The body is a building we continually learn and relearn to inhabit and to escape from. Emily Speed’s work suggests that architecture is not just material – it’s metaphor, memory, muscle. Her practice explores the symbiotic relationship between the body and architecture. How architecture moulds the body and how the body shapes architectural form, in a continuous exchange of movement and meaning. In Speed’s world, buildings do not hold us upright – they bend, they reach, they embrace, they trap, they fail the bodies they’re made for.
Leaving Artlab Contemporary Print Studios where Speed is in residence we take a walk through Preston. Rain sculpts our surroundings. Obscures vision. Umbrella pointed against the sheets of wind. Topography expressed through the raindrops pattering, reverberating inside our coats’ hoods pulled tight. ‘Clothes are a kind of architecture, a sheltering structure,’ I say. ‘Have you seen Piero Della Francesca’s ‘Madonna Della Misericordia’ or ‘Madonna of Mercy?’ Speed asks. I shake my head. ‘Or in German it’s ‘Madonna of the Sheltering Cloak’. People are always under her blue cloak. You get loads of different versions of these Madonnas, some of them have whole cities underneath. The idea of the cloak as a wall, a layer around the body, but it’s extra to clothes. I think what I also enjoy is the surreality of how many people can fit under it. There’s something about using scale as a narrative device, it doesn’t matter, they’re smaller because there’s a lot of them.’
We stop at the foot of a stone staircase. A Neo-Classical building in sandstone ashlar. A portico extends its facade with a pillared balcony at waist-height. Decorative arches. Corinthian columns too numerous all to be needed for weight-bearing. They’re ornamental forms, or they’re glyphs of architecture. It’s a shorthand for collected knowledge and power. It’s a shorthand which draws a specific feeling from the relatively small and casual passerby who pauses, as we pause, to gaze up at its stoic elevated mass. (Why did ancient Egyptians opt for the labour-intensive method of constructing with colossal blocks rather than using bricks? Like the Power Glyph of the Column, the profound sense of awe that a seventy-tonne stone has on visitors to these megalithic structures cannot be overstated. Awe that’s travelled thousands of years.)
Imagine a body, your body, how it acts in different spaces. Your park body stretches, lingers, follows the slow logic of winding paths and curves itself onto benches like the gentle slope of grass. Your office body bends, shoulders drawn forward to screens, hips squared to the edge of the desk, still, functional, it holds tension, performs endurance. Built environments are designed to reflect and reinforce social, economical and political structures. Social norms inscribe themselves to the body, influencing its movements, behaviours and perceptions.
We open the heavy doors of the building’s entrance, fancifully decorated escutcheon plates surround the handle with interwoven arms. We pass into a two-story circular atrium. Rain thrums on a domed skylight, softly echoing with our footsteps clipping the tiled floor. A massive mirrored staircase wants to draw the eye to the centre of the room, follow it up to balconies where scholars circle purposefully, papers tucked under their arms, but we dawdle its periphery.
‘I had a drawing day last week,’ Speed says, and gestures to her sketch on the wall, ‘Soft Floorplan Hanging’ (2024) – a floorplan, folded and dangling over a bar. She envisioned it printed onto fabric; a floppy, unreadable object with fingers at the end that bend together to form rooms, loosely constructing the outline of a building. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about floor plans – folding, the hands holding. Maybe the building will morph into a body, or it might be legs, arms and fingers.’
I think of the narrative built through the act of drawing. When the lines collide and what they say to each other. The arguments and battles for space/position. The meetings, entwinings. The expressions a shape pulls, its character. In ‘Soft Floorplan’, the fingers are reclined, hanging, at rest. Or stretching, mobile and breaking free of the net. Are they pointing to the floor or flipping the bird?
I hear a crack as I step back from the sketch. I retract my foot and see numerous curved sculpted fingers laid on the floor, fresh from the kiln. ‘The floorplan will hang on ceramic finger hooks now. Bright orange. I’m going to get the glaze looking really smooth and rubbery. The buff of the clay’s got a pinky beige colour to it, so the finger will pop out of the end. I’ve made something a little bit similar, but it’s not quite…’ She turns to an oversized plaster hinge mounted on the wall. A middle finger. A gesture both gleeful and furious. ‘When I made this I was reading about Cardea, the Roman goddess of hinges and thresholds.’
Cardea keeps people in or out. She governs entrances and exits, visibility and concealment. In Speed’s work, the hinge is both literal and symbolic – a feminist architecture of transition. It’s the part you don’t see, the small mechanism that enables the entire structure to function. ‘Column in the front, hinges in the back,’ I say. The hinge becomes a glyph of quiet power, an unseen structure that holds everything together.
