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

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16
Experiments in Walking, image 1 of 3 1/3
Experiments in Walking, image 2 of 3 2/3
Experiments in Walking, image 3 of 3 3/3

Experiments in Walking

In 2021, I began a series of improvisational experiments exploring walking as an embodied, enworlded sensory practice. Over several years, this practice helped me physically understand the sensory shifts precipitated by the clinical eye mask - a tool ubiquitous in psychedelic-assisted therapy. What began as an exploration of walking blind rapidly evolved into a deeper investigation of interpersonal connection within altered sensory contexts. I first walked blindfolded in a local park with my partner as a guide. Later, I navigated the concrete paving of the Melbourne CBD, the sand down at Williamstown beach, and once - very briefly, before the terrain proved too difficult - the uneven scrub of the bush up near Lerderderg Gorge.

Walking blindfolded, my hearing and touch amplified to compensate for the darkness, and an intense, uncomfortable connectedness emerged. My sensory attention latched onto my guide completely. I tuned dramatically into their acoustic presences, feeling the rhythm of their gaits and their physical proximity to my own body. I became acutely sensitive to their relative demeanours, feeling for any subtle shifts in the tone of their voices or their movements. In the absence of sight, I was perceiving my environment almost entirely through them.

These experiences have stuck with me in a particularly unusual way. Drawing on Sarah Pink’s ideas on sensory enactment, this sequence was an incredibly impactful way of putting myself in a participant's shoes. Every single time I put the blindfold on, I was struck by an acute sense of visibility, strangeness, and a profound sense of vulnerability. This vulnerability offered a front-row seat to the sheer weight of co-presence. When visual connection to a room is severed, the guide's body becomes the world. The felt presence of the therapist becomes participant's most critical tether. It is not just about physical reliance; it is about actively building a sense of safety from their continuous presence.

This intense centring of relationality cements a critical reality for spatial practice: designing for the therapist is designing for the participant, always.

Thresholding Safety × Discomfort

Soft Improvisation

2021

Library

Rebecca Solnit, "Wunderlust"

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit explores the rhythmic, embodied act of walking as a profound way of being in the world. She frames walking as a sensory state where the mind, the body, and the environment fall into active alignment. It is a practice that deeply roots us in our immediate surroundings, allowing the physical landscape to shape our psychological experience.

During this walking work, the idea of walking as a relational, world-building practice was one I held close. In particular, her emphasis on rhythm gave me aspects of my own physical experience to focus on.

Ballestero and Winthereik, "Experimenting with ethnography: A companion to analysis".

In their afterword to Experimenting with Ethnography, Melanie Ford Lemus and Katie Ulrich describe the ethnographic experiment as an exercise in "setting up certain conditions within which something interesting, unexpected, or perturbing can emerge". It is a practice of structured exploration, designed to introduce active movement into theoretical questions and allow unlooked-for insights to surface.

When I read this chapter, I was particularly excited by the creative capacities of ethnographic practice, particularly autoethnography and sensory ethnography. Ford Lemus and Ulrich’s orientation toward experimentation was also new to me and helped me pay attention to the unexpected in my projects. Rather than treating these experiments as a means to prove a predetermined outcome, their writing reframed them as an active tool for allowing unlooked-for realities to emerge, directly shaping how I approached the sensory and relational shifts in these walking studies.