Speculative and Exploratory Field Works.
Inscriptions, handwriting, cognitive connections across visual art materialisms.
Gathered readings, walking across holloways and embodied dispositions, surfaces/inseparable cartographies of embodied experiences.
Undisciplined knowledge enables and sustains actions, gestures of a post disciplinary field.
Inseparable categories (containers and bodies) and their contents.
The Aesthetic,
The Economic,
The Political,
The Social,
.jpg)
Outpost 181024
https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton
Philosophical Solitudes~Sensual Objects
Here the full meaning of the philosopher's solitude becomes apparent. For he cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them. Doubtless it is in democratic and liberal milieus that he finds the best living conditions, or rather the best conditions for survival.
Gilles Deleuze.
Life Of Spinoza.
Ann Cline.
A Hut of One's Own/Life outside the circle of Architecture.
How to cook a wolf.
Essay as Cookbook.
The pleasure of Sue's little house and her inspired oblivion to the ugliness of poverty, appeals not because of its strangeness, but because of its calm. The pleasure of her little house as with the 'bagatelles' around Paris lay in the intensity of its inhabitation.
At first when you entered it, the house seemed almost empty, but soon you realised that it was stuffed with a thousand relics. You ate by one candle, everything from one large Spode soup plate. I have never eaten such strange things as there in her dark smelly room, with the waves roaring at the foot of the cliff. The salads and stews she made from these little shy weeds (gathered from the cliffs and nearby field) were indeed peculiar, but she blended and cooked them so skilfully that they never lost their fresh salt crispness. She put them together with thought and gratitude, and never seemed to realize that her cuisine was one of intense romantic strangeness, to everyone but herself, moreover it was good.
M. F. K. Fisher.
Inherent Light.
The light that seems to glow from within a colour.
To attend to colour, then is in part, to attend to the limits of language. It is to try to imagine, often through the medium of language, what a world without language might be like.
David Batchelor.
Retinal Studies
Colour, David Hornung. 2005
Knowing Obscures Seeing.
Vision is influenced by our preconceptions about reality. In viewing a scene, we establish unconscious hierarchies that reflect our functional relationship to objects and our momentary priorities.
The camera, like the human eye, sees only shapes and colours. It documents the world impartially through a lens that is similar to the eye. The functional relationship we have with objects creates visual expectations that interfere with our ability to see 'like a camera.'
In retinal painting, one concentrates upon colour and shape while resisting the urge to name individual objects. When vision is directed in this manner, one actually experiences a different way of seeing. The result is a picture in which the subjects seem to be constructed purely out of colour shapes.
The Impressionists developed a way of painting that, at its most extreme, sought to replace drawing as the basis of pictorial composition with the objective transcription of colour shapes as observed in reality. Claude Monet (1840-1926) in particular attempted to build his pictures strictly out of his response to visual sensations. He proposed that the painter should record only the patterns and colours that fall on the retina and ignore the 'identity' of the subject. This constituted a new kind of realism that reflected the physical nature of vision.
Bridge Tones.
Tones, tints, or shades that combine qualities of two distinctly different colours and act to soften those differences when placed near them in a composition.
Chromatic Darks.
Very dark chromatic greys that have discernible temperature.
Chromatic Greys.
Subtle colours that result from considerably lowering the saturation level of prismatic colours. Chromatic greys weakly exhibit the distinguishing quality of the hue family to which they belong.
Median Transparency.
An illusion of transparency where the value of the colour at the overlap is halfway between that of the two parent colours. The hue of the overlapping area blends the hues of the two overlying colours equally.
Luminosity.
The amount of light reflected from the surface of a colour. Value is a measure of luminosity.
High Key.
What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly light in value.
Middle Key.
What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly medium in value.
Achromatic Greys.
Greys that are created by mixing black and white. Achromatic greys have no evident coloration when seen against a white background. Black and white are also achromatic.
.jpg)
Greyscale.
A graduated representation of the value continuum broken down into a finite number of steps, usually ten, eleven, or twelve achromatic greys.
Non proportional Colour Inventory.
