of animacy and the sensorial, biotechnical interventions (birth, growth, ailment, and death), human, animal and plant bodies, and spaces of trans-ition, whether -gender, -species or interior-exterior relations).

In An Elastic Continuum, the premise of ‘skin’ was purposefully layered, aggregated and poriferous, as with epidermal and geological stratum, as seen in the work of Carter, Kempley and Lucas. Clifford and Vann’s practices centred on protection and exposure of the soft body: PPE and chronic dermatological conditions. With a focus on façade, veneer and construction, the work of Fisher, Howard and Speed invited thought on the parallels between skin and built spaces through folds, pattern, and costume. Sharples, Stanley and Walker accounted for the liminality of skin and the body as a transitory site, whether that be in relation to buildings that temporarily store human bodies (as with mortuaries), or through interior-exterior relations (as with the mouth or uterus). In place of the subject-object binary, the practice of Hamilton, Von Munchhausen and Barrett provided a more permeable and participatory account of matter, where material affordances yielded questions of autonomy and the sensible. And the work of Hughes, Squires, and Rushton signalled the ways in which human and plant matters are intimately connected through physiology, sexuality, and the military-industrial complex. Through expansive readings of ‘skin’, An Elastic Continuum provided a public mediation and sensory interface with the noun, organ, and material.

An Elastic Continuum positioned curation – through exhibition-making and public programming – as a generative method of speculative analysis, bringing artistic practices into dialogue with posthumanist and new materialist discourse. The project extended scholarly research beyond academic contexts and into civic cultural spaces, creating opportunities for public engagement and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange.