Philip Beesley
The first thing is the smell: a recipe full of ammonia The invisible
atmosphere leeches from the 400 litres of latex rubber painstakingly
layered over the 80-year old concrete floors of the warehouse building.
It surrounds you and gives a faint bite inside as you breathe it
in. The acrid taste that you find inside you leaves the question
of its origin uncomfortably hanging. You know latex is artificial,
but it doesn’t feel that way: urine? Disease? A bundle of ancient
instincts are aroused in reacting to the space. You find yourself
on guard.
One space has taut metal cables from the centre of
the ceiling holding a spine set inside the rubber skin. The spine
pulls the latex up into a huge long upside-down hull. The rubber
walls curve inward up to the spine and suck hard at the floor. The
air around pushes hard back down on this collapsing void, bulging
the surfaces inward.
The second space is filled by an opposite twin, a
long air-filled blister breaking outward from the rubber skin of
the floor and rising up to head-height. An inner-tube valve that
declares the method of inflation marks the smooth surface of this
immense pillow. A rectangular slip-sheet set into the centre of
each lamination breaks the bond between the rubber and the floor
slab to made these voids. Two instant rooms.
Already there, my daughter chuckles and bounces against
them both. This might be a recreation. The title ‘Push /Pull’ does
sound like a simple play. By operating primary forces against each
other you construct a kind of gravity. This construction sounds
elegant and quite tidy.
