Crafting Life is a symposium accompanying the opening of the exhibition Transformism at the John Hansard Gallery, enabling an exploration of some of the ideas suggested by the artists’ works and exploring how crafted life forms create an interplay between art, design, science and technology.

The cultivation and crafting of biological life has existed for centuries, both for aesthetic and practical purposes. Today, with the advancement of bioscientific tools, techniques and materials, these new forms are now not only produced by farms and individuals, but in laboratories and factories, with ‘crafting’ taking place on the molecular level.

In this symposium, we will begin to examine, from different disciplinary perspectives, some of the implications of applying new scientific and technological tools to the manipulation of living forms and systems, what this means for our relationship with non-human life, and the new realm of aesthetic and forms it opens up.

Text and Images via Crafting Life: Materiality, Science and Technology symposium.