Co-working with Things: How Furnished Spaces Contribute to the Emergence of Artworks

This practice-based doctoral project asks how furnished spaces such as the studio, workshop and home, contribute to the processes from which artworks emerge. The project examines both the work that things do, when they are arranged as furnished spaces, and the reproductive work involved in furnishing working spaces and maintaining them.
A series of practice-based approaches (painting, drawing and print-making) explore both an existing furnished space (the print-making workshop) testing its affordances with a set of rule-based procedures, and also explore furnishing a home-studio as a working space, by exploiting the constraints and opportunities of changing domestic arrangements.

A connection emerged between new materialist approaches such as Karen Barad’s, who sees apparatuses of production such as scientific labs as labourers, through the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, who advocated for a different relationship with technology, where maintenance is revalued as a privileged relationship with machines and materials that are active and work, with feminist autonomist theorists that sought to demonstrate the productivity of the unpaid and undervalued practices of social reproduction.