Sunday, 23 March 2025

Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006


If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/












Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.









https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

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Saturday, 22 March 2025

Living Places : The Intensity of Inhabitation/Grey Tones Chromatic or Achromatic.

Outpost 181024


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.





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.

The result of mixing a colour with black.


Tint.

The result of mixing a colour with white.

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.

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Friday, 21 March 2025

CLAY/Propositions/Correspondences : Letting the material speak for itself/Technicity/Generative AI.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.


"Claywork/Correspondences" explores how clay, as a material, and the resulting artforms, can reveal situated interactions between bodies and habitats, emphasizing the material and relational aspects of human-environment connections. 

Here's a deeper dive into the concept:

Clay as a Material of Connection:

Clay, being a natural material found in the earth, becomes a tangible link between humans and their environment. The act of working with clay, from gathering the raw material to shaping and firing it, involves a direct engagement with the earth and its processes. 

Correspondences and Situated Interactions:

The term "correspondences" suggests a relationship or connection between different things, in this case, the human body and the habitat. By examining claywork, we can understand how humans interact with their environment, how their bodies are shaped by their surroundings, and how these interactions are reflected in the art they create. 

Examples in Art and Culture:

Ceramics and Pottery: The creation of pottery and other ceramic objects demonstrates a deep connection to the earth and its resources. The process of shaping and firing clay involves a careful manipulation of the material, reflecting a knowledge of its properties and behavior. 

Figurines and Sculptures: Clay figurines and sculptures can offer insights into the beliefs, practices, and social structures of past cultures. The forms and materials used in these objects can reveal how people perceived themselves and their relationship with the natural world. 

Glazing and Decoration: The application of glazes and decorations on clay objects can further enhance the connection between the material and the artist's vision. Glazes, with their diverse colors and textures, can transform the raw material into a vibrant and expressive medium. 

Beyond the Object:

The study of claywork can extend beyond the object itself to encompass the broader context of human-environment interactions. By analyzing the materials, techniques, and cultural meanings associated with clay, we can gain a deeper understanding of how humans have shaped and been shaped by their environments. 

Mind and material engagement | Phenomenology and the Cognitive ...

1 Dec 2018 — The preferred analytical convention is to break the line's cognitive life into pieces: first by separating ourselves fro...


Springer

Clays and the Origin of Life: The Experiments - PMC

In our view, the most promising theory to explain the origin of life is centered around the interaction of active sites on clay mi...

PubMed Central

Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness ...

But there is a key difference: in contrast to the map, Indigenous human life on land is omitted. However, three small figures can ...


British Art Studies

Generative AI is experimental.



Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

The Becoming of Continuity/Relations.

In/Out of Material, Tony Cragg.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The Ways/Movements of Practice.

Ceramics In The Environment.








Clay, is always a working idea, a matter/material process between things, a form of thinking in process.

The Durational Time of Play/A Lure For Feeling.


You don't need a choreographer to dance, what you need is a choreographic proposition. Propositions are ontogenetic, they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience. For Manning what else is an associated milieu but a cornfield for crafting of the as yet unthought, where the microperceptual meet to create new movements in the making.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning, Always More Than One, Individuation's Dance. 2013.










https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/


Crucible Bowls. 2020.

Slab Facades. 2021.

Rutile/Yellow Ochre/Red Iron Oxide/White Raku Slip/Transparent Raw Glaze.


The Moon Tower, Nina Hole. 2000.

The Watchdog, Michel Kuipers. 1990.


Intertwinining Thinking and Making.

Painting in Form of a Bowl.

Quietus, Cinerary Jars.

The Vessel/The Human Body.

Volumes/Voids


Clare Twomey.

Tony Cragg.

Eduardo Chillida.

Paul Soldner.

Julian Stair.

Bryan Newman.

Gordon Baldwin.

Hans Coper.

Lygia Clark.

Richard Hirsch.

Edmund de Waal.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Steven Holl.



Ceramic vessels and surfaces  for a reflective solitude, an architecture of light,silence and innerness.

Spaces between Objects/Things/Making, Giorgio Morandi.



The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.


Volume And Space.


Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, 'Man Pointing,' is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.


Paintings of nothing, ceramic, raw material, dry pigment, wax.


With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.


The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.


Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.





Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.


Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.


The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.


Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.


Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold. 


Urban Spaces, palimpsest, impressions, traces, ecologies, redundancies.


Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.


The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Affordances of Things.


Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.


Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.


Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.


An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.



Matter and materials are lively and require attention. 

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.


Aleatory, by chance, lots of the 'acts' of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.


In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.


All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.


Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.


A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, understood by the physical phenomenon of an energy or force as it flows across an obstacle. Diffraction is the process of ongoing differences, and ass such it can be used as a tool for analysis, as it attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Karen Barad.


Areas Of Presentation and Participation.

Historic and Social Sites, Art Venues and Exhibitions.

Making Theoretical Objects, Installations and Interventions.


Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.


“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.


Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.


The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry' He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.


With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.


Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  



The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.


Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.


Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.


Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.


Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.


Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.


Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.


Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.


Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture.

How to build your own.

Beginning.

Model Making.


We will begin practising by constructing a room and covering it with a simple dome or a vault.


Once a person has constructed a model, within hours, he or she is encouraged to learn and understand more. The knowledge thus gained will trigger quests in building with earth. It is possible to learn the basics of thousands of years of earth architecture within a day if it is taught in the simplest terms, and  if all our senses are involved in the learning process. 

Nader Khalili.


Re-imagining learning, workshop session, conducted and initiated a walk across a landscape with clay being actively manipulated by a number of participants as they engaged with the material, their bodies and the landscape.


Beach firing at St. Ninian's Scotland, experimental kiln and site built reduction pits excavated from the beach. Pots fired and reduced with found materials, then washed in the Irish Sea.


Hans Coper, essay on professional practice, including his architectural ceramics. 

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.


Sectional Works.

Slab Constructions.

Plasterwork, Pressmoulding.


Working with materials/substances/drawing and traces of making.


Raku, engobes, slips, oxides, templates, spray diffuser, stencils, fabric inclusions, intermediaries, Indentations, found objects, ferric chloride,  

Reduction materials, woodland branches through shredder.

Clay body additives, molochites, mica, vermiculite. other material,


Clay Tools : Block Strips and Combs.


Sound Vessels.

Capacitors/Insulators.

Passive, encapsulated layers.

Architectural Slab Works.


Ceramic and gesso/whitewashed/waxed/painted/bound/surfaces and structures.


The Chapel Of St.Ignatius.

House, Black Swan Theory.

Steven Holl.


Nail Collector's House, New York.

White plaster walls, hickory floors, and cartridge brass siding nailed in pattern over a wood frame, create a tactile weathering for this structure, a poetic reinterpretation of the industrial history of the site and the pre-Civil War architecture of Essex.


The jewel-like Chapel of St. Ignatius contains the essence of Holl's vision, his interest in the phenomenology of space, his passionate investigations of form and material, and his use of reflected light and colour.


The angst of a concept before spatial definition, interior and exterior are simultaneously explored.


The largest 'tilt-up' slab weighs 80,000 pounds and is filled with reinforcing steel. Its greatest stress is during the lift.


Working from the specific towards the universal.

The Built and The Unbuilt.

A theory of architecture that is mutable and unpredictable.

The body as a theoretical object doing/architecture (architecting its situatedness, Oren Lieberman)


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Monday, 17 March 2025

Spatial Interventions/Problems/Praxis of Method : Novalis/Bachelard/Arte Povera.

Outpost 131223


Body Movement.

Robert J. Yudell.

The interplay between the world of our bodies and the world of our dwelling places is always in flux. We make places that are an expression of our haptic experiences even as those experiences are generated by the places we have already created. Whether we are conscious or innocent of this process, our bodies and our movements are in constant dialogue with our buildings.







Problems of Method.

Novalis/Bachelard.

No vision invites him to do so, it is the very substance he has touched with his hands and lips which summons him. It summons him materially by virtue of what seems to be a magical participation. The dreamer undresses and enters the pool, only at this moment do the images appear. They emerge from matter, they arise as if from a seed out of a primitive sensual reality. A rapture which cannot yet project itself on the feminine substantiality of water. Water becomes woman against his breast.


Gaston Bachelard would like to develop a philosophy that has no point of departure, and a philosophy that is not a point of departure. Bachelard in his books, attempts to systematize formal material and dynamic imagination.


