Moving Materials is a body of work culminating in an exhibition of mutable sculptures created through performance art gestures that involved sensing objects. The exhibition set the conditions for invited guests to engage with these sculptural forms through conversations and physical interactions. Materials were everyday objects including paper, wood, textiles, plastics, plants and found objects chosen to provide a diversity of sensorial qualities. Materials were assembled into sculptures and exhibited in the gallery. Some sculptures were only photographed, titled, and compiled in an image book. Because the sculptures were mutable, the book revealed a history of reconfigured forms and evolving relationalities evoked through these material compositions. Images served as still points for visitors to the exhibition, as a trajectory of moving materials. Moving Materials focuses on the dynamic relationality between materials, forces, and bodies as the artwork - with sensation as the provocateur of forces interacting. The cross-disciplinary approach to moving materials, performance, and sculptural composition draws on Elizabeth Grosz’s ideas of art as interrelated intensities, affects, and cosmological forces. Timothy Morton’s ideas about the inter-relationality of objects further contextualizes the wider implications of examining relations with materials. Discussions of contemporary artworks by artists Sherri Hay, Cassils, and Dana Michel provide further context for how object-relational movement inscribes meaning in the artwork.

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