Philip Beesley: Hylozoic Ground

Architecture trained artist, Philip is as much a story teller as he is a designer. His creations attempt to tread lightly upon the earth but heavily into the viewer’s feelings. He creates mechanisms that are near-life as if they are just about to emerge from the primordial systems into greater life.

This is MIT’s biosplastic 3D printing lab “decay by design”. They use fish silicates and other bio-composites to create forms that will disintegrate later in time. The forms are inspired by natural skeletal/leaf like structures.

While this is more of an inflatable, the balloon like outfit transforms immediately into a fashion ready outfit in seconds: A confusion yet intriguing moment. The reason I show this is to set up an idea in my second sketch.

A sketch of a rigid fabric structure attached to a dancer, her movements accentuated to create larger than life movements. I was originally thinking of a spider or a scorpion but the result of the sketch is more so a geometric exercise of the extension of the body.

This idea is curious about the human/s form when completely cloaked to create new forms of life. The heads pulling the fabric against each other to create a monster than is different than human, and perhaps like no other life.

For this last sketch I propose a duel between two characters where the battle is shown through the pulling of the fabric forms against each other. An underlying structure might dictate the way the fabric moves in tension. The power of the human represented in a display of strain and stress.