Outside: Activating Cloth to Enhance the Way We Live explores cloth’s value, relevance and impact on societies today, recognising the constantly evolving fields of expression, often sited beyond art mediated contexts. The book explores cloth’s potential as a metaphor for consciousness, a carrier of narrative, and a catalyst for community empathy and cohesion.

Invited curators, philosophers, artists and scholars employ a variety of didactic styles that include the conversational, metaphoric, process-orientated, poetic, and autobiographical. Each author takes their line of enquiry to the next on a unique journey that probes a range of empathetic modes of investigation and expression. Through collective, rhetoric and practice-based investigation, the value of cloth and community in everyday lives is disclosed.

This book will appeal to scholars, students, critics, teachers, practitioners, philosophers, volunteers and curators who are interested in fresh ways to consider cloth in socially engaged, socio political and participatory forms of expression. Authors include Professor Lesley Millar, Alice Kettle and Dr Jane Webb, June Hill, Philippa Lawrence, Betsy Greer, and Dr Robert Clarke.