23 March–31 May 2020

D.W. Winnicott’s concept of a holding environment relates to his work on the caring environment that a parent (specifically in his work – a mother) creates for a child, and the supportive environment a therapist makes for a client.(8) A holding environment insulates the baby/client from stress, but also allows moments of frustration to enter. Gradually adjusting to the withdrawal of care as an immediate response to need, a holding environment allows the baby/client to develop creatively and to become self-sustaining. This transitional space between parent and child, analyst and analysand, exists as a resting place for the individual engaged in keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (9) For Winnicott this is retained in life in the area of intense experiencing that belongs to the arts, to religion and to imaginative living and creative scientific work, providing relief from the strain of relating inner and outer reality. Winnicott discusses cultural experience as located in the ‘potential space’ between ‘the individual and the environment (originally the object)’. (10)

Felix Guattari, in his essay of 1964, ‘The Transference’, notes that ‘in the transference there is virtually never any actual dual relation’(11), rather he argues that dual relations are always triangular in character, noting that ‘there is always in a real situation a mediating object that acts as an ambiguous support or medium’.(12) As Gary Genosko points out, Guattari relies to a certain extent on both D. W. Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object and potential space between mother and child as a third entity, but also Jacques Lacan’s object a, as that which provokes the institution’s desire. For Guattari, it is transdisciplinarity that holds the potential of radical critique, linked in his own philosophy to transversality, an ‘unconscious source of action’, that carries a group’s desire, ‘a dimension opposite and complementary to the structures that generate pyramidal hierarchisation’.(13)

These watercolours were made during the coronavirus pandemic ‘lockdown’ in the UK in 2020, from the 23rd of March to the 31st of May. This was a time when the days of the week, usually so distinct, began to blend into one another, each one ending in an announcement of those who had passed away in the previous 24 hours. The images are of spring blossoms that I found in an adjacent hedge, a nearby meadow, and the woods, a short walk away from my home. The titles pair the date I noticed a flower of this kind open for the first time, with the rising total number of deaths from COVID-19 in the UK, as recorded on that same day.(14)

In ‘Get Better Soon: Planetary Health and Climate Emergency,’ written during the UK COVID-19 lockdown, artist David Cross argues that COVID-19 is a symptom of the ecological crisis.(15) Cross explains how the Stockholm Resilience Institute’s 2009 paper identified ‘nine planetary boundaries in the earth’s system,’ which ‘define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system and are associated with the planet's biophysical subsystems or processes’.(16) Beyond this, according to Katy Raworth, lie ‘unacceptable environmental degradation and potential tipping points in earth systems’.(17) Raworth’s ‘doughnut’, is a spatial concept that positions the nine planetary boundaries as an ‘environmental ceiling’, which she pairs with ‘twelve dimensions of the social foundation are derived from internationally agreed minimum social standards, as identified by the world’s governments in the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015.’ For Raworth, ‘between social and planetary boundaries lies an environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive’, in my view this constitutes ‘a holding’.

This work forms part of wider research conversations with colleagues at the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Ethical Architecture/Built Environment Research Network, which was established in 2019 in response to student demands for an architecture education aligned with the climate and ecological crises, and radical institutional and cultural change.