PRS Europe PhD Examination: Sally Mackereth

A Cabinet of Architectural Magicking

This PhD reflects on my creative preoccupations and identifies “magicking” as a distinctive form of my practice and contribution, operating at the intersection of magic and architecture, an uncomfortable pairing of worlds where the solid, rational, grounded, trustworthy is interwoven with the ethereal, intangible, illusory, mystical.

Adopting a ‘thinking through making’ process, four case studies were examined through a lens of my flea-market collecting, tampering with books and several curious devices inspired by ancient navigational stick charts, which I assembled and then filmed. This offered up new insights into the grain of my creative practice including spatial and temporal distortion, performative intervention and a surrealist influence of collecting where Siren’s voices, ancient shipwrecks and volcanic eruptions are brought to life through the architectural details.

The design thinking is aligned with my habit of collecting, where observations of a site are intuitively selected and put together in an assemblage of metaphorical specimens in a tray that are grouped and arranged then regrouped, paired up and juxtaposed for heighted effect.

These catalogues of oddities comprised of seemingly mundane, apparently discarded, and unrelated physical objects and traces of past lives lived are carefully gathered together and recomposed, bestowing the components with new status. These blended animations become an anecdote retold, a play reperformed, a place reimagined, imbuing the new buildings with dramatic narrative tension and a latent temporality.

With this new awareness of the factors influencing my creative process, I seek to reinforce these powerful motivations and drive my practice in new directions.