A Clearing: Landscape, Permanence and the Interior

Interior Architecture and Design in New Zealand has often been a by-product of the omnipotent “indoor-outdoor fucking flow” (Cheshire, 2015) between architecture and landscape. This dominant mode creates a systematic denial of interiority.

How might my creative practice embrace interiority but still imbue the interior with qualities of the landscape? How might interior architecture and design venerate the unique and varied conditions of geology?

Through a “Dynamic Reflection Model” (Blythe et al., 2013), research undertaken in practice, I have surveyed my lived experience and reflected on the fascinations and creative urges in my past, in the present, and for future projects at Knight Associates. I have analysed my Community of Practice and speculated on where the outcomes of this research may lead for my future creative practice.

Through this process, I have explained how my creative practice responds to these questions by being both deeply invested in interiority, but equally grounded in the landscape. I have established a creative practice that brings the richness, variety, and permanence of the natural world into the interior. Through my body of work, rather than a biophillic response mimicking the forms found in nature, or framing the gaze across landscapes, I aim to treat interiority as a particular form of topography, a ‘clearing,’ through a dynamic of heightened material richness and reduced formal complexity.