Material Healing

Fabrics, materials, and substances changing our concept of remedy

Join us  at 9 am (AZ time) on Wednesday, March 30, when we explore how fashion, textiles, and the emerging properties of kombucha are changing our understanding of healing, cooperation, and well-being. Registration via ZOOM!

We all know how it feels to be in clothing that makes us feel good. The whisper of silk against our skin, the coziness of our favorite cotton sweatpants, the scarf that swaddles our neck just so.  Now, artists and scientists are exploring textiles, fashion, and base materials as not only materials that passively make us feel better but as active participants in our health. Artists Galina Mihaleva and Laura Splan and biologist Gissel Marquez Alcaraz have been developing vests that can detect breast cancer, exploring materials that have cooperative properties, and creating collaborative textiles art in remote encounters with strangers during the pandemic. Textiles are no longer just a matter of fashion but they are fashioning our health.

Bring your favorite piece of clothing or textiles that make you feel better or add in healing and be prepared to give us a one sentence explanation about why.

BIOS

Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through tactile experiences and sensory encounters. Her work invites an investigation of detail, calling into question how things are made and what they are made of. Using a range of traditional and new media techniques, she reconsiders perceptions and representations of the body to examine cultural constructions of self and other that are often in conflict with our biomedical realities. Her conceptually based projects destabilize notions of the presence and absence of bodies, evoking the mutability of categories that delineate their status. Material and process serve as conceptual underpinnings and catalysts for speculation within the narrative implications of the work.

Her artworks have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation and the 2021 Bruges Triennial with the timely theme of “trauma”. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Museum of Arts & Design and New York Hall of Science and is represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the NYU Langone Health Art Collection. Her lace virus series, “Doilies” (2004), was recently exhibited in a former medieval hospital that served plague victims in Bruges, Belgium in the thirteenth century. Reviews and articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Discover, designboom, American Craft, and Fiberarts. Publications featuring her artwork include “The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art & Architecture” and “Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects”. Splan’s research and residencies have been supported by the Jerome Foundation, uCity Science Center, and the Knight Foundation. Her research as a member of the New Museum’s NEW INC Creative Science incubator included collaborations with scientists to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biotechnological landscape. Her recent exhibitions featuring molecular animations and sculptures made with artifacts of the laboratory, include a large-scale immersive installation in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Her current solo exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum, “Rhapsody for an Expanded Biotechnological Apparatus”, engages viewers with the tactile materiality of animals who produce antibodies for human vaccines.

Galina Mihaleva, Ph.D., is a costume, fashion, and wearable technology designer, and artist. She is an Associate Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University, where she teaches Fashion and Wearable Technology and Materials Matters: Materials and Techniques.

Prior to joining ASU, Galina directed the Lab of Open Matters LOOM and taught at the school of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University for eight years, focusing on interdisciplinary research and blurring the lines between fashion, engineering and material science. Her artistic practice and academic research deal primarily with the dialogue between body and dress, driven by the idea of having both a physical and a psychological relationship with a garment as a responsive clothing - wearable technology.

She is the founder of Galina Couture where her team develops exclusive collections of one-of-a-kind designs. Her art and design work has been shown in festivals, galleries and museums across the United States, Asia, Central and South America, Africa and Europe. Mihaleva’s artistic work has been exhibited in leading international venues, including the Art and Science museum in Marina Bay Sands in Singapore; the National Museum of Singapore; the Nelsen Museum of WOW in New Zealand; Textiles Museum in Gent, Belgium; the Phoenix Art Museum; Scottsdale Museum Of Contemporary Art; in Berlin, Germany for BEYOND; Morocco for the Smart Tiles Salon; Look Forward Fashion Tech Festival at the Gaite Lyrique venue in Paris, France; Cannes, France; Sochi, Russia, for Podium; Ecuador for Pielle Moda; Venice for the Venice Film Festival; Istanbul; Tokyo; Argentina; and Egypt. In 2007, she was nominated for the best design award at Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. Galina received the Rumi award in the USA and first place at the Tiffany’s Paris Fashion Week in 2016. She has also been a finalist for the 70th Cannes Film Festival Red Carpet, Cannes, France, and for three years at the World of Wearable Art in New Zealand.

Galina holds a master’s degree in Fashion and Textile from the Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia, Bulgaria (1992) and a Ph.D.in smart textiles from the Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia, Bulgaria and Gent University, Belgium (2014).

Beyond in-depth analysis of cultural values, she combines traditional textile methods and techniques while developing and using new radical materials and innovative technologies.

Unbounded by the old rules, Galina now offers her work as a testimony to the power of beauty and expression, and to the transcendent human spirit. She regards her works as being timeless.

https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/wearables/

http://galinamihaleva.com

Gissel Marquez Alcaraz is an Evolutionary Biology PhD student working with Dr. Carlo Maley and Dr. Athena Aktipis at Arizona State University. Gissel has been studying kombucha and the bacterial and yeast interactions that take place within the system for nearly four years. Although Gissel continues her research with kombucha, she is in charge of other projects looking at how the microbiome affects cancer progression and cancer across multiple species. 

Recently, Gissel has started working with Dr. Galina Mihaleva attempting to make a biodegradable material using Kombucha. Together they plan on putting the biofilm that grows in kombucha through experiments to make it, water resistant, durable and accessible for making biodegradable textiles and materials. 

SPONSORS:

The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks