Material Memories: Design and EvocationThis book examines the way that objects 'speak' to us through the memories that we associate with them. Instead of viewing the meaning of particular designs as fixed and given, by looking at the process of evocation it finds an open and continuing dialogue between things, their makers and their consumers. This is not, however, to diminish the role of design in shaping human consciousness. The contributors do not view objects as blank carriers onto which humans project prior psychic dramas, but rather, place crucial importance on the precise materials from which they are made, their social, economic and historic reasons for being, and the way that we interact with them through our senses. This book therefore studies the physical within the intellectual, directly testing the concept of material culture. With telling illustrations, and spanning the Renaissance to the present day, leading scholars converge across disciplines to explore the souvenir-value of jewellery, textiles, the home, the urban space, modernist design, photography, the museum and even the sunken wreck. Together they show how the sense of the past and of history, far from being a 'radical illusion' as some post-modernists claim, has been a deeply felt reality. |
Contents
The Physical Past | 1 |
Susan Stewart | 17 |
The Material and The Mortal | 37 |
Copyright | |
12 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Material Memories: Design and Evocation Jeremy Aynsley,Christopher Breward,Marius Kwint No preview available - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic album architectural artefacts artists associated banners become body British Cambridge Canada Canadian Charlotte Perriand city's civic fame civic memory collection constructed context Corbusier death decoration described display domestic élite embroidery Empire England English Enid Marx Ernö Goldfinger essay example exhibition Fascist female Figure film Frank Lascelles Goldfinger Grey Grey's historic buildings household human Ibid imagination imperial included involuntary memory Italian jewellery Kettle's Yard Lady Lascelles Le Corbusier living lock of hair London Lord manor house material culture material forms Material Memories material objects means migrant Museum narrative National Norwich Oxford pageant painted past photographs political popular present Proust relation relationship Renaissance representation ritual RMS Titanic role royal Saint George sampler Sibford Gower social souvenir space specific status stitched survival Susan Stewart symbolic tactile things touch tourist tradition trans urban Victorian visual Walter Benjamin Willow Road women