Research Catalogue

Light Paintings: Material Processes, Optical Phenomena, and Artistic Implications. The Miracle of Light and Darkness as a Material Phenomenon

This research investigates how local sourcing practices in the Netherlands can enable the reuse of secondary food-related materials for ceramic glaze production, and how the exploration of existing networks through material research can contribute to the development of new cross-sector collaborations. Through a practice-based approach that bridges ceramic production, design research, and the restaurant industry, the study explores the potential of locally available “waste” materials, such as bones, shells, charcoals, and discarded glass, as viable resources for glaze making. The research combines material experimentation with qualitative fieldwork, including interviews and informal discussions with chefs, ceramicists, suppliers, and material practitioners. By tracing the origins, processing, and transformation of these secondary resources, the study critically examines the environmental impact and opacity of conventional glaze supply chains, which often rely on imported raw materials and energy-intensive extraction and transportation processes. Central to the research is the creation of a material archive that documents locally sourced secondary materials and their behavior in glaze recipes. This archive functions not only as a technical tool for ceramic experimentation, but also as a framework for understanding relationships between material flows, human practices, and local infrastructures. Drawing on the concept of “working in the minor key,” the research emphasizes learning through direct engagement, observation, and collaboration rather than predefined systems. The findings suggest that material research can act as a catalyst for new circular practices and cross-sector networks between restaurants and ceramic industry, fostering shared responsibility, creative exchange, and reduced material consumption. By reframing waste as a site of value and knowledge, this study proposes an alternative, locally embedded approach to glaze production that integrates sustainability, and social engagement.

This thesis is based on the integration of three complementary components: Giusirames's Treatise, the artistic and scientific research conducted through processes of material solidification, and the visual portfolio documenting the resulting works. These three elements form a coherent system, in which theory does not precede practice, nor does practice illustrate theory, but both emerge from a common conceptual core: the desire to interrogate matter as an active subject and not as a mere support.

Gotofuturism offers a conceptual lens for the current period marked by multiple crises—from armed conflicts and the rise of right-wing regimes to climate catastrophe and widespread social fatigue. It functions as an artistic strategy for coping with feelings of hopelessness while seeking new forms of engaged imagination. The concept emerges from historical avant-garde and post-avant-garde traditions and is positioned between a critical revision of the past and active engagement with the present. Through painting and object-based work, it examines issues such as the phenomenon of post-truth, growing financial precarity, and the rising influence of revisionist powers.

The project 4 Elements introduces four symbolic color-coded agents #ccff00, #000000, #c0c0c0, and #cc99ff through textile objects and installation in public space. These agents operate at the intersection of speculative fiction, game design, and posthuman myth-making, forming a visual scenario for possible future LARP-based narratives. Drawing from posthumanist, feminist, and environmental theory, the work addresses the tensions of creating amidst climate crisis, political instability, and dominant anthropocentric systems. It embraces nonlinearity and multispecies entanglements by situating its presence within the landscape as a porous, temporary gesture. Expanding on earlier experiments with participatory movement and costume in public space, the project resists fixed meaning in favor of symbolic drift—proposing alternative modes of being, sensing, and assembling in a world marked by collapse and transformation.

Cruising with Craft to the Ends of the Worlds: Practices of shattering, becoming scyborg and dancing with dragons as possible cartographies is an investigation of cruising with craft as a companion to explore how its languages and discourses contribute to processes of equity such as decolonization and can challenge ivory tower academic structures through its cracks and margins, the place of the undercommons. Thinking with craft becomes essential in scyborgism. As la paperson defines in A Third University is Possible a scyborg "is a queer turn of word that I offer to you to name the structural agency of persons who have picked colonial technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes." la paperson uses the scyborg within the academic institution to use the resources given for decolonial purposes when reconfigured. There is interest in how this idea can be expanded to other institutions such as the archive and the museum as well as the academy and artistic practice-based research with craft as a companion. Craft becomes crucial for its direct connection to the colonial framing of human and non-human and forces the consideration of the individual as well as the collective simultaneously. Collaborating and kinship making with artists and institutions of a vast array of disciplines has the potential to reassemble or reconfigure the current cultural systems of queerness and body politics while shattering the boundaries academically imposed on craft as a field. Unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of cultural institutions as unpacked by Kathryn Yousoff, there is an urgency to develop ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms. lambert deploys the shoal or sandbar in reference to the work of Tiffany Lethabo King’s work The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies to allow for constant shifting(s) and assemblage(s) to produce vibrations, meanings and embodied understandings. Through Natalie Loveless’s development of polydisciplinamory, a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating creates systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at, in regard to the othered body. These methods centralize joy and pleasure, making them crucial in developing alternative models of institutional existence. The thesis is comprised of a miscellany of compositions such as texts, images, objects and prior publications that have been assembled together to form this publication with Patrick Lacey and Jens Schildt. In this, there is no ending, no beginning, no index, only choices to be made and actions to be considered. The process of this assemblage marks a moment where work becomes material, context and tool for cruising once again. The person who encounters this becomes the research, acting in solidarity with Loveless’ resistance to the monography that explains and instead centers the value and importance of practice as the research itself.