Christine & Stephen Procter Interdisciplinary Craft Symposium 2026  

This symposium will demonstrate how digital tools can advance creative, cultural, and making practices. It also interrogates a broader definition of technology as any purposeful transformation of material, the value of ingenuity, and implications on ecology. Focusing on glass and ceramics, we will explore how technologies shape contemporary material practices through presentations, demonstrations, and discussions that examine the intersections of studio-based approaches with industrial and engineering processes. It considers what can be learned from Indigenous understandings of technology as relational, adaptive, and grounded in place, and reflects on how glass and ceramic practices are responding to the pressures of a rapidly changing cultural and climatic environment. These conversations ask what role these material disciplines might play in imagining more sustainable and ethical futures.  

 We are delighted to welcome Norwood Viviano as our keynote speaker, a leading contemporary artist whose practice integrates digital 3D computer modelling and printing technologies with traditional glassblowing and casting processes. Viviano’s sculptural work explores data, movement, and the intersection of material, technology, and public space.  

The symposium also offers an exciting pre-conference workshop with Norwood Viviano and is supported by the School of Art and Design through the 2025 Strategic Research Seed Grants.

Light refreshments/tea/coffee provided