What role does ‘the materiality of things’ play in our relationship to the objects we create and consume?

Thingness, and it's accompanying symposium, reflected on how objects come to be and how the making of an object affords it a 'voice'.  Selected works by five artists and designers collectively explore how they engage with objects through materiality and the making process. Building on Camberwell’s reputation for making, the exhibition proposed to create a dialogue around notions of the maker, the making process and the material. The symposium facilitated an exchange of ideas between designers, theoreticians, makers of objects, curators, art and design historians, anthropologists, educationalists and material scientists around the theme of ‘thingness’.

The design of the publication was comprised of two parts - the essay and the artist's content, and so the title running through the backbone of the book acts a binding force for these two separate elements.  The aesthetic of the publication follows on from the ethics of the exhibition itself, and was important to make the book a tactile object, designed with the value of things in mind.  The title itself is softly printed in Gill Sans wood block, leaving traces of the grain, and used different paper stock, for texture.  While this running title page was printed in-house, downstairs in the letterpress studio, the inside was commercially produced - showing a further sympathy for duality of purpose.

For the 'Thingness' symposium, the catalogue had to be re-distributed for the accompanying event, and repackaged with a schedule of events, and so a wrap around program which slots onto the top of the book, and echoes the font cover, was designed. 

The Thingness catalogue was designed by Freddy Williams and Paul Hardman. It has a hand-set and printed cover and has been bound as a concertina.  The exhibition ran from 10th May - 10 June 2011 at Camberwell Space