We enter Speed’s piece, ‘Rooms Designed for a Woman’ (2021), a sculptural work that references both the pressures and tendernesses of domestic life. We crawl through the door, scaled to make the legs look bigger – it’s too small for us to walk through. I’d say we were about the size of the woman’s arm, and the door is half her thigh. Body parts have historically been used as a measuring tool. The text in Leonardo DaVinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’(c1490) paraphrases the ancient Roman treatise Ten Books on Architecture (30-20 BC) written by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio: ‘Vitruvius, the architect, says in his architectural work that the measurements of man are in nature distributed in this manner, that is 4 fingers make a palm, 4 palms make a foot, 6 palms make a cubit, 4 cubits make a man, 4 cubits make a footstep, 24 palms make a man and these measures are in his buildings.’
In ‘Rooms Designed for a Woman’, bodies push against the limits of space. Limbs burst from furniture, the body spills from structure. Inside, we squeeze into the space between the woman’s body and the wall, we sit on the beige bulbous floor. Speed slides over a paper maquette, a test, an idea – a railroad flat or a chapel; three rooms in a row connected by arched doorways. In the centre, arms reach across the walls, spanning the space, stiff and blocking our way, or pliant and gently stroking our shoulders as we walk past. ‘With watercolours, you get a loose quality.’ She plans to screen print with watercolours onto the floors and walls, with photopolymer etching on top as texture. ‘It’ll alternate between brick and parquet and skin. It could be folded into shape, but it’s more interesting in this half-state. There’s something about when it springs halfway up.’ Something about potential, something about precariousness. ‘I’m thinking a lot about… it’s one of the things that’s so dire at the moment isn’t it? You can’t really choose where you live.’
(Imagine a lighthouse renovated to a specific design with two outstanding features. The first is the basement, where a thick layer of smooth grey stone protrudes from the floors and walls, undulating in ergonomic shapes, so that the whole of it can be lounged on in multiple places, at multiple heights. Stone spilling down the ceiling, across the floor, making organic, tiered chaise longues.)
‘I’m on a residency at The Energy House in Salford,’ Speed says, ‘and thinking about the future of housing. The Barratt houses, which are quite expensive, are just the minimum square footage that the government – that is legal, for the amount of bedrooms. There’s this meanness. It just feels like the bare minimum. And it feels like a lot of things are just the bare minimum.’
(The stones retain heat from an underground source. Musty like an ancient cave, cosy and earthy. (In dreams, psyche is often depicted as a house. The stories of the house signify time. Descending the staircase, going back in time, and deeper underground, into ancient caves. The replica of the Chauvet cave is missing the smell. A couple of years ago you could still visit Peche Merle, a real ancient cave, and really smell it, so when you visited the replica afterwards, it was the smell you missed. Each successive simulation misses a vital piece, until the one at the end, where you’re viewing it from, is mangled with holes you can’t see from this angle. Each generation accepts a depleted version.))
I think of my own childhood home, I grew up in a council house – this image of bodies bursting out of buildings, too small to contain them, trapped, framed, resonates. There’s a tenderness in this image too, the tumult of living on top of each other which any family experiences, rows and stacks of limbs tangled together. And as any child would, I imagined another place, watched Grand Designs (in the middle of the lighthouse are the usual living quarters, split across three levels, though its circular nature makes for some interesting interior design), drew out floor plans, designed the ideal house.
(The second outstanding feature is on the top floor. Looking up from the street or from the surrounding beach, or from a boat in the nearby port, it appears as though a Victorian greenhouse has been placed on top of the lighthouse. The walls are entirely made of glass panels, ornate wrought iron frames painted white. The roof has glass panels meeting at a point in the middle like a hat. But on closer inspection and stepping inside, we recognise – this is an observatory. A telescope sits in the centre of the room with a blue writing desk beside it. So as not to block out any light, or block the view of the sea, the bookshelves are built under the floorboards. Ropes with golden tassels lay about the floor, so you pull on them, to open up the floor, and take a book from underneath.)
The lights dim and Speed’s floor plan emerges from the ground, backlit inside a frame, the design is a little bigger, four rooms instead of three. ‘The walls are legs and feet now instead of fingers? What made you change it?’ I ask. ‘With the legs there’s something I like because you end up with crotches,’ Speed replies, ‘but they’re not crotches, they become like knees, or elbows. The crotch would be here. But not.’ ‘And the legs make errogenous zones, the back of the knee, the achilles tendon,’ I note. ‘Yes, and I like this idea of having bulges or ambiguous fleshy walls. I’m going to have some suggestion of thighs, or limbs inside, the suggestion of it being really full and bodily, because the body takes up so much space in it.’ The legs are trapped in the blueprint, their flesh has no flight, it’s solid stock at home, guarding, structuring.
