︎MUIREANN NIC AN BHEATHA   

TOUCHING: A RESEARCH METHOD IN ART AND DESIGN (2022)


When we want to check the facts, to verify our ‘epistemic grip on reality’, as the philosopher Ophelia Deroy puts it, the sense for which we reach is touch. And while touch can certainly be used to elicit and ‘grip’ knowledge, it can also be used in a more tentative and probing modality — to feel our way toward truths that are both within and yet always beyond the grasp.

This publication contains interviews, research samples, recipes, quotations, and reflections on the research process by tutors, workshop instructors and students all across the KABK community. The range of materials and processes engaged with is diverse and the approaches are as unique as fingerprints, but a premise embedded in the DNA of material research is that experiments are shared. And so, whether your work is about addressing one of the urgent social issues of our day or pursuing one of the more enduring questions about the relationship between humans and the environment, we hope you will find in this book the inspiration, but also the ingredients, you need to recreate and adapt your own variant of material research.


My research methods were shared in the book along with recipes and guidelines.



DIS_SEMINAR
Worshop on touching as a research method in Art and Design, where I held a bioplastics workshop, sharing my reasearch around working with biomaterials, and teaching people how to cook and colour bioplastics.