Issue 61 considers progress and change. There are a few questions around this including how much time needs to pass before something needs to change, or is it simply the case that progress is continuous? The key element is to recognise developments, keeping your eyes and ears open. This is particularly important in the art world because when you start tracking artists and noticing trends, this is when things start to get exciting, especially when those trends are just under the radar.

One of the central ideas in this issue of Aesthetica is the diversity of materials that artists and designers are using to make new works. For example, in The Future of Fashion is Now, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam is considering the convergence of fashion and art. This has been explored before, but the museum is looking at the next generation of designers who are playing with form and construction. There is even one designer who creates dissolvable clothing, which redefines possibilities of material, form and function. Much in the same way, Lee Boroson’s Plastic Fantastic show uses scale to uncover the inner and outer-self while renowned artist Olafur Eliasson constructs a new world within the gallery space, which challenges expectations of the man-made and the natural.

Photographers Stephen Shore and Barry Cawston highlight photography’s ultimate power to record and document, but their works remind us that what is not included in the photo is equally as important as what is. Staging and paying homage to Edward Hopper, fine art photographer Richard Tuschman re-creates a time and a place that call upon collective memory. The same theme is continued in Warp Films’s latest release ’71, which looks at historical events in Belfast in the early 1970s while Ida, by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, looks at the definitions of identity. Materials can engage the ordinary and transform it into something spectacular. This issue celebrates materiality and highlights some of the best practitioners in the world who currently imbue this notion.