IRIS VAN HERPEN AND PHILIP BEESLEY

A new collaboration is underway between Canadian architect and sculptor Philip Beesley and the Amsterdam designer Iris van Herpen. Two new groups of work by these artists can be seen in Paris this month, one taking the form of fashion that transform conceptions of clothing, and the other in immersive, dissolving architecture environments that interact and breathe around their viewers.

A new generation of Van Herpen’s work was unveiled on July 1st in her Wilderness Embodied Fall-Winter 2013-14 collection at the Palais de la Découverte, Paris, with contributions from Beesley in experimental details. In January, Beesley and Van Herpen’s previous collaboration produced a series of dresses for Van Herpen’s Voltage Haute Couture collection. A series of Beesley’s suspended architectural environments influenced by these explorations is continuing this exchange with Radiant Soil currently on view in the Fondation EDF Alive/En Vie exhibition, Paris, and Epiphyte Veil, a next generation large scale geotextile work, currently touring throughout France (Maubeuge, Créteil, Lille).

In Beesley and Van Herpen’s new works, clouds of intermeshing material extend outward from the surface of the human body, extending tendrils and plumes outward, interweaving with layers of air that surround each of us. Hybrid intermixtures of natural and technical forms also extend inward, creating intimate layers close to the skin.Van Herpen’s Voltage series used highly sensitive, trembling vibrations embodied in clusters of individual components. Clusters of laser-cut translucent mylar fronds developed alongside Beesley were arranged by moulaging their angled geometries around an inner sheath that closely fit the body. Details from this couture are now entering ready-to-wear clothing. In a second hybrid textile, a robust silicone meshwork swarmed around the body. Individual impact-resistant acrylic chevron links were chained together with small silicone links to form a diagrid of hovering corrugated lacework. Within Van Herpen’s Wilderness Embodied series, fabrics of soft layers of feather-like silicone spines bristle in dense pile surfaces. Flexible shells of translucent tinted silicon are embedded with interlinking bone-like 3d-printed parts, extending the surface of natural human skin.

Influenced by these explorations, new architectural installations within Beesley’s current sculpture environments offer dense reticulated grottos made from densely massed custom glass vessels and tens of thousands of massed laser-cut transparent leaf filters, brought into motion by networks of shape-memory alloy and brought close to life by chemical reactions housed within the glass flasks. In works currently in development, 3d polymer and silicone printers are integrating ‘protocells’, prototype liquid chemical cells, into dense reticulated surfaces that will used to clothe environments presented in the coming months.

Might future spaces start, in very primitive ways, to become alive? The expressive work created within Beesley and Van Herpen’s dialogue are characterized by restless, seething qualities. Intimate dimensions found within these new hybrid fabrics suggest form-languages for designing urban buildings. The boundaries between human bodies and buildings might be blurred, with lace-like shells filtering convective currents extending around each of us. A new city built to be able to easily handle unstable conditions where it could shed heat, cool itself, and then rapidly warm up and gain heat again might well look like a hybrid forest, where each building is made from multiple overlapping layers of porous openings interwoven with dense artificial layers of fern and ivy-like filters.

HYLOZOIC SERIES: VESICA
Vesica refers to the medieval art tradition of circumscribing holy figures within a luminous aura or halo. Channelling this evocation of an enriched, fertile immersion, this iteration of the Hylozoic Series invited viewers into a nurturing space of expanding and dissolving boundaries. In sacred geometry, the term 'vesica' also refers to the intersecting zone within two overlapping circles; a transitional space symbolically located between Heaven and Earth. Within this indefinite state, individual bodies may become entwined within a complex system.

The City Gallery's presentation of Vesica aligned strongly with the City of Wellington's 2040 initiative, which addresses fundamental questions of future living and city making in the 21st century. During Vesica's presentation period, Philip Beesley visited New Zealand to deliver the keynote address at the 7th annual 'DeSForM (Design Semantics Form and Movement) Conference: Meaning Matter Making', hosted by theVUW School of Design. DeSForM 2012 celebrated and explored recent developments within New Zealand's emerging digital creative sector.
City Gallery Wellington - Curator's Statement

www.irisvanherpen.com
www.philipbeesley.com