Co-creation: Human and non-human making processes and their environmental entanglements

This panel offers a geographically and chronologically broad, interdisciplinary framework for re-evaluating human and so-called non-human interactions and their environmental implications in the creative process. Informed by recent work by scholars including Giovanni Aloi, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sugata Ray, and Merlin Sheldrake, it asks whether we can interrogate the beginning of the creative process before the intervention of the human and still acknowledge the significance of the hand, and what implications this might have for art, craft and design history.

There are many epistemic systems that grant personhood to any entity: from mountains, seas, plants, and rocks, to animals and their “gifts”, but art history has long been dominated by a preoccupation with individual, exclusively human authorship. What happens when we do away with human-centred categories and think of natural materials and forces not as mute or inanimate, but instead as dynamic agents—co-makers—in mutually transformative processes with wider environmental entanglements? This panel invites papers on topics such as biomimicry, the chemical and biological processes (from fermentation performed by yeast, moulds, and bacteria) that work both with and against human expertise, and the contribution of natural forces such as fire, water, sound, and electrical energy.

We welcome practitioners, museum-based scholars and academics in any field.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Marta Ajmar, University of Warwick, Marta.Ajmar@warwick.ac.uk

Christine Guth, Independent Scholar, cmeguth@gmail.com