IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper presents dynamic handwoven sculptural forms as a creative response to architectural legacies and a provocation for urban design into the future. To make these artworks, I loop, coil, stitch and contort utilitarian materials that are part of the urban fabric. In the process, industrial products that are usually used to homogenise urban space become a responsive self-organising system unrestricted by a predetermined design. Through these methods, I explore the gap between how a city is envisioned from a plan view and its physical realisation from the ground up. In Canberra, Australia’s planned capital, the preeminent geometries of the city’s design have encultured a detached top-down vantage point. This paper interweaves analysis of Canberra’s architectural history with present day observations, to contextualise a series of temporary site-specific sculptural interventions that have been woven into place. These interventions reimagine the prevailing geometries of the city from an embodied and relational perspective. Offering an alternative morphological model with which to approach the design principles and fixed narratives of Canberra’s civic spaces. From bus stops and car parks to city squares, this highly localised creative research brings a tacit knowledge of weaving into broader spatial practice. It shows how the past and present of cities, along with their complex futures, can be explored through responsive and relational sculptural form that weave new urban models stitch by stitch.