The Mater Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

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The Mater Podcast

Maddie Rose Hills

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/24d. Total Eps: 32

The Mater Podcast explores materials through the eyes of artists and researchers. Host Maddie Rose Hills invites two guests to speak together about a material central to their practice. We will be speaking with seed keepers, artists, geographers, media theorists, writers, philosophers, archaeologists, and curators about the materials that fascinate them. The podcast is created off the back of Mater, a research project initiated by Maddie in 2021. Mater commissions new writing on the subject of materials, as well as hosting artist interviews and exhibitions. More at @mater________ & https://mater.digital/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recent rankings

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Apple Podcasts

🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
22/08/2026
#83
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
21/08/2026
#43
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
20/08/2026
#27
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
13/08/2026
#79
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
12/08/2026
#48
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
23/07/2026
#85
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
22/07/2026
#52
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
08/07/2026
#52
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
16/06/2026
#90
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
15/06/2026
#50

Spotify

No recent rankings available

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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https://marta.la/exhibitions/various-artists-objects-for-a-heavenly-cave
3 shares
https://joya-air.org/joya-mater-apply
3 shares
https://www.shaharlivnedesign.com/
2 shares

https://www.instagram.com/mater________
20 shares
https://www.instagram.com/softcoreny
2 shares
https://www.instagram.com/hfletch
2 shares

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RSS feed quality

Good

Score global : 79%

Publication history

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Latest published episodes

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Earth Materials with Heidi Gustafson & Belinda Blignaut

Episode 8

Friday, August 23, 2024 • Duration 58:04

On ochre, wild clay and foraging! This week I am joined by the magnetic pairing that is Heidi Gustafson and Belinda Blignaut. When I first came across the sculptures of the artist Belinda Blignaut I was blown away by them. Made from unprocessed clay and other found materials from her immediate surroundings, tapping into ideas around transformation. Though it took me a long time to actually reach out to Belinda and tell her what a fan I was, images of her works have been pasted on my studio wall and saved on Instagram for several years.

When we spoke on the phone a few weeks ago Belinda suggested we invite Heidi Gustafson to join us in conversation today.. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Heidi’s work in more detail since then.. Heidi is ‘a recovering philosopher who forages and crushes rock for a living.’ Her Book of Earth is an immersive introduction into the world of ochre, a naturally occurring mineral used to make pigment. Heidi’s cabin in the rural North Cascades shelters the Ochre Sanctuary project, which contains more than 600 pigments from around the planet.. a transforming body and future earthwork made with ochres and earth pigments gathered by humans worldwide.

We spoke about the body, and Belinda’s journey through health and healing. The body is central to Belinda’s work - the Mud Rights practice sees her covering her body with earth, creating an earth skin and lying down in the ground.. It is a still, meditative and contemplative experience of re-connection.

Heidi spoke about the vastly broad array of colours and forms that an ochre can take, how they have been a way of understanding her connection to earth, and how ochres are connected to our bodies through our material make-up.

Find Belinda & Heidi on Instagram: @belinda_blignaut @heidilynnheidilynn

Find out more about Heidi’s Ochre Sanctuary: https://earlyfutures.com/ochrearchive/

Heidi’s book, Book of Earth: https://earlyfutures.com/book-of-earth/

Belinda also organises the Wild Clay retreat: @wildclayretreat

We are on Instagram at @Mater________

We also have a website with 19 commissioned pieces of writing which can all be read for free on our website mater.digital

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Horsehair with Nicola Turner & Mick Sheridan

Episode 7

Monday, August 12, 2024 • Duration 41:45

I am joined by the wonderful Nicola Turner & Mick Sheridan, speaking about sculptures, upholstery, waste, horsehair and wool..

Nicola Turner: https://www.instagram.com/nicolaturner.art/?hl=en

Mick Sheridan: https://www.instagram.com/m.s.upholstery/?hl=en

Nicola is an artist with a background in set and costume design. She has designed for The Royal Opera House, National Theatre and Sydney Opera House to name a few.. Today we will be talking about her sculptures. As an artist Turner investigates dissolution of boundaries, liminal states, and continuous exchanges across ecosystems.. exploring the interconnection of life and death, human and non- human, attraction and repulsion. She combines found objects that hold traces of memory, with the shapes of living forms, and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair - a material used previously for bedding and furniture. Her sprawling sculpture, The Meddling Fiend, in the Royal Academy courtyard has been a highlight for many visitors to this year’s Summer Exhibition.

Mick is a second generation upholsterer based in Wales, proficient in both traditional and modern methods, and specialising in British wool fabrics. Mick’s Guerilla Reupholstery project finds fly tipped or discarded furniture on the streets, and transforms them into something new.. Using as much of the existing materials as possible and augmenting that with waste products from their reupholstery business. The chairs are sculptural, several being made in collaboration with an artist, and one with a Designer/Weaver.

