Multistory produces a yearly journal of art writing by artists based in the Black Country. For this year’s programme we’re welcoming curator and writer Sylvia Theuri as co-editor and guest mentor, who will lead a writing masterclass and crit for selected artists.

For this issue we are looking for art writing that responds to the broad theme of materials. Drawing on the Black Country’s history of craft and industrial manufacturing we invite proposals that explore the relation between materials and place.

Themes explored in this issue might include: a personal relationship with a material, material agency, the politics of making and consumption, the boundaries between art and craft, a material’s capacity to tell stories, remember and resist. Artistic practices that allow the materials to lead, embodied processes. Ways of making that embrace the tactile, the ephemeral, unruly ways of knowing, learning or thinking through making. The entangled histories of labour, identity and place, how materials carry memory, transmit knowledge and influence how we relate to each other.

We invite writers to respond to the theme through experimental art writing, criticism or fiction, hybrid forms of critique. Selected artists will receive a £250 fee and editorial support from Multistory.