Material Change is a series of conversations exploring the relationship between the visual arts and ecology. Across these discussions, we speak with artists, designers, organisations, and material researchers who are responding to the Climate Emergency in their practice.
We’re Sculpture Placement Group (SPG). Our mission is to innovate, support artists, and ensure that art is a vital part of everyday life. Through pioneering initiatives and practical, open-access tools, we work to break down barriers for artists while supporting the wider arts sector to address the urgent challenges of the Climate Emergency.
Sculpture is inseparable from its materiality; its meaning is rooted in the substances, processes, and labour that bring it into being. Through this podcast, we examine the role materials play in art-making, reflecting on their environmental impact and our relationship with the objects we create and encounter.
The podcast is open and discursive by design. It invites listeners to follow our thinking, see how research informs action, and understand the ethical, accessible, and sustainable practices that underpin SPG’s work.
In this episode of Material Change, we speak with Benadette Pompili, a social designer and ceramic researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice focuses on materials and their narratives, with particular attention to the ecological impact of art, design, and industrial production. Through her research, Pompili aims to spread knowledge, encourage care, and retrace tradition by thinking and acting intersectionally.
The Future Materials Bank is part of the innovative Nature Research Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie, leading this department is Giulia Bellinetti. Artists, designers and material researchers develop ecological materials and processes that inspire a reconceptualisation of our relationship to the object and the role of non-human actors in our lives.
The bank is both an online and physical thing, it’s a living document and resource of all the materials that have been developed thus far on the programme. Its intention to inspire is clear in the wealth of imagination and technique illustrated.
In this episode, we speak with artist Kate V Robertson about commissioning artworks through an ecological lens. Focusing on a public commercial commission, the discussion explores how stakeholders shape production and her material approach across her wider practice.
Robertson works in print, sculpture and installation, engaging systems of technology, advertising and print media through material processes. As a director of Sculpture Placement Group, she brings a nuanced understanding of commissioning models and the material realities of contemporary art production.
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