Mick's Guerilla Upholsterer account: https://www.instagram.com/guerrilla_upholsterer/?hl=en

The Meddling Fiend at The Royal Academy : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7gVTwxvhPk

Julie Ann Sheridan: https://www.instagram.com/sheridanjulieann/

Sadie Campbell: https://www.instagram.com/sadiedidi/

Find us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mater________/?hl=en

Minerals & Fiction with Deborah Tchoudjinoff & Oscar Salguero

Episode 6

Sunday, July 28, 2024 • Duration 42:10

A fascinating conversation with Deborah Tchoudjinoff and Oscar Salguero about geology, minerals, technology and fiction

Deborah is a multidisciplinary artist based in London who works across sculpture and digital media. She has worked with AR, VR, Unreal Engine, combined with sculpture made from wood or metal to present mixed media installations. Often beginning with a locality or research concept, she considers what the form is through the process of material and visual experimentations. Her practice engages with the temporal and spatial aspects of ecologies, in particular how technology, constructs, remembers, and forgets the stories of past and future ecologies. She is influenced by fiction, world-building, and otherworldly aesthetics.

Oscar is an independent curator, researcher, and archivist. His exhibition NEO MINERALIA presented a selection of new geological specimens crafted by ten international artists. The exhibition suggests recent rock formations no longer fit within the traditional groups: Igneous, Metamorphic, and Sedimentary. Instead, the era of human influence on the climate and environment has introduced two post-natural rocks: Synthetic and Digital. Salguero is also the founder of Interspecies Library - the first archive dedicated to the study and advancement of artists’ books exploring alternative interspecies futures.

Deborah is on Instagram at: deboraht_ff

Oscar is on Instagram at softcoreny

Find us on Instagram at Mater________

Our website it mater.digital

Projects & people referenced:

The Toaster Project, , 2011

Deep Time Matters with Miriam Sentler & Paulina Blaesild

Episode 5

Thursday, July 11, 2024 • Duration 45:09

This week I’m joined by Miriam Sentler and Paulina Blaesild, to speak about deep time matters, art, archeology and the act of swimming

Miriam lives and works between Norway and the Netherlands. She is a contemporary artist and doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo.. Her projects often result in long research trajectories, taking shape in different mediums like installations, audio, textile, video, photography, artist publications, and text. Sentler's interdisciplinary work emphasises the changing of landscapes, focussing on the cultural and environmental legacy of (fossil fuel) industries and the modern era.

Paulina is a doctoral research fellow at the department of Historical Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. She is a palaeoecologist and wetland archaeologist working with vegetation development studies and artistic practice to explore past and present ecological encounters, their interconnections and the mediatory effects of technology.

This discussion highlighted to me the potential within having not just conversations but also working collaborations across disciplines.. Or even non-disciplinary spaces as Paulina mentioned - where you are not restricted by certain processes.. These in-between spaces create so much room for curiosity and productive exploration.

Miriam referenced the book Arts of Living on a damaged planet: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517902377/arts-of-living-on-a-damaged-planet/

Find Miriam online at:

www.miriamsentler.com

www.deeptimeagency.com

Find Paulina online at:

Blaesild, P. (2024). Paulina Blaesild - Human-Environmental Interactions in Wetlands, Arkeologisk Forskningsseminar, Universitetet i Bergen (presentation, in Swedish).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVK4_Tp6D3Q

Karlsson, M. (2021). Unik stenåldersmiljö grävs fram i Östergötland, Forskning och Framsteg (Interview, in Swedish). https://fof.se/artikel/2021/7/unik-stenaldersmiljo-gravs-fram-i-ostergotland/

Images & Data with Abelardo Gil-Fournier & Jussi Parikka

Episode 4

Saturday, June 22, 2024 • Duration 44:45

Jussi Parikka ( https://jussiparikka.net/ ) is a writer and media theorist. He is Professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University and Visiting Professor at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague as well as the Winchester School of Art. He is the author of Insect Media, A Geology of Media, What is Media Archaeology?, and Operational Images.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier ( https://abelardogfournier.org/ ) is an artist and researcher. Originally trained in Physics, he holds a PhD in Arts from the Winchester School of Art (UK). His practice addresses the entwining of image surfaces with the living crust of the planet. His work encompasses different techniques, spanning from sound and video installations to computational processes such as machine learning, including assemblages where the living conflates with the animate.

Together they have collaborated extensively, and their new book Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (can be found here) will be launching on 25th June. In this conversation they break down some of their thinking around the materiality of media being inherently connected to the sites they come from.. they talk about plants and living surfaces, of 'dynamic formations'. And how this book related to their practices as individuals.

Link to the full text read at the beginning by Jussi Parikka, on Mater.digital: https://mater.digital/jussi-parikka/

On Abelardo Gil-Fournier’s recent solo show at the Fundacion Cerezales- https://www.artforum.com/events/juan-jose-santos-mateo-abelardo-gil-fournier-fundacion-cerezales-2024-549901/

Seeds with Zayaan Khan & Chris Keeve

Episode 3

Friday, June 14, 2024 • Duration 48:28

Today on The Mater Podcast, we are speaking with Chris Keeve and Zayaan Khan.

