Crystal Fabric Field (Pete and Repeat), 2020
MDF, powder coated steel, fanzines

Barham designed the yellow Crystal Fabric Field Bracket (1016) to enable a way of building that mimics how crystals form - by repeating the geometry of their unit cell over and over. The bracket is a structural instruction which defines the basic forms a structure can take, whilst the space it inhabits, and the objects and bodies it is designed to hold, are the foreign particles that inflect the precise dimensions and directions of its crystallisation.

On the bracket’s three sides are cut-outs of a comma, an inverted comma and a full stop; marking an equivalence between architectural and syntactic structures that Barham draws throughout her practice.

The bracket was originally conceived for the exhibition architecture Barham designed to house Liquid Crystal Display (Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2018; MIMA, Middlesbrough, 2019). She has since gone on to use the bracket to create a series of benches, stands, shelves, and other support structures under the collective title Crystal Fabric Field.

The title is developed from Donna Haraway’s 1976 work 'Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that shape embryos', which explores the role and importance of metaphor in biology.

Here, in Arcade's Brussels space at Rue du Marché aux Porcs, the work creates a space for books, records and editions created by artists and friends of Arcade for the gallery’s publication platform Pete and Repeat. https://thisisarcade.art/pete-repeat