Space contains compressed time.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

The Autobiography of Lost Possibilities.

Gaston Bachelard.


A dispersed philosophy that must constantly operate on its very edge, at the very limit where its systematizing impulse is challenged by the actual creations in other domains of human activity. Bachelard becomes a 'hinge' between totalizing metaphysical systems and polyphilosophy.


Bachelard does not develop a fully fledged philosophy of values, rather his books offer lessons for working, reading, breathing and dreaming well, all of which constitute an art of living poetically. Throughout his work he developed the paradox, that the primitiveness of poetic consciousness is not immediately given, it can only be a conquest. Images reveal nothing to the lazy dreamer.

Colette Gaudin. 


Guiseppe Penone.

Souffle 6. 1978.


A large earthenware jar on which the artist has stamped the imprint of his own body. This process shows a sensorial conception of art, a concentration on the organic and the original, reasserting the permanent nature of myths and an animist conception. A vitality of matter, material and object.

The National Museum of Modern Art.

Georges Pompidou Centre.


Arte Povera as an artistic praxis, highly critical and anti-cultural. An art that explores a 'strange area' that is interested in elemental human situations. It was the art critic Germano Celano who in reference to the research done by the polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, outlined in his book 'Towards a Poor Theatre' proposed the notion of Arte Povera in 1967.


Epicurean Asceticism.


The Phenomenological Approach.


Problems of Method.


Reading as a dimension of consciousness.


For Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, the essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.


Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.


Bachelard's auditive metaphor 'reverberation' for the poetic image brings together through sound, both time and space. In its reverberation, the poetic image will have made a sonority, a situatedness of being.


Science and Poetry.


Concepts and images develop along two divergent lines of spiritual life. The image cannot give matter to the concept, the concept by giving stability to the image would stifle its existence.


Nascent Material/Media.

Drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.


Drawings loosing their haptic senses of mark-feeling and becoming increasingly camouflaged into an image based on representation of an objectified art form/context. 


Life Drawings subdued by visual representation.

Is the initial situation/situatedness/awkwardness of drawing process becoming overwritten.

Drawings feeling the body marking its presence in the space /stage of drawing.



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Jannis Kounellis: Gray is the Color of Our Time

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Saturday, 15 March 2025

Making Processual Paths Of Volatility : Ceramics/Sinopis Red/Palette from Antiquity.

Outpost 171225

Early palette from Antiquity:

White, yellow ochre, sinopis red (earth red), black (bluish).

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art. 2007


Intricate Local Behaviours : Conversations/Correspondences between unrelated entities.

Lines. (Making/Thinking/Matter/Material)

Tim Ingold











What Is Art ?

Joseph Beuys.


I find it interesting that you say that this stool or box speaks to you, whereas this floor, as you said, doesn't. A similar thing happens to me, and I ask myself: What is this due to, the fact that it doesn't speak to me, or only a little? It makes me think that these ready-made things, this precision, actually compels me to behave in a particular way, not just these things here, but also a certain window, or a specific type of architecture that is very fixed very straight, that derives from something very thought out; this compels me to live or behave in a similar way,

Volker Harlan.


Beuys: Yes, right, exactly; in other words, this lives (points to the box) while the other (points to the floor) is dead. The first doesn't force itself on you, the other continually forces itself on you.

Thinking Processual.

Resistance/Viability : Mapping/Living

Meaning that it is not so much a matter of crossing boundaries, but rather a matter of open-endedness. A place where boundaries have become diluted and single figures are already coupled or heterogeneous figures (in the case of Bacon, man-animal).


Kovar/Deleuze.

The Architecture of Abjection.

The Logic of Sensation.


Working From Simple Things/Gestures/Materials.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/










Theoretical Movements in Clay+Ceramics.

The Circular/Elliptical Matter/Mattering of Things.

Gathering/Pouring/Manifolds : Forms of Thinking. 


Events.

Arte Povera.


The Way, without demarcation, rather a way of viability by which the continuum of life is renewed.


The Philosophy of Living.

Francois Jullien.


The Quiet Mind :  Silently without resistance

(Sound of barking) Do you listen to that dog? Wait, wait. Silently? Listen to it completely silently, which means without any resistance, without any irritation, just listen to it. When you listen quietly there is no resistance, there is no irritation, you do not identify yourself with the dog and the barking of it, your mind is quiet.

