Parallel Practices
Parallel practices was a pilot project of residencies, partnering makers and medical professionals, led by King’s College London and the Crafts Council.
Through these residencies, the project aimed to demonstrate the mutual benefits and value of collaboration between biomedical scientists and craft makers.
The video below gives an overview of the Parallel practices project and its four artist residencies, which took place in 2014.
The project is intended to stimulate learning and innovation through a focus on the body, materials and processes that inform clinical outcomes and artistic practice. This will lead to new ways of working in collaboration and showcase tangible outcomes such as new artistic work and medical interventions in craft making.
The residency teams
Richard Wingate and Tamsin van Essen, ceramicist, who explored anatomy through a series of new directions. Tamsin used clay to interpret and mimic the same physical and material processes and transformations as anatomy.
Matthew Howard, lecturer in robotics at the Department of Informatics, and Karina Thompson, textile maker, stimulated debate about the nature of stitch in the 21st century and show its value in cutting-edge robotics.
Richard Wingate, Principal Investigator at the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s, and Celia Pym, textile maker, who explored ‘mending’ in anatomy and the relationships between care and caretaking in textile repair and studying anatomy.
Thrishantha Nanayakkara, principal investigator of the Laboratory for Morphological Computation and Learning, Les Bicknell, book artist, and Naomi Mcintosh, jeweller, explored extending current soft robotics through model-making and looked at ways of controlling movement and articulation of objects in order to build new structures.
This partnership project forms part of the Crafts Council’s Portfolio and Innovation strands of activity and is supported by the university's Culture team.