Studiolo Interior Perspective is part of the Eastway Studiolo project. Comprised of a series of drawings and an accompanying textual narrative, the project aims to explore how alien figurations can reveal relational strands in the context of architectural design. A set of dialectic tensions between the finished and the unfinished is integral to the process.

One source of the dynamic of unfinished and unfinished can be found in the Leaky Embodiment Alter-ego Personas themselves. Invented through portraits, animations, and sculptures, LEAPs are intentional depictions of instances of corporeal instability. Their bodies are comprised of bulbous, mismatched parts, ancillary heads and organs, with interiors sometimes exposed through x-rays and section cuts; at times their proliferating viscera spills forth, while they look on with comic alarm. As much as their fragmentary, dynamic bodies blend and are contaminated by contexts, as alien assemblages, much like Odradek, whom Jane Bennet notes in Kafka’s short story defy ontological categorisation by the story’s narrator, LEAPs always remain other than. As such, the figures become access points to an exploration of corporeal alterity and radical relationality.

In the Interior Perspective, a LEAP is deployed as a body agent, a figure that catalyses design. The drawing shows the exterior masonry wall as transparent, revealing the interior.  The LEAP appears four times: writing at their desk; emerging through the arched entrance to the Studiolo, which they sculpt as their hand touches its edges; reading while perched in an elongated pod-like chair that they mould with their posture; and, as a ghostly apparition, reaching upwards towards the skylight and tracing the upper surface of a domed ceiling with the arc of their arm.

Through their mutability and leakiness, LEAPs’ bodies disrupt the corporeal limitations that figures typically provide in design drawings; in some instances, their metaphoric and metonymic properties help to determine and shape the design, but in others they provoke an unravelling of threads, preventing the achievement of a fixed, finished state. In the case of the Eastway Studiolo project, the LEAP’s contingent bodies and evolving narrative influenced the expansion of the design from an interior out to the surrounding environment.

The dialectic between tendencies of unfinished and finished also plays out in the creation of the drawing artefact itself. The drawings are loose, freehand, materially and tactilely based, and as such, unlike hard-line drawings, they are prone to reworking and revisions. In this way, they raise questions and offer further avenues of exploration. Yet the drawings also provide a tendency towards completion. Unlike digital drawings, with their constantly adjustable vantage point, these drawn scenarios come into focus through the inherent commitment to the fixed station point and frame entailed in composing them. Also ensuring a state of completion, the limits provided by physical media and techniques of mark-making and erasures ensure a finitude; simply put, as much as LEAPs may provoke exploration and questioning, the paper can withstand only so much erasure, inscription, and pentimento.

These dynamics ensures a fertile proliferation of points of enquiry and invention to define the burgeoning world.