We discovered Katherine Pogson through her uncommonly heartful and incisive contribution to Kate Fletcher’s Design and Nature: A Partnership. Katherine’s piece, titled (in part) ‘Towards…Something More Liveable’* grabbed our attention: “For design, this suggests an uncoupling of the link between established economies of desire and new ideas about value, to redirect the creative urge outward and away from production, towards community engagement, resilience building, and knowledge sharing.”

So we invited her to come speak to us about her art practice and her research, and she agreed! Katherine will outline her creative journey, what her fieldwork means to her, “redirecting the creative urge,” and the problems with being nested in the capitalists system (which we all feel!) as a prompt to action.

Then talk about inspirations towards alternative fashion systems  "community engagement, resilience building and knowledge sharing."

Her practice-based research combines anthropology, craft and environmental theory to explore how making, and letting go of making, can open a material dialogue about human and ecological boundary constructs.

*This expression in turn is quoted from Donna Haraway at AURA Conference in Santa Cruz, May 2014, available on vimeo, complete source in Design and Nature.

Tickets $10 public; free for members of the chapter and the Slow Clothing Cohort

ABOUT KATHERINE POGSON

Katherine Pogson worked as a designer-maker for fifteen years, before an encounter with the natural world began to lead her in a very different direction. 

Currently a PhD candidate in the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at University of the Arts London, where she also teaches Fashion Cultures and Histories, her research looks at the role of creativity in recalibrating our relationship with other-than-human nature.

Combining citizen science fieldwork, textiles as data visualisation, video and writing, Katherine is interested in how collaborative processes can extend our attention to the natural world beyond visual inspiration, shifting the focus to lived experience and practices of nurturing, to rethink what creativity means in the Anthropocene age.

“Towards… something more liveable: A Moth Journey” her chapter in Design and Nature, A Partnership (Routledge 2019) outlines the beginnings of this process.  Link to the web page: https://katherine-pogson.squarespace.com/a-moth-journey