The Joanne Avison Podcast

Sacred Geometry: Kenneth Snelson and the Missing Piece

Joanne Avison Season 5 Episode 25

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0:00 | 40:34

What if the missing piece in understanding the human body was discovered by a sculptor?

In this episode Joanne explores the extraordinary life and work of Kenneth Snelson, the artist whose remarkable discovery of floating compression transformed the way we understand structure, movement, and the living body.

Working from curiosity rather than convention, Snelson built a simple sculpture that revealed a profound truth: living forms are not held together by stacked parts, but by a continuous relationship between tension and compression. His insight became the missing piece that helped shape modern ideas of tensegrity, fascia, and living architecture.

You'll discover:

  • Why Kenneth Snelson's X-Piece changed everything
  • The difference between floating compression and tensegrity
  • How living bodies organise themselves differently from buildings
  • Why weaving offers a powerful model for understanding fascia
  • How the principles of living architecture appear throughout nature
  • What Snelson's work reveals about movement, resilience, and human form
  • Why the patterns of physical forces matter more than isolated parts

More than the story of a sculptor, this is an invitation to see yourself differently. Kenneth Snelson's work reminds us that the human body is not a machine assembled from separate pieces, but a living, self-organising architecture whose intelligence has been quietly present all along.

If this way of understanding the body resonates with you, and you'd like to explore it in depth, Joanne Avison and Paul Thornley teach these principles through their online programme, Myofascial Magic in Action (MMIA). This in-depth course brings together fascia, movement, anatomy, and Sacred Geometry to help practitioners, movers, and curious learners experience the living body in an entirely new way.

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Podcast produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman