Dissociated Membranes

"Then Jacob rent his cloths..."

This writing explores a particular kind of architectural textiles that I have been making for several years. The fabrics described here have immersive and reflexive qualities. Reflex is a response that suggests the textile being touched touches back. Immersion goes beyond the familiar sense of being clothed and surrounded by a fabric. Here the term implies animated space expanding and dissolving boundaries. In these fabrics, boundaries of our selvesÑbody and psycheÑare questioned.

The hand of fabric—the particular interaction of nap, bias and weave that combines to give every fabric a specific quality of movement and interaction when it is handled—is often referred to in descriptive reviews of textile art. We know that handling textile has a particular link to human emotion. There are poignant implications in the way textile flexes and moves with us. When we grieve, we grasp and caress and tear cloth... The American psychologist Donald W. Winnicott has done much to illuminate the expanded identity coming from the blurred psychic boundaries between our bodies and other 'transitional objects', for example between infants and their toys and blankets, their "lovies" . Winnicott would likely explain that when we hear the tract from Genesis saying "Jacob rent his cloths", we may understand that Jacob's clothes were part of his anatomy, and that he was in effect tearing himself apart. Textiles have always acted as second skins. Similarly building envelopes can be tuned precisely to work as layers of our collective bodies.

This expanded definition of the 'hand' of textiles relates to the projects here in several ways. The first example shown here concentrates on flexible draping that finds a subtle skin for the land. The next project attempts a porous, ephemeral space that opens boundaries. Other examples tend toward an intimate prosthetic relationship in which living functions are implied in the fabric. Here the hand is active, flexing and recoiling. The projects Haystack Veil, Erratics Net, Synthetic Earth, Hungry Soil and Palatine Burial attempt special qualities:

Haystack Veil is a landscape of cut saplings, thirty thousand twigs cut and bundled into a knit veil floating over a moss and lichen covered cliff alongside the Atlantic Ocean. Haystack Veil bears on the land following primordial topography, a cloak over the earth.

Erratics Net is a complex interlinked wire fabric mounted on a glacier-scoured terrain in Nova Scotia. Layers of new strata floating just above the surface of the land are developed within the foam-like filigree of this textile installation.

Synthetic Earth is a composite material involving a mass of sealed glass vessels holding digestive fluids covered by a densely layered net. The elements in this covering material are designed with springing barbed details encouraging accretive massing and clumping, a slow process of ingestion. A lurking, carnivorous quality results.

Hungry Soil translates the primal qualities of earlier projects into a three-dimensional lacework system based on mechanical repetition. An efficient system of interlinking spring clips and fluid injectors is arrayed in a quadrilateral lattice. The density of this system gives a distinct 'valence', a kind of anima.

Palatine Burial is a grotto of densely massed barbed wire shards with individual links configured to grasp and puncture adjacent surfaces. Like the links used in Synthetic Earth, these details are ambivalent. They act as a reef supporting new growth, while at the same time their acute physical nature repels. Palatine Burial works directly with a historical site relating to the foundation of Rome. The project finds a refreshed relationship with archaic rituals.

These projects can be understood as an extension of the ordinary industrial practice of reinforcing landscapes using geotextiles. At the same time, the projects tend to question boundaries of psyche. Their large-scale field structures offer immersion, an expansion rendering our physical bodies porous and offering wide-flung dispersal of identity. This might remind us of a long mystic tradition. A recent example from modern European culture could be the mid-century writing of Georges Bataille, pursuing ecstatic alterity:

"...I stood up, and I was completely taken... Only my legs-which kept me standing upright, connected what I had become to the floor-kept a link to what I had been: the rest was an inflamed gushing forth, overpowering, even free of its own convulsion. A character of dance and of decomposing agility..." 

This work shares common interests with early strains of psychoanalysis. In a passage presented to a surrealist circle in 1937, Bataille's associate Roger Caillois studied insect behaviour as an analogy for a psychopathy of dissociated identity-specifically, the assimilation of insects into space through mimicry: 

"Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his sense. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space [...] And he invents spaces of which he is 'the convulsive possession'. [...] Caillois explores a vertigo, an "attraction by space,... by the effect of which life seems to lose ground, blurring in its retreat the frontier between the organism and the milieu..." 

The anima that is treated in these works as a sacred quality is a product of geometry and material synthesis. Making a new nature. 

Biography

Architect Philip Beesley's research involves digital generation and visualization of structures, physical fabrication of installations in landscape and museum venues, translation of experimental works into architectural tectonic systems, and critical analysis and documentation in a spectrum of public venues. The purpose of this work is to create a specialized new vocabulary of architectural envelope systems that expand technical performance by creating extremely lightweight and porous systems, and expand poetic power by expressing contemporary states of the psyche ranging from immersive ecology to dissociation.

He is co-director of the Waterloo Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing, a new facility involving rapid prototyping, high performance computing and visualization at the University of Waterloo. Beesley recently received the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada).