This conference invites graduate students to examine portraiture, modernity, and materiality as active forces rather than a passive surface. Matter speaks: their voice awakening the impulse to make. Objects are encountered through the body and the senses: handled, worn, repaired, and transformed over time. Drawing on approaches including phenomenology, material culture studies, and new materialisms, we ask how materials carry memory, structure experience, and demand particular modes of making, care, and interpretation.