By Emily Goodman
Contributing Writer

I was recently traveling to another country with my kids when I noticed something interesting about how my 6-year-old navigates the world. Meandering through the European city streets, my daughter wasn’t simply taking in the sights; she was attempting to feel them, running her hands across the stones of the facades of buildings, grasping and swinging from the metal rails along staircases, lightly touching plant matter and grabbing fistfuls of gravel as we walked through the park. For her, the world is an opportunity to experience with multiple senses at the same time. Watching her attempt to touch everything reminded me that we are sensing creatures, capable of much more than hearing or seeing the world we live in.

For Lexington-based design firm, Substudio — comprised of the creative duo of Hannah Dewhirst and Ingrid Schmidt — experiencing the world through multiple senses is the goal. The pair met as graduate students at the Cranbrook Art Academy in Michigan, where the two worked on seemingly opposite ends of the sensory spectrum, with Dewhirst developing projects “about kind of sensory deprivation and environmental erasure,” while Schmidt was creating works about “hyper stimulation” particularly through the use of light. Yet while the engagement of the senses was different for each one, the pair quickly recognized that they were, as Schmidt describes it, “interested in these super sensory, immersive environments that we […] could test with our own bodies.” For Substudio, the work they create is designed to be experienced in multiple dimensions and with the entire body. According to Schmidt, “We think about how somebody approaches it, what they see first, how it changes as they get closer and as they’re moving away.”

While Dewhirst and Schmidt are trained architects, their more recent work has been focused on interior design, especially in the form of custom-designed and fabricated rugs. This shift was, in part, due to the pandemic, which forced the pair to abandon the more commercially produced materials (vinyl inflatables or wallpaper) towards something they could make by hand. As Dewhirst recalls, “When the pandemic hit, we had no studio, and so I built this [tufting] frame at this size in my apartment in Detroit, and it was a direct way to work with a tool and not rely on a shop or a studio space, which was totally inaccessible at the time. […] And so, we worked on tufting rugs by hand, using tufting guns.” At first Dewhirst and Schmidt combined these rugs with other projects, pairing the soft sculptures with their patterned wallpapers, as they did for a show at the Wasserman Gallery in Detroit in 2020.

Eventually, as things reopened and new opportunities emerged, the pair began creating rugs at a much larger size, requiring them to incorporate elements of machine fabrication into the creative process. The pair was commissioned by the Italian fashion company Bottega Veneta in 2021 to “fabricate huge-scale rugs for these pop-up spaces that they were making” in Detroit, according to Dewhirst.  As a result, they began “working with robotics and a factory in Morocco” in order to create immersive, room-sized pieces.

Regardless of the size, all of the works that Dewhirst and Schmidt create involve multisensory elements. Their rugs — both hand-tufted and machine made — are both visually and tactilely rich. Each piece involves complex and interwoven visual patterns that are often echoed in the shape and volume of the rug. The pieces frequently incorporate curved edges that replicate organic forms and use hallucinogenic plays of color and shape, drawing the eye into complex and deep patterns, which are created by varying the texture of the rug alongside the color of the tufted fibers. All of these elements combine to create works that are as much about feel as they are about look, pieces that draw you in so you can relate to them with your whole body, from the sensory neurons on your fingertips to the sense you get from standing next to something bigger than yourself.

Most of their projects are site-specific, and the pair approach each location with an openness that stems from their interest as architects in creating spaces that stimulate the senses in unique ways. They embrace the opportunity to play with not only their experience of a space, but also the viewer’s. Schmidt and Dewhirst have at this point figured out how to bring together different ways of engaging with a space, and their attention to all of the sensations and their potentialities means that the work they create reminds us that the world exists well beyond what is merely visible.

Like my daughter, Dewhirst and Schmidt approach the world as if it needs to be felt, not just witnessed, and their works are a good reminder of the pleasure and experience of feeling, in all of its varieties.  

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(Images provided by Substudio)