Key details
Time
- 2:30pm – 5pm
Location
- Battersea
-
Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Dyson Building, 1 Hester Rd, London SW11 4AY
Price
- Free
Who can attend
- Everyone
Type
- Lecture
This talk will outline conceptual approaches to current sculpture, offering precarious instruments that might help indicate our emerging reality. A tough and resilient optimism can be expressed within new kinds of form-language that are delicate, curious, and open. What is coming in our future? How do we speak of the future when the world is unspeakably insecure? It would be tempting to respond by building closed walls around our homes, and closed shells around each of our individual worlds. Yet new science tells me that life is always open, not closed. It tells us that life is continually arising and continually being created. My work is based on this new science. The hovering, oscillating membranes that are gathering in within this work speak of worlds arising in fertility. They invite us to be open, instead of closed. With these projections, the boundaries of our own homes and cities and even our own bodies might resemble crystalline snowflakes and petaled flowers. We can be unapologetically fragile.
Tickets can be booked to attend in-person at the Gorvy Lecture Theatre, but the lecture will also be livestreamed globally. Tickets for in-person and/or Zoom attendance can be booked through Eventbrite.
Philip Beesley is a pioneering artist working in sculpture, architecture, and couture. He is widely known for his immersive sentient installations. His installations were presented twice at the Venice Biennale for Architecture and are now touring Europe and Oceania. His collaborations with haute couture designer Iris van Herpen appear within 15 collections.
Beesley's research founded key parts of the rapidly emerging discipline of Living Architecture. His current research reveals fertile qualities at the boundary between mineral and organic realms including metastable and precarious systems. His publications offer paradigms, tools and frameworks that can support design of complex far-from-equilibrium systems. Beesley leads the interdisciplinary organisation Living Architecture Systems Group connecting sixty organisations and 150 member researchers.
He has contributed innovative curriculum frameworks across education and practice. A multi-year collaboration with TU Delft reaches across multiple departments and research groups. Awards distinguishing his collaborative work include the global ACADIA Design Excellence Award, the Prix de Rome, VIDA, FEIDAD, and two Governor General's awards for Architecture. The University of Waterloo awarded Beesley the singular title of University Professor in 2023.
For more information, see: www.lasg.ca
Philip Beesley's Work
Hylozoic Ground, with essays by critics.
STEAM-based kits and component systems are now in development with TU Delft.
Digital-Physical hybrid shadow projections currently in development.