‘In the floorplans, and when the maquette is flattened,’ I say, ‘this cross-sectioning, segmenting, is reminiscent of quattrocento paintings.’ I’m aware of Speed’s interest in fourteenth century Italian religious art, I’d seen it on her website before we met. ‘You see it in the boxing off of the compositions, using buildings as their structuring element. The open-faced rooms are like comic strip boxes.’ ‘Yes, and I cannot get away from that,’ she agrees, ‘those sort of paintings go through everything in the way that I think about picture making. It’s the flattened picture plain and the weird dimensions – so the buildings are tiny on top – but it’s that element that they’re just enough, they’re just enough to frame a body but they don’t house it. It’s like a stage set, the whole thing is theatrical and narrative-based.’
Speed and I pass through a threshold made from sheer curtains, draped Bone, Ecru, Parchment and Vanilla Organza, soothing symmetry, head down a dimly lit corridor that unfolds under our feet as sound dissolves. We draw closer, and see a small light angled to illuminate a painting underneath. Numerous architectural shapes used as framing devices, windows revealing an almost neon blue sky. ‘The Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple’(1306) by Giotto di Bondoni in a gilded frame. On first glance, colour is the most striking element, the hot pinks and turquoises feel decidedly modern, and this modernity seems alien in the 1300s. We can see the theatricality Speed spoke of in this painting, like a scene in a film, it depicts the exact high point of the biblical drama, enters late and leaves early – Joachim is kicked out of the temple. Only one of the priest’s hands is pushing, the other is still reassuring but his face is stern. Joachim’s expression is unsure, hurt, it’s not sunk in yet, there’s still a slight raise of his eyebrow, he comforts himself by comforting the lamb. In the temple the other priest and the little guy are going about their business unbeknownst, a scene has not been made there – the scene’s only for us.
‘Do you think the small buildings in these paintings become a glyph of architecture?’ I ask. ‘Glyph is an interesting word to use, I’m interested in things that have symbolic readings, narrative readings, but maybe not in the way you might expect.’ ‘I was thinking about the glyph in terms of drawing as well, like a stand-in, a suggestion – in your building net, the arms going across the room.’ ‘I suppose it is. It’s that structure for the narrative, it sets up the scene in the way that Giotto does. In a lot of my work the scale has spoken about things not being enough or not being able to contain. The way that happens is the body is either bursting out of it, or it’s half in half out. Like here,’ she gestures to the temple in the painting, ‘the building comes up to his waist, it’s a cut off section but it’s like he’s in a play pen. That idea of the architecture not being enough is really interesting.’
Architecture emerges from chaos to establish territories of order. The evolution of a self through a lifetime – our boundaries, our trajectories, our narratives – is how we delineate order from the chaos of existence. There is a mirroring – in the construction of architecture and in the configuration of the self. Both processes are enmeshed in power structures. Who constructs buildings and who gains access to them? What implications does the socio-economic environment a person is born into have on their ability to shape, evolve and express themselves?
Architecture is not neutral. It is a language, a set of codes, a choreography for bodies. Speed’s practice intervenes in this language. She writes new glyphs in plaster, gesture, fabric, clay. Rooms that do not command but reflect. Structures that do not contain but converse at the site of the body – its scale, its softness, its defiance. I think of Speed’s finger-hooks, her kneeling limbs, her floorplans held in ceramic touch. I think of my own childhood home and the rooms I invented when the real ones felt too limiting and boring.
A conversation is a shared hypnosis. A hypnosis that languidly, hastily, assembles rooms for questions, for tangents, for ideas to reside in, its walls expand, shift, colours change, corridors stretch and meander as more objects are added. Maybe the building was always there but before the dialogue’s struck you can’t see it. We don’t leave the building, we dissolve back into it, into folds of fabric, arches of plaster, the impression of limbs pressing. Speed’s work doesn’t offer answers so much as questions embodied.
This exploration was informed by conversations with Emily Speed, part a series of written responses to the Women in Print artist residencies at Artlab Contemporary Printmaking Studio, UCLan, Preston. www.artlabcontemporaryprint.org.uk
Eloise Oui is a multi-media artist and writer from Yorkshire. www.eloise-oui.com
This exploration is supported by UCLan.
Published 08.06.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
2,832 words
