Constellation

Constellation is a collaborative sculpture by the Canadian artist Philip Beesley, working in collaboration with industrial designers, engineers, and couture artists.

Constellation offers a soaring, undulating canopy of luminous lace-like clouds embedded with liquid-filled protocell glass vessels. The clouds surround a suspended beacon-like central cluster of radiant spherical sheltering nest forms. The delicate materials hover, reaching up high and creating delicate shadows. Deeply fragmented vibration-like filamentary forms are interwoven with shimmering, hopeful light.

This is a precarious gathering space. Constellation offers a deep vision for inclusive, unapologetically fragile open gathering. Beesley and his collaborators offer a vision of a transformed world where future architecture seeks communion with plants, animals, and inert matter alike. The extraordinarily complex interior worlds of this constellation of cells offers an immersive vision of new life arising. The artist asks: can a new architecture based on dissipative natural forms, such as fragile snowflakes and shifting clouds, create buildings that are both sensitive, self-renewing, and resilient?

The sculpture involves beautiful, life-like inner and outer glowing light and shadows in continually changing and evolving forms. Expressive animated shadows extend far beyond the sculpture over floor and wall areas

The sculpture was fabricated by combinations of handwork and multiple small-scale laser cutters and traditional machining within the artist’s Toronto studio. Materials include expanded stainless steel, glass, fluid-filled vessels, and innovative thermally formed polymer transparent forms. These interwoven components are all suspended on lightweight aircraft cable suspension rigs.