Dr Ellen Sampson

Position:

Professor of Design Practices

Department:

School of Arts

About me

I am an artist, curator and material culture researcher whose work explores practice-based methods as ways of producing and articulating knowledge. Working with photography, film, writing, objects and installation, I use material and embodied forms of enquiry to examine relationships between people and things they wear. My research explores how lived experience becomes materially inscribed through use and how attention to materiality can make visible forms of knowledge that are difficult to articulate through text alone.

Museums and archives are central to my practice. I work with collections both as material for research and as systems through which knowledge is produced, organised and made visible. My work attends particularly to worn, damaged, overlooked and absent garments, asking what objects can tell us about bodily experience and what remains difficult to collect, preserve or represent. I have worked with museum collections internationally and have exhibited and produced work for institutions including Somerset House, the Barbican, Z33, Bard Graduate Center and the Museum at FIT.

I completed my PhD at the Royal College of Art and was at Curatorial Fellow at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York a Professorial Fellowship at UCA.

Area of expertise

My research sits across fashion studies, material culture and museum studies. I am particularly interested in the relationship between clothing and bodily experience; wear, damage and repair; material and embodied forms of knowledge; and the ways museums and archives shape what can be known about bodies and their histories. Across these projects, my research asks how bodily and material experience becomes evidence: what is preserved, what is overlooked, and what kinds of knowledge might become possible when we attend differently to objects and their absences.

These questions underpin my book Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear (Bloomsbury, 2020), and continue in The Afterlives of Clothes (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), which considers clothing after it has ceased to be worn and the different forms of evidence produced through preservation, deterioration, collection and loss. I am also co-editor of Wearable Objects and Curative Things (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

My current research extends these questions into the methods and structures through which knowledge is produced. I am currently PI on two AHRC-funded projects, Enclothed Knowledges: A Practice-Based Fashion Research Network and A Museum of Uncollected Things. Enclothed Knowledges examines practice-based methods and the forms of knowledge they produce within fashion studies, including how such work is articulated, shared and reviewed. A Museum of Uncollected Things asks what happens to the histories and experiences that museums cannot, or do not, collect, and how absence might itself become a way of thinking about collections.

Publications

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