A graphic rendering of specific colours observed in an object.
Proportional Colour Inventory.
A graphic representation of the exact colours and their proportions in a observed object.
Retinal Painting.
A term coined by Harriet Schorr in reference to painting from observation in a manner emphasizing the faithful transcription of coloured shapes as they appear on the retina of the eye. An outgrowth of Impressionism, this method favours accurate colour rendering over drawing to describe form.
Shade.
Tint.
Tone.
Made by mixing grey (either chromatic or achromatic) with a colour. Tone can also have a more general meaning. The term is sometimes applied to all colours achieved by admixture including tints and shades.
Colour Unity.
The Altered Palette.
Unifying Strategies for Colour Mixing.
Any primary triad will have inherent limitations, but these are what give a palette its character.
Comparisons between the compositional study and the finished inventory clarify just how the inherent light in a design or painting is a projection of the palette from which it originates.
The colour overtones associated with specific pigments will limit possible saturation range. These limitations can be thought of as an expression of the character of illumination inherent in a colour. Just as a fluorescent light produces a characteristic quality of light that unifies what it illuminates, any primary triad exerts a characteristic quality of inherent light through intermixing.
An almost fool proof way to achieve family resemblance among a group of colours is to generate them from a limited source. Intermixing any primary triad (plus white) can produce a wide range of tones that share a common light quality.
A triadic dot study, teaches a mode of examination that, in a few steps summarizes the tonal range of a selected palette. The follow-up applies the colours of the study to a composition and puts the palette into action.
Earth Tone Primary Triad.
A primary triad of chromatic greys (so called because of their resemblance to pigments found in nature, e.g., ochres and umbers).
Low Key.
What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly dark in value.
Ceramic Oxides/Body Stains.
Chromatic greys from earth tones producing weak muted colours.
Speculative architectural volumes and surfaces around issues of ethics and aesthetics.
Innerness and Interior : Surface Pleasures
In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?
Theory and Analysis. Russell Moreton
Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. 2015
This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.
In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?
Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.
This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)
A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.
Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.
There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.
‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson, 2009:36)
Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)
Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)
The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?
Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.
I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)
Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.
‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.
Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.
Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.
Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.
The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.
Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.
His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.
Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)
Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)
In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)
His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.
Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it helps us to gather in our surroundings.
‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson, 2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves, 2009:8)
This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.
His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?
Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.
Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)
We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.
In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.
Clay+Ceramics.
Ceramics from clay constructions of indisciplined spaces where experiential markings and imaginative readings between theory and practice develop new material discourses.
Possible Outcomes~Clay Based Ceramic Propositions
Architectures~Making Spaces in Abjection.
Bodies, Spatial Bodies and their Relations.
A place between is spatial. It is a mapping of the topographies between here, there and elsewhere. It is also social, an articulation of the place of dialogue, of the ongoing discussion between one and another. A place between is temporal, it pays attention to time, to the ways in which we locate the then from the now, the now from the yet to come. Jane Rendell.
Nomadic Structures~Compositions :
Drawing Resonances~Surfaced Sounds
Works in action that are paused at specific sites of speculation.
Wayfaring~Making : Bodies Of Experience through Spatiality, Temporality, and Subjectivity.
https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton
Art works in gathering and playing a 'series of exchanges or choreographed economies composed of actions, things, people, events and places' with critical spatial practices.
Jane Rendell.
Tim Ingold.
Ceramic Shelters : Transitional Zones between Thinking and Making.
Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist working with clay is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is Interested in developing speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.
Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material further develops his inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased.
His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.
Assemble forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.
For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His finished fired constructions could become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s).
Ceramics and Architecture : Making Things, Perception/Thought/Action
Urbanism : Fossil Futures~Anthropocene
Ceramics Following Resonances : Interiors in fired clay.
Ruins · Jozef van Wissem · Zola Jesus
When Shall This Bright Day Begin
℗ 2016 Jozef van Wissem and Zola Jesus
Released on: 2016-02-05
Mixer: Jozef van Wissem
Producer: Jozef van Wissem
Composer: Jozef van Wissem
Music Publisher: Wissem Music
Lyricist: Zola Jesus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-Kx7ehxCQ&t=21s
.jpg)
.jpg)
Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.
