About

The Project

The Material City project is an ongoing, evolving, experiment in collecting and new materialism. I’m fascinated by the way people experience the city and the materials that it’s made of, so I collect bits of Manchester in jars. The aim is to make you stop and think about the everyday things that go into our urban environment. Things like brick, tarmac, sandstone, and canal water; things that we walk over, walk past, and ignore as part of the background noise; things that hold the urban world together.

I like to ask people to consider each material separately, which is why each one gets its own jar. Every material that makes up Manchester has its own history and cultural impact. Every material has different properties, and humans have used them differently because of these properties. The Material City project explores this and gives the city a different, non-human, voice.

Find The Material City on Instagram

What is new materialism/materiality: my take (brief)

Materialism is a way of looking at "stuff" (for example: plastic bottles, a kitchen sponge, a hairbrush; or maybe something less ordinary: a crown, or a uranium fuel rod) that recognises it's material properties: is something hard, soft, rough, heavy etc and what makes it like that. There are ways of doing this that see materials and things as passive. That means only humans have agency and only humans drive any interaction with these materials. The choices are all human and the object has no bearing on these choices.

New materialism sees matter, objects, and things as active. It moves away from human agency, and our very anthropocentric way of viewing the world. New materialism sees that matter has an agency of its own that interacts with humans.