Juhani Pallasmaa theorizes architecture as in-betweenness, as a co-constitution of matter and experience, of poetic image and concrete form. Architecture then, is the mediated experience of bodies/matter and spaces. I engage Pallasmaa’s writing to explore the liminality of the thing and the no/thing: architecture as membrane between material, experiential, and virtual, a space between spaces. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space reveals a friction within poetic images as they tease at the limits of rational language. He speaks of poetic language and image having an agency to transport us from physical spaces to places of spatial memory, places we once inhabited but now revisit only in reverie. This agitation is a space between language and poetry, a tenancy of the in-betweenness of material and space.
My work appropriates these 2 notions of the in-between by positioning architecture as a membrane. The membrane is a mediator, granting agency to language, to bodies/matter, to ourselves and space. Through the use of the poetic image employed by both authors, I explore membrane as a zone of connection/resistance between the concrete and material, and the plastic and potential. The membrane is the place where reality is negotiated. My MFA research in craft media reframes the concept of the in-between to articulate the transgressive actions and agencies of bodies and space. I explore craft as a material and aesthetic apprehension of this liminality and investigate the potentials between queer bodies and agencies in action.