The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.
Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.
The choreographic object/agent.
The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.
Theorial objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.
Oren Lieberman. 2013.
The Production of The Unexpected.
The Joy of Speculative Play.
Perception/Thought/Action
A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.
Projective Speculations.
Ecologies/Locations.
Questioning/Research.
Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.
Landscapes Of Actions.
Modalities Of Intravention
Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.
Ephemerality
Corporeality
Precariousness
Scoring
Performativity
If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.
Lepecki. 1996.
Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.
The Archive.
Matters of Concern.
Terms of Engagement.
Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.
Bringing Things to Life.
Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.
Place-Refreshed.
New-Agencies
The Interconnectedness of Places.
For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.
Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.
Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.
Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.
Ceramics and Architecture
Marking The Line.
In response to Sir John Soane.
Joanna Bird. 2013
Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.
Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.
Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.
Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.
Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance. Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.
Joanna Bird Pottery
Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation. London.
Ceramic Forms and Paintings.
Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.
Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.
Water : A Phenomenal Lens.
The transformative properties of the substance.
The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.
An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.
Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.
Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.
Time : Duration and Perception.
Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.
Henri Bergson.
One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.
Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.
Saint Augustin.
Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.
The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..
Steven Holl.
.jpg)
Outpost 100223
Hungate, Norwich.
Anglian Potters
Undercroft, Norwich. 2023
Helgate Proposal
Exploratory Ceramic Practice.
Clay Making.
Plaster Work.
Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.
Glass Tech Kiln.
Ceramics Now
Silent Interiors : Anthropocene Aesthetics : Ceramics and Environmental Engagements.
Humanise : Building Interior Places.
Ceramic Vessels and Voids : Spatial Bodies~Surfaces~Interiorities.
Clay+Ceramic : Lines~Making~Correspondences.
Material absorbed in its own thoughts : Mattering Interiority : Craft Philosophies.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature.
Filmic Modalities
An Ecology of Mind
We are so accustomed to thinking of aesthetic phenomena as a discursive or representational construct, that we often forget that without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible.
Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information it contains
Bateson credits art with playing the role of confronting the quantitative limit built into consciousnesses
Art assists mind in recognizing that the potentiality of heightened consciousnesses exist and that it resides in you and in me
Perception of Environment/Relational Situations
Tim Ingold
Each thing framed dwells in the world differently.
The frame and framing, through its configuration, must never offer a gap or a bridge through which as it were, the world could get in, or from which the picture could get out.
The picture frame reminds us that the work of art, while it hangs in our room, does not disturb our day-to-day sentient and perceptual ecologies.
It is like an island in the world that waits until one approaches it and which one can as well pass by and overlook.
On The Picture Frame, Simmel
Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing
Aesthetic contemplation blurs reals and emotional space in a way that produces tangible affects in the world
The thinking hand that mediates a haptic bridge in which creating and holding, becoming and grasping are all practical everyday activities extending the thinking body
Objects that stand in two worlds at once and becoming drawn into the movement of practical life through the virtue of being held in the hand
The intermingling of persons and objects in pictorial space and the aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things
The pictorial space is one in which persons and images intermingle and passions can be aroused.
Art and Agency, Alfred Gell
I would like to conclude this analysis of Tarkovsky’s unique use of nature as a ‘comfort zone’ by saying a few things about his two science-fiction films, Solaris and Stalker. Solaris is based on the great same-titled science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. The many philosophical and ethical differences between the novel and film can be summarized by the fact that, whereas the novel begins in space on the Solaris space station orbiting the planet Solaris, the film begins with a 45 minute prologue on earth, which establishes the importance of home, family, and ‘mother’ earth to the psychologist Kris Kelvin (and by extension all humans), who is soon to leave for outer space. The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature is established right from the opening, a (second) slow motion close-up shot of plant life swaying under a crystal clear stream that slowly pans right to reveal the hand of a man wearing brown trousers and a dark leather coat standing amidst waist high reeds.
