Holding it Together: Making, maintaining and mending from the Early Modern to the present

Registration closes on 22 June 2026 About this event Making things last underpins a plethora of cultural practices – care, robust-design, refashioning and waste – all rooted in diverse conceptions of endurance. In the early modern period, things were sometimes made to last by manipulating material characteristics; across Europe and Asia examples range from the pursual of hardness and heat resistance in the formulation of new recipes for varnish and porcelain, to the manipulation of natural dyes and their chemistry to find colours resistant to laundering and sunlight. Other practices sought endurance by anticipating later care and maintenance; silver objects, for example, required regular polishing to guard against the blackening action of oxygen and sulphur, extending their continual makin