Performing Matter

Interior Surface and Feminist Actions

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Performing Matter inquires about the material constitution of interiors as sites of political protest and ethical exchange. By forwarding feminist agency and a concern for the emancipation of interiors and their surfaces, this work oscillates between practical aspects of building construction, material properties, making processes, and embodied knowledge concerning interior materiality and spatiality.

Dr Julieanna Preston is a spatial artist and designer working through sculptural objects, performative installations, interior interventions, building renovations and speculative furniture designs. Her projects are developed via a spatial-writing and transdisciplinary creative practice and have been exhibited at such events as the Arts Festival in Auckland and Whirlwinds, UCL, London. She has edited Interior Atmospheres (Architectural Design, 2008), Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (Wiley, 2006), Interior Economies (IDEA, 2012); and has published in Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture (Ashgate, 2011) and After Taste: Expanded practice in Interior Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). Julieanna teaches at the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

“Julieanna Preston captures and mobilises the vibrancy of interior life in a book of delightful wit and light strength of matter. Configured in four ‚suites‘, she shows the capacious interiors and spatial designs that a performative material practice enables for the contemporary designer. Throughout these performative acts, enriched conceptual, physical and digital transversal relationships are constructed, so that the design languages, materials, together with the traditional and advanced technologies available for use, resonate with poetic and ethical expressions of human and nonhuman life.“
Dr Peg Rawes, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, London