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Impressions
I pushed my fingers blindly into a damp, cool mound of clay, working quickly and without a form in mind. Over three hours on a quiet afternoon in late 2024, I let my hands intuitively squish, grip, and release the material, slowly moulding it to my body, until I had twelve messy, blobby artefacts sitting before me on my cutting mat. Some pieces wrapped perfectly around a single thumb; others formed awkward, multi-fingered ridges or captured the deep, pressured valleys left behind when my hand squeezed tight and pulled away.
That afternoon, I was thinking about my earlier work with Dermographies, in which I looked much closer at the surface of my own skin. That project was named after a text by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, also titled Dermographies. There is a particular line from that text which continues to resonate today, in which they write about the necessity of attending to the mode of being with, "where one touches and is touched by others" (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001, p. 5). At the time of undertaking this particular soft improvisation, I was also reading parts of Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. I had just encountered their idea of intra-action, through which Barad argues that distinct agencies do not precede their interactions but rather emerge and become legible only through their mutual entanglement (Barad, 2007, p. 33). It made sense to me, thinking with both these texts, that an evolution of the surface-focused thinking of Dermographies involved the introduction of materiality into this line of questioning to better understand what this kind of mutual exchange, or what this kind of being with, looks like, feels like, and what it produces.
This simple afternoon experiment seeded the idea of 'loose space' within psychedelic-assisted therapies. If bodies and materials are constantly entangled in this reciprocal exchange, the challenge for the spatial practitioner is to design PAT spaces that are inherently mutable. How do we architect therapeutic environments that are flexible, soft, and yielding - specifying loose spatial arrangements that possess the capacity to be continuously rearranged to contour precisely to the highly specific, vulnerable body of the participant?
Soft Improvisation
2024
Library
Karen Barad, "On Touching - The Inhuman That Therefore I Am"
In "On Touching," Karen Barad unpacks the quantum physics of contact to show that touch is never a simple, innocent encounter between separate beings. She leans into the concept of "intra-action," arguing that distinct entities do not precede their interactions; instead, they emerge and take shape only through their mutual entanglement. Matter is a dynamic, iterative process, meaning that to touch something is to be fundamentally touched, altered, and folded into a reciprocal exchange.
During the Impressions project, intra-action was visible immediately, in the residues and traces of clay on my fingers, in the ridges of fingerprints and skin textures on the clay. This direct, reciprocal exchange seeded the idea of "loose space" for psychedelic-assisted therapies - therapeutic environments designed to be as soft, yielding, and responsive to a vulnerable body as the clay was to my hands.
Jane Bennett, "Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things"
Vibrant Matter shakes up the traditional divide between lively human subjects and passive objects. Bennett introduces the concept of "thing-power" to describe how ordinary, nonhuman materials - from street trash to dietary fats - possess an active, energetic agency of their own. Rather than inert stuff waiting for human direction, vibrant matter is a crucial, forceful participant in complex, ever-shifting assemblages.
This way of thinking materially feels inherently psychedelic to me - as I have often, during psychedelic encounters, understood the agency of inert objects and the intimate aliveness of material.