Love Objects Emotion, Design and Material Culture

How are love and emotion embodied in material form?

Love Objects explores the emotional potency of things, addressing how objects can function as fetishes, symbols and representations, active participants in and mediators of our relationships, as well as tokens of affection, symbols of virility, triggers of nostalgia, replacements for lost loved ones, and symbols of lost places and times.

Addressing both designed 'things with attitude' and the 'wild things' of material culture, Love Objects explores a wide range of objects, from 19th-century American portraits displaying men's passionate friendships to the devotional and political meanings of religious statues in 1920s Ireland.

Anna Moran is a lecturer in history of design and material culture in the Faculty of Visual Culture at NCAD, Dublin, Republic of Ireland.


Sorcha O'Brien is a lecturer in history of design and material culture in the Faculty of Visual Culture in NCAD, Dublin, Republic of Ireland.

1. Dr. Anna Moran and Dr. Sorcha O'Brien, Editors' Foreword; 2. Victor Margolin, Introduction; Part 1: The Lives of Objects; 3. Dr. Louise Purbrick, The Wedding Present: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Contemporary Domestic Worlds; 4. Dr. Catherine Harper, Sex, Birth, and Nurture Unto Death: Patching Together Quilted Bed Covers; 5. Dr. Jo Turney, Making Love with Needles: Tales of Love, Hate, Possession and Rejection from Three Knitted Objects; Part 2: Projecting and Subverting Identities; 6. Dr. Mary Elizabeth Howie Bringing Out the Past: Courtly Love and Nineteenth-Century American Men's Passionate Friendship Portraits; 7. Dr. Linda King, Fly The Friendly Airline: The Aer Lingus Air Hostess and the Commodification of Irish Femininity, 1951-1961; 8. Dr. Jessica Sewell, A Playboy's Pipe: Performing Masculinity in Post-War America, Part 3: Objects and Embodiment; 9. Dr. Jenifer Ni Ghradaigh, Loving Christ as Your Own: Christ-dolls, Thwarted Maternity and Private Devotion; 10. Dr. Ann Wilson Enchantment, Kitsch and the Irish Fight for Freedom: The Bleeding Statues of Templemore; 11. Dr. Kay Inckle, Love Hurts? Scars, Tattoos and the Emotional Body; Part 4: Mediating Relationships; 12. Dr. Jonathan Chapman, Design, Meaning and Sustainability; 13. Dr. Adam Drazin Uncertainties of Home-Making: Irish-Romanian Homes and Relationships in Dublin; 14. Jane Hattrick, Seduced by the Archive: A Personal Relationship with the Archive and Collection of Objects Pertaining to the London Couturier, Norman Hartnell; 15. Dr. Christina Edwards, Material Memories: Making a Wet-Plate Collodion Memory-Text