IED AWARDS 2019
Ms Maker
Performance artist and co-founder of the Institute of Making, Zoe
Laughlin, won the 2019 Inspire, Support, Achieve award. Here, in
edited excerpts from a longer interview, she describes how she got
into engineering, and the importance of materials
ED: You have said that there’s no such
thing as materials, only structures. What
do you mean?
Zoe Laughlin (ZL): “That’s as much of
a provocation and a conversation-starter
as anything. It’s really to say, there’s only
ever stuff – materials as they manifest
themselves in the world. You might
say, copper is on the periodic table;
it has this many protons, neutrons or
electrons, it will have this type of valence.
Those are properties that give it certain
characteristics when you nd it, even if
you only have a lump of copper rod. But
if I cut that rod in half, one bit might live
in a drawer and another bit on a shelf,
and they’ll patina differently and react
differently. If you handle one more, it will
oxidize more rapidly; the material status
of it is always in ux. You have the idea of
copper on one hand, and then you have
copper in the world. And I suppose that
it’s ghting that sense of materials not
really existing - they’re always an idea
that’s then applied to something, and it
might be a thing on the periodic
table that you
would call an element, or it might be an
idea of a family of something that you
might call glass.”
ED: Are you saying there is only a limited
use in calling all of those different types
the same thing?
ZL: “Ultimately it’s a good enough
description that gets everyone agreeing.
We know what we all mean. But you are
sitting right now in the Materials Library.
Being surrounded by stuff, you start to
realise that you can map the similarities
and differences between things in a way
that would be very different from just
putting all of the metals on one shelf.
Actually the powdered copper maybe has
more in common with corn ower than
another bit of copper, because of its
neness; the fact that you can blow it; you
can breathe it in. You could just have a
shelf of things you could inhale. It would
be equally valid.
“Another problem is that people
only see the object, they don’t see the
material. They just see ‘chair’, but they
never think ‘polypropylene chair’ – or not
until maybe you introduce a material
that challenges their preconceptions
about how a material might
function, like if the chair was
made of glass. When you
change the material, maybe
you start to realise that
always the material is
doing something, that the
material and the object are
inextricably linked.
“But when you see new technologies
like 3D printers that offer a new process
and potentially new materials, you start
making new objects. The form and the
material and the function are inextricably
linked. When you have new machines
that can create new forms in new ways,
you don’t only get objects that have new
functions, but you also need to address
the material it should be made out of, and
the forms that you’re choosing. It’s really
dif cult to imagine totally new things.
“For me, making is ultimately de ned
as the relationship between a material
and a process. We put the Materials
Library next to a workshop so we have
an overt selection of processes to hand.
But you know something different about
wood the minute you try to cut it in half.
That’s different to holding a bit, which
is different to looking at a picture of it.
In a way, we’re trying to look at all of
that which constitutes an experience of
a material and a process. That is the
making of something. And there’s value in
the doing, I think.”
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