Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine

 This book explores the intersections between wearable objects and human health, with particular emphasis on how artists and designers are creatively responding to and rethinking these relations. Addressing a rich range of wearable artefacts, from mobility aids and prosthetics to clothing and accessories to digital health tracking devices, its themes include care and cure; wellness culture and the commoditization of health; and the complex interactions between (human) bodies and (non-human) objects. With a theoretical framework inspired by the work of materialist thinkers including Sherry Turkle, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and bringing the disciplinary fields of fashion studies, art and design practice, and medical and health humanities into dialogue for the first time, this volume draws attention to the complex agencies entangled in the things we wear, and situates fashion and art in relation to broader cultural and historical contexts of health, illness and disability.

Fiona Johnstone is Assistant Professor in Visual Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. She is the author of AIDS & Representation (2023) and the co-editor of Anti-Portraiture (2020) and Art & the Critical Medical Humanities (forthcoming). 

Ellen Sampson is an artist and Senior Research Fellow in Design at Northumbria University, UK. Her book Worn: Footwear Attachment and the Affects of Wear was published in 2020. She is co-founder of the Fashion Research Network, an interdisciplinary network for scholars working on fashion, textiles and dress.

Paula Chambers is Subject Leader in Fine Art at Leeds Arts University, UK. Recent exhibitions include “Inconvenient Bodies” at Hošek Contemporary, Berlin (2023) and “Material Nomads” as part of Momentum 12, Moss, Norway (2023). She has chapters included in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms (2020), Feminist Visual Activism and the Body (2021) and An Artist and a Mother (2023).