Miranda Smitheram

Design researcher, educator and artist, Dr. Miranda Smitheram is the Co-Director of the Textile and Materiality research cluster and Director of MaSH Lab at Milieux. Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Miranda is currently Assistant Professor of Material Futures in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. 

Her research practice is tactile, haptic and embodied, and incorporates ancestral and speculative methods to work with ecosystems, socio-cultural matter, and nonhuman collaborators. Through this she explores developing new remediated and hybrid materials, to contribute to sustainable, relational and Indigenous futures. 

Her current research explores decolonizing matter, and centres an ethics of care and relationality. Through unraveling ontologies and kinship of invasive plant species, Miranda frames possibilities of rematerializing these unwanted invaders through soft surface, biofabrication and textile applications to propose localized solutions through materiality. Miranda’s research moves between digital, virtual, and physical, with a particular interest in the ontologies and critical materiality that is revealed through the flux of these processes. Both her field research with flora and her digital research with materiality follow an ontological design approach. These mediated materials take shape as textile forms, structures and digital artworks that question the interaction and agency of human and more-than-human, place, and space in a post-anthropocentric context. 

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