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
Scrim, image 1 of 5 1/5
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Scrim, image 3 of 5 3/5
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Scrim, image 5 of 5 5/5

Scrim

Drawing on the Light and Space precedents of Robert Irwin’s scrim installations - which used sheer, taut fabric to alter the volume and atmosphere of a room - I began carrying a piece of semi-translucent fabric out into the world. My initial instinct was simply to place this material in different environments and watch how the spaces around me projected themselves onto its surface.

Through this physical interface, the material’s semi-opacity brought multiple territories into direct relation. The fabric allowed for muted, blurred sightlines to the world beyond, while simultaneously catching the light and acting as a surface for immediate projection. Over time, I began treating the scrim as an active canvas, painting impressionistically on it to record my experiences of the surrounding environment. Eventually, I hung these painted fabrics inside my home, progressively cutting physical apertures into them. This created a complex, layered textility: a superimposition of painted marks, cast shadows, holes, and the physical world beyond actively interpenetrating the surface.

This practice functioned as an exercise in what philosopher Erin Manning calls thresholding. Manning conceptualises thresholding as an active, emergent, and porous process. Crucially, she notes that for these practices to be generative, they must include explicit constraints that perform and reshape space. By cutting, painting, and layering the fabric, I was spatially testing how a threshold might be articulated not as a hard architectural barrier, but as a yielding, semi-permeable membrane that actively negotiates what is allowed to pass through.

Thresholding Vibrant Matter

Soft Improvisation

2022

Library

Lawrence Weschler, "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: a life of contemporary artist Robert Irwin"

I was interested in Robert Irwin's use of scrim as a spatial device that shifts the viewer's perception of space, and so I read more on the subject during this project. In Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Irwin describes scrim as a "defocusing element" that sets up a profound spatial ambiguity. He notes that the material skews expectations and tilts the perceptual mechanism, allowing you to perceive a room as you otherwise might not have.

I took this idea—that a gauzy, semi-transparent screen creates a certain ambiguity between where the body ends and the world begins - and worked with it throughout this soft improvisation. Irwin's reflections offered a framework for understanding how such a material allows the world to interpenetrate itself. This text provided the conceptual foundation for treating my own semi-opaque fabrics as active, yielding membranes that continuously negotiate the physical and perceptual boundaries of a space.