Philip Beesley
Presented at the Subtle Technologies Conference,
Toronto, May 19, 2001
“Then Jacob rent his cloths...” [1]
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 selves-body and psyche-are 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"[2]. 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.
