Katie Jayne Britchford MFA

"Our world is full up, full to the brim with stuff. We constantly want more, we constantly need more. We work more so we can buy more. We buy more so we can have more. But what is all this ‘more stuff’ and do we really need it? It is as though we have forgotten who we used to be and whence we have come. Life seemed simpler back then when there was less stuff to buy, less things to need. My thesis is not a text about consumption, nor is it about materiality, it is more about getting to the root of all of it, the reasons why we make things and where it all comes from. There must be a good reason behind it, or maybe not.

The materialization of culture, of nature, of beauty, of art, and finally my own materialization, are all sub headings in which I start a conversation about ‘how’ and ‘why’ within my thesis. We look upon history as a way of further understanding ourselves, and it is through materials and objects that we reflect on the past. The evidence we have from a world that came before us comes down to a material that stood the test of time, only to be dug up and analysed.
Even cultures that we know that lied heavily on the immaterial, say the Egyptians, transformed their beliefs through material objects, with a strength and durability to survive thousands of years. It is only through the material that we can analyse today, that we discovered that such a world existed before our time. Each generation leaves behind a material documentation, a way of saying ‘look what we have achieved’. And there is no doubt that the acceleration of our material world is gaining such momentum that we simply cannot understand where it is leading us, and we constantly wonder how can we rectify this mass consumer culture which is building up all around us. It is as though the desire to create and design, to bring our inner world into the outer world, has become a language that simply cannot be tamed; even our oceans are filling up with the ‘stuff’ that speaks of materialization."

katiejaynebritchford.com