writing

Hyperlocal materialism

A version of this document was presented at the College Art Association’s annual conference on February 15, 2020 in Chicago.

Kate Hampel and NIcole Seisler, February 2020

For a long time we’ve been working in parallel ways in our studios, separated both by medium and by distance (Nicole in Los Angeles and Kate in Chicago until a recent move to Southeast Ohio). While our materials are different, we share a deep interest in the unique properties and locational identities of those materials, and so what began as a conversation about our individual approaches of foraging for materials has become a collaborative practice where we share both our material knowledge and our sense of place with each other through the materials we find locally. 

 Hyperlocal Materialism in the idea grounding this work–it’s a form of hyper-site-specificity, in which locally-sourced materials inform the process and practice of making. We’re approaching our collaborative work from this perspective, with a project that brings together our two very different practices–both interdisciplinary and invested in materiality. Working together, we’re able to reconsider our materials to bring in the performativity and the site-specificity of being here now. …

MEDIUMS IN CRISIS

In December of 2019 I was invited to contribute to Board of Photography, a forum for ongoing conversation about media and interdisciplinarity.

Fiber is a medium both in and out of crisis.

In crisis, because degree programs in Fiber are still closing, as they have been for decades. Not long ago the Cleveland Institute of Art folded Fiber and Material Studies into Sculpture, creating a new Sculpture + Expanded Media program. They also relocated their looms and dyeing equipment to a fledgling non-profit space which now hosts students in the same for-credit weaving classes they used to take on campus. What are we to make of this outsourcing of fiber? On the one hand fiber’s tactility and materiality are too interesting to do away with entirely, on the other hand too contingent to maintain. …