Studio Phantastica

Information

Welcome to the wonderful world of Studio Phantastica. This space represents the culmination of five and a half years of my doctoral research into the spatialities and space-making practices of contemporary psychedelic-assisted therapy.

As a living extension of the research-creation practices that inform my exegesis, this website functions as a tool for space-makers, professional designers, everyday designers, spatial thinkers, psychonauts, and therapy providers. Whether you are a formally trained architect or an everyday space-maker, this platform is for anyone actively engaged in shaping environments for psychedelic care.

When you explore the main page, you will encounter a series of floating fields of colour. These are what I call 'offerings for practice' - critical orientations that have emerged through my research as deeply important ideas for space-making. Representing my core contribution to design practice, these offerings are intended to provoke new ways of thinking about the spaces and spatial practices associated with psychedelic-assisted therapy. By clicking on each offering, a pop-up box will reveal its central provocation.

Mapped across these fluid offerings is a radial dial of sixteen distinct projects, illustrating the fullness of the creative outcomes generated over the course of this work. Each number opens into a specific undertaking, taking you to a project page that contains more information about its context, timing, and execution, along with the photographs, sketches, and writings produced along the way.

This interface can be navigated in multiple ways. You can explore projects directly through the dial, or click on specific offerings to see their directly associated projects rendered in colour. Alternatively, you can navigate using the three design approaches located on the top navigation ribbon. These approaches act as frameworks for engaging with the offerings and projects:

Practice

This approach asks how your design practice itself can become inherently psychedelic, moving across different perceptual registers while navigating the practical realities of our work.

Sites

This approach explores where design might actively intervene within the psychedelic-assisted therapy assemblage and across the psychedelic surround to support the therapeutic encounter.

Materials

This is an approach to designing that asks us to rethink our assumptions about the physical world, treating the materiality of space-making as a vibrant, precarious ecology that actively participates in the therapeutic experience.

These offerings, design approaches, project outcomes, and creative practices are intended to sit alongside the central concept developed during my PhD research: the psychedelic surround. I developed this term to articulate the field of multi-temporal and multi-sited spatial conditions that emerge alongside the psychedelic-assisted therapy encounter (Conrick, 2026, p. 8). Reading these elements together expands our understanding of what is both designed and designable within the context of contemporary psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Thank you for taking the time to explore my work.

Projects

01

Collected Comforts

02

Caritas Christi

03

Sinking/Feeling

04

Scrim

05

Doing Research Together

06

PsiConnect

07

Experiments in Walking

08

Dermographies

09

PSIKEA: Extending the Sensorium

10

Impressions

11

Asanapy

12

The In-between

13

Swinburne

14

Encountering Atmospheric Elements

15

The Tomorrow Party

16

Tanglework

1

2

3

4

5

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7

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11

12

13

14

15

16
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Collected Comforts

In early 2021, I began by simply asking people what comfort means. I asked a study group to send me photographs capturing how they made comfort in their everyday lives, and what I received in return was a visual archive of beds and bodies of water. Pictures of dogs curled in blankets, messy sheets, and pillows still holding the deep, indented shape of a resting head. There were baths, showers, swimming pools, and warm pools of afternoon light.

Looking at these images, I wondered about immersion. I thought about the profound sense of being fully consumed by an environment, and perhaps, the feeling of weightlessness. Beds and baths offer forms of immersion that take the horizontal, relaxing body and wrap it in layers of warmth. Water and fabric both share a Shore hardness - a standard measure of a material’s resistance to indentation - that is less than the human skin. They offer a unique material condition where the environment both supports and surrounds the flesh while remaining softer than it, allowing the body to literally sink in. With water, you can see the immediate trace of this encounter - the pruned fingers and toes after a long soak acting as a temporary, bodily imprint of the flesh negotiating with its environment.

But water is a complex material for comfort-making because, within it, the body literally threatens to sink. Looking at these images of immersion highlighted a delicate tension: how do you locate the promise of a ‘sinking feeling’ without the threat of sinking too far? The discomfort of a too-soft sofa or an overly yielding mattress perfectly captures this threshold. There is a precise material tipping point where the physical weight of a heavy blanket or the depth of a bath transitions from securely holding the body to suffocating it. When one sinks too far, the edge of the epidermis dissolves, and the feeling shifts from being held to being swallowed entirely.

This early archive initiated a deep questioning about the balance between sinking and support. For spatial designers, it asks us to locate the exact threshold between immersion and submersion. How do we design an architecture that facilitates an act of sinking with the environment, rather than sinking completely into it? In the context of P-AT environments, where the vulnerable body is already dissolving at the edges of consciousness, how do we specify materials, furniture, and surfaces that yield enough to hold the body securely, without engulfing it?

Vibrant Matter Loose Space

Soft improvisation

2021

Library

Margaret Wise Brown, "Goodnight Moon"

I have read Goodnight Moon to my daughter so many times that I can now recite it by heart. Despite its deceptive simplicity, I find myself thinking about it frequently. There is something deeply ritualistic about the rhythm of this story. The deliberate act of bidding goodnight to every object functions as a methodical grounding technique, actively mapping the physical dimensions of the bedroom. By acknowledging these items individually, the text grants them a fullness of being and a more-than-human agency. It beautifully illustrates David Bissell’s conceptualisation of comfort as an active, dynamic configuration of bodies, things, and spaces. Through this ritual, the room becomes infinitely more than the sum of its parts.

David Bissell, "Comfortable bodies: sedentary affects"

In David Bissell's Comfortable bodies: sedentary affects, comfort is fundamentally unmoored from the passive, universal aesthetic it is so often assumed to be. He critiques the notion of comfort as a simple, objective capacity - the idea that you can just design a "comfortable chair" and be done with it. Instead, he positions comfort as an active, dynamic "configuration" that emerges from the relationality between bodies and their proximate environments. It is a sensibility that we must actively do or make, constantly twisting forth and negotiating with the spaces we inhabit.

For my work, this was an incredibly liberating way to think about the physical environments of care. It pushed me towards thinking with comfort as always in relation, always in motion, always about to become undone. This text also helped me to move past thinking comfort as singular, and instead urged me to begin asking "what is actually configuring?"