Chris is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Kentucky, their research has to do with seedkeeping, plant breeding, and agrobiodiversity conservation—the things that people do, or don’t do, with seeds.. and the things that seeds may or may not do on their own—in the face of legacies of racial capitalism in land and food systems. Their dissertation project involves participatory and collaborative work as a seed grower and organiser with multiple seed networks and seed and land justice projects in the U.S. Their work sheds light on the cooperative geographies of seed networks

Zayaan Khan works in food justice, land justice, and seed justice as a storyteller and transdisciplinary artist based in South Africa. Drawing inspiration from the rich biodiversity of local landscapes and the enduring relationship between people, the land, and the sea.

She is also building the Seed Biblioteek, a seed library based in Cape Town, South Africa. Seh is a PhD Candidate in The Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town, South Africa, an interdisciplinary research cluster, focused on seed: "From seed-as-object to seed-as-relation."

We speak about

Seedwork
Land reform
Spiritual connection with the land
The land having a memory
South Africa
Kentucky
Rematriation

Find Zayaan Khan and Chris Keeve

Paint with Kirsty Buchanan and Safira Taylor

Episode 2

Monday, June 10, 2024 • Duration 40:15

One for the painters out there! This week on the Mater podcast I’m joined by two painters, Safira Taylor and Kirsty Buchanan.

Safira is an artist currently based in Amsterdam, her current focus is a long-term painting series titled ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’, exploring the intricacies of reproductive processes. Executed on vintage linen, these sheets bear a rich history predominantly passed down by women across generations.

Kirtsty Buchanan, also based in Amsterdam, makes paintings from compositions drawn from domestic scenarios or sketches from dream diaries. She is mostly interested in the realm of the domestic and how this space can influence use of material.

We touch upon the vast subjects that are paint, canvas, linen, process, paint mediums, colour, pigments… so much more to go into within each of these aspects of painting - hopefully for future episode.

Find them on Instagram at safira.taylor and kirstygraces

Roy Oxlade book Art and Instinct

Amy Sillman Faux Pas

Kate Bush Mother Stands for Comfort

Glossary of Dying Terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_dyeing_terms

The Thames Foreshore with Tom Chivers & Dr Claire Harris

Episode 1

Monday, June 3, 2024 • Duration 51:19

For the first ever episode of The Mater Podcast, Tom Chivers and Dr Claire Harris come together to speak about The Thames Foreshore. Hosted by Maddie Rose Hills.

Tom Chivers is a writer, publisher and arts producer from South London. He has released two full collections of poetry, and his debut novel London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City, was published in 2021. The book journeys through personal, historical, mythic & geological tales of London beneath our feet. Tom writes that the book ‘is partial, subjective and incomplete; I am neither historian nor geographer, but write with a poet's compulsion for rumor and conjecture’.

Tom is currently researching a phd entitled In the Flow of Things: Encounters with the Mudlarks of the Thames Foreshore.

We also spoke with Dr Claire Harris, who is a palaeolithic and community archeologist. Currently in a position at the Museum of London Archeology as a member of the Thames Discovery Programme. Claire has previously worked as a curator and researcher at the British Museum, and is a research associate with the Pathways to Ancient Britain project. Previous collaborative projects have included ‘Neanderthals in Hackney: Exploring North London’s stone age past’.

We spoke about what is going on down on the Thames Foreshore in London. The materials down there - sand, mud, silt, clay, human detritus.. We spoke about mudlarking, and the history that is visible when you are on the foreshore. We spoke about deep time, and palaeolithic London.. Community Archeology and finding a sense of belonging through sites such as these in the busy city

Find Tom Chivers' Soundcloud with Thames sounds here

Follow Tom on Instagram

Find more work by Claire here

Claire on LinkedIn

The Mater Podcast Trailer

Sunday, June 2, 2024 • Duration 01:39

Welcome to The Mater Podcast, hosted by me, Maddie Rose Hills.

I initiated Mater in 2021, as a research project driven by a fascination for how artists think about materials. In September 2021 I finished my Masters in Art and Material Histories, which left me feeling inspired by all of these artists and their amazing relationships with materials.. Through Mater, I began to broaden the research, looking at seed-keepers, philosophers, architects, curators, designers, geographers, ecologists, highlighting the tangled nature of the world of materials.

Through this podcast we will be joined by new and old collaborators, and we'll be speaking about clay, seeds, glitter, paint, forests, pigments, milk, mould, water...

I’m excited to go on this journey of curiosity and discovery, diving into the world of materials.. You can follow us on Instagram at Mater_______ And you can read all of the commissioned texts for free on our website at mater.digital.

Thank you for listening, Bye!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Mater Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

The Mater Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

Instagram63

Apple Podcast8

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

Instagram63

Apple Podcast8

Apple Podcasts

Spotify