In addressing the exhibition theme we chose to collaborate together as architect and artist, as husband and wife, because the subject has been at the heart of both our practices over a life time, expressed as a commitment to the idea that art has a therapeutic social basis and is offered as a form of healing care of self and the Other. We have an ongoing creative conversation that underpins our thinking and making, but also, it seemed fitting to collaborate in a project where the very nature of the theme suggests a cooperative response. Between the ‘I and Thou’, the third space, the shared space, of reciprocity could emerge. We also wanted to inscribe our work with the masculine and feminine as a further layering of that shared space, with the connectedness and ‘spontaneous benevolence’ that can define kindness in the originary intimate sphere.
For a long time we have worked with the metaphor of the beehive as a social/spiritual picture for the repair and transformation of community, nature and the wider world. We have used the structures and materials of the beehive in their cosmological and mythic significance for over a decade in our art, architecture and writing. As the bee colonies have come under increasing duress from environmental imbalances, we have also seen the beehive as a critical indicator of our lack of a caring relationship with nature. The materials of the beehive – the pollen, honey, beeswax, are of themselves, materials of a healing and sacramental nature, imparting inherent warmth.They and the communal life of the bees, offer paradigms of communality, self sacrifice and co operative social structure. For this exhibition we decided to make a sanctuary/shelter from these materials and ideas that would impart by its gesture of protection, meeting and ‘passage’; its sensual embodiment and saturated sweet honey aroma; its physical intimacy and proximity, the notion that shelter and kindness belong together. We have titled the work: ‘SENSE’.
The six sided ‘blocks’ of beeswax used (an abstraction of the hexagonal cell that makes the comb of the beehive dwelling), are laid out loosely in the form of the vesica pisces, the overlapping of two circles to create a third space – a metaphor for the creative, reciprocal space generated in the act of kindness. Above the work a cloud-like baffle made from raw cocoon silk offers another form of ‘warmth’, protection and sensual embracement. The work enacts a passage, a gesture of turning, of compression and release, as one walks through it, engaging the spectator in a physical enactment of the ‘dance’ of communion with the other- at once risky and transformative.
We installed, ‘SENSE’ in the bush land of our country studio: bush which was burnt to ash 3 years ago. The intervention in the regenerating bush contextualizes the work’s ecological dimension: made from nature, it, in turn, offers consolation and healing back to nature in the form of a richly encoded cultural object of care and kindness. We also assembled the work in the midst of the regenerated orchard in full blossom, where a rainbow, arching the sky from horizon to horizon, hovered luminously for a brief moment, inscribing this work with hope.
An architecture of kindness would, in our thinking, offer some of these same qualities – the intimacy, reciprocity and care that enables empathy and relationship to flow between human beings: an architecture mediating between a challenging yet protective built environment to a kinder world beyond its healing walls.
Gregory Burgess & Pip Stokes
http://pipstokes.com.au
Melbourne, Victoria2009