Cambridge Material Mash

The ‘Material Mash’ was a pop-up event run by the Material Culture Forum and the Material Culture Workshop in 2025. It was a pop-up exhibition and networking event, hosted by Jesus College, Cambridge.

The Mash grew out of a desire on Sophia Feist and my parts to promote non-traditional presentation methods for material culture scholars at Cambridge. While papers work well for communicating historical information, we both found that they were distancing our audiences from the personal interactions with objects that form the core of our practice.

Participants were invited to bring an object or photograph used in their research, along with a short block of gallery text written to V&A guidelines. These we mounted and displayed, using them as conversation points. The objects submitted were varied, including eighteenth-century silhouettes, wool carders, Japanese medals and Victorian dolls.