Forest Hide and Seek [Sensory Refectory]

As a neurodivergent person with a disability, frequent visits to medical settings sparked my interest in how these environments could become more sensory-friendly and pleasurable. This led to the central research question: how can one be A PART of a space while being APART within the space? From this, the brief grew into a sensory refectory within a medical practice, where eating becomes more than a functional act. Smell, taste, sound, touch, sight, movement, memory, and pause are treated as spatial conditions that can support comfort and agency.

The project explores blur as a way to avoid harsh boundaries. It asks how users might gather, withdraw, regulate, and participate without being exposed or separated into fixed rooms.

The forest became a parallel for this ambition: a sensory landscape of shifting densities, blurred edges, thickets, clearings, filtered views, and shadows, where one can be visible and hidden, close and apart simultaneously.

Through making, testing, extracting, and reinterpreting physical and digital models, drawings, photographs, and film, abstract ideas begin to become spatial realisations, teasing out pleasures within movement, density, blur, skin, and bones.

Forest Hide and Seek
Framed between exterior and interior, the refectory emerges as a luminous thicket, chair-backs, and mesh curtains overlap in shifting densities, blurring edges as light filters toward the distant ordering counter.

Bones and All
Digital and physical iterations test how thicket components blur shadows, edges, and boundaries. For example, the cast floor extends the thicket, dispersing its offcuts across the casted flooring, softening the edge between structure, shadow, and surface.

Peering in – Musical Chairs
Musical Chairs traces the continual repositioning of chairs, where each shift alters light, shadow and visibility. Scaled-up chair skeletons turn furniture into thresholds, generating blur, density and atmosphere.

Roof Plan
The roof plan extends the project’s layered research method’s conceptual language through overlaid drawings on various translucent papers. The plan is not to be read as technical data, but as densities and blurred research outcomes.

Speculative Drawing 01
This drawing marks a shift from abstract research into spatial testing, translating ideas of movement, density, blur and concealment into the first spatials imagining of the refectory.