Online symposium: Adventures in Chemistry and Technology Exploring the Legacy of 19th Century Innovation in Textiles, Jewellery and Materials

Dr Jo Horton FRSA is convening the online symposium, Adventures in Chemistry and Technology Exploring the Legacy of 19thCentury Innovation in Textiles, Jewellery and Materials, at De Montfort University on the 11th September, 2020.

The symposium will stimulate discussion on historical innovation in aesthetic design and the backbone of modern textile design, fashion and jewellery-materials, chemistry and making technology. It aims to discuss the importance of stories of chemists and early material scientists contributing to the world of craft and design, and of makers and artisan manufacturers becoming chemists and inventors. It is hoped to draw upon a wide range of disciplines, engaging with design historians, jewellery historians, economic and industrial historians, textile, fashion and jewellery practitioners, historians of science, museum and gallery curators, trade bodies and company archivists.  

For further details and registration please follow the link: 

 http://adventureandlegacy.our.dmu.ac.uk/ 

About the Convener

Dr Jo Horton is a textile designer and academic. Her interdisciplinary practice-based research explores electrodeposition and the metallisation of cloth as a creative opportunity in embellishment and surface design. She draws on the history of chemistry and the science of making, through engagement with the work of Elkington and Co. and contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to textiles, jewellery and materials. 

Her award-winning work has been exhibited at the Festival of Textiles 2016, at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London,  the Vittoria Street Gallery, Birmingham and appeared as artist-consultant on the BBC4 series Art, Passion and Power: The Story of the Royal Collection in 2018. Horton has presented at conferences as diverse as the British Association of Victorian Studies,  The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry and the International Council of Museums-Costume Collections. The book chapter “Growing Surface Between Electrochemistry and Mixed Media Textiles” in Surface and Apparition:The Immateriality of Modern Surface will be published by Bloomsbury in November, 2020.