Everyone is welcome to join us at STEAMhouse for the first IRL Materials Club Talk.
Materials Club is a community-led group that has been based in STEAMhouse since 2019. Now in its third year, it has become a creative-led research space exploring questions related to our ecological future through deep material practices.
We support and cultivate projects that look to use materials in new, different, and sustaining ways. This includes working with waste, nature, and within the values of circular design. We encourage collaboration and open conversation allowing new knowledge to be shared and developed collectively. This is a space to be inspired, learn, engage, and become part of a growing community.
Materials Club Talks invite practitioners to share new and interesting materials practices. Each month a different STEAMhouse member will invite a guest to share their materials practice. This presentation will be followed by an open discussion that will delve deeper into their personal values and the motivations for their work, with a focus on materiality and our current global context. This month’s guest – Cassie Quinn, founder of regenerative design studio CQ Studios – has been invited by STEAMhouse member Zoe Powell Best.
Our Guest
Cassie Quinn is a textiles and bio designer who was recently awarded the prestigious Mayor’s Entrepreneur Award and Creative Enterprise Awards. She was amongst the first cohort on the MA Biodesign at Central Saint Martins and will soon begin her PhD researching Innovations in Flax.
CQ Studio views waste streams from the fashion industry as valuable resources and utilises scientific processes to transform waste into innovative textiles. Alongside the development of materials and textiles, Cassie also delivers educational workshops for schools, businesses, and members of the public to help educate them about sustainable textile processes and why they are important.
Presented as part of the STEAMhouse Create Programme.
STEAMhouse is a space to experiment, test and develop new knowledge. At the project’s heart are five key principles – conversation, exploration, collaboration, openness and newness. The STEAMhouse Create Programme is a free ERDF funded programme that supports resource-poor businesses to build digital skills and make their new product, project, or service ideas a reality.
Open since early 2018, STEAMhouse is powered by Birmingham City University, in partnership with Eastside Projects and funded by the European Regional Development Fund. The STEAMhouse Create Programme supports businesses, including self-employed, sole-trading artists, to test new ideas, prototype and make new products and services (which if you are an artist may be artworks) as well as explore the potential of digital technologies to help you collaborate and innovate.
Find out more HERE
