Epistemologies of Stuff (2022)

‘Epistemologies of Stuff’ was made with the collected detritus of the University of Hertfordshire’s Microfluidics Engineering Lab.

I spent a year with Prof Ian Johnson, Dr Bel Tan and Dr Loic Coudron attempting to learn the basics of microfluidics so I could know enough to make ‘Epistemologies of Stuff’. It is an artwork about categories, about how we see, know and understand.

The stuff I collected from the Microfluidics Engineering Lab was displayed in the light of 3 different disciplines – anthropology, archaeology and art history. Anthropology, archaeology and art history have distinct ways of talking about artefacts and contextualising human achievement. In this artwork, I play with the stereotypes and clichés that the different types of museum tend to fall into.