Meditation

The meaning of that word is to measure, basically (for oneself).

https://www.krishnamurti.org/transcript/in-meditation-there-is-no-direction/#:~:text=One%20must%20be%20wholly%20and,is%20vain,%20full%20of%20confidence


Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Kounellis/Opera, interventions, unscripted by workmen, bodies on trolleys. 

Penone, wooden frame, human body, empty frame installed in a stream.

Beuys, accumulator, clay balls, wires, simple sturdy wooden table.


Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.


The Enabling Constraint. 

Erin Manning.


Visual Art Practice. 2024


Whether abject(ion) issues forth from a human body, a space or any other entity, it sets the whole world in motion and instigates a chain of exchanges.


In 'becoming' for Deleuze and Guattari we form a multiplicitous assemblage where individual elements are blurred, and together begin to act as a kind of whole. But a whole that is not fixed, as the assemblage also has a side facing a BwO which is continually dismantling the organism.


Through abject(ion) the smells, textures and physical forms of our body space and this excrement leaking out, become fused together. We become part of the space: the space becomes a part of us.


Abject(ion) re-configure the body and space physically through the transference of matter.


Architecture Without Organs (BwO)


The BwO is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts. A whole that does not unify or totalize them. But that is added to them like a new, really distinct part.

Deleuze and Guattari.


BwO plays a role in the notion of an open subjectivity. Kovar asks, are or how are abject(ion) and BwO related, and how might this relation be played out in architecture?


The BwO for Deleuze and Guattari is a concept that uses the virtual dimensions of the body as a set of potentialities that may be activated through becoming, importantly it is a body, understood as process that is continually constructing and deconstructing connections. 


To speak of process and the continual construction and deconstruction of connections is to implicate numerous entities between which these connections are made and therefore speak of heterogeneity.



Open Subjectivities.

Unmaking The Human Body/Subject.

Blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.


Translucent assemblages are all that are left from the transparency/clarity of the morning that will soon dissipate.


Reliquaries of Light and Darkness.

Bodies, spatial and human in transitional movements. 

The Sacred and The Medical Body.


The Hospital Room.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Cronos.


 


Clay/Working/Learning/Making.

Working in Clay and Fire /Mapping Resistance and Viability.


City of Orion, ceramic objects in the landscape.

Raveningham Sculpture Trail. 2024


Ceramic works investigating the relationship of water to the human body and the architectural body of interior spaces.

Water at The Hungate, Norwich. 2023


Exhibitions with Anglian Potters.

Ferini Gallery, Lowestoft. 5

Undercroft, Norwich. 4

All Saints, Cambridge. 2

2019-2024.


Revisited Contemporary Ceramics

Things of Beauty Growing.

The Fitzwilliam Museum. 2018


Anglian Potters. 2018



Teaching Sessions, throwing/handbuilding.

Brockwood Park School. 2012-2015


Speculative Clay Workshop/Walking in the Landscape.

Teaching Academy, Brockwood Park School. 2011


Raku Firings.

St Ninian's Cave.

Scotland. 2013


Bodyscapes, raw clay installations.

Chapel Arts Studios, Andover. 2010

The Yard, Winchester. 2009 


Contemporary Craft Ceramics. 2004-2006 

Life Drawing/Sculpture, figurative/abstractions in clay. 1996-2002


Dexterity Crafts.

Potter throwing domestic pottery.

Walton on the Hill. 1985


Ceramics, architecturally influenced vessels in slab and thrown processes.

Epsom College of Art and Design. 1981-1984


Industrial Pottery experience.

Grayshott Pottery. 1979-1981


Studio Pottery experience. 

The Hop Kiln Pottery. 1978


A Level Ceramics.

Farnham Sixth Form. 1976-1978

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Friday, 14 March 2025

MATERIAL MATTERS/Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies : STRANGE TOOLS AND THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY


STRANGE TOOLS
ART and HUMAN NATURE
ALVA  NOE













THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY
DAVID HARVEY

As David Harvey argues in his seminal Condition of Postmodernity, architecture becomes one of the aestheticised products by which global capitalism and political regimes express themselves. It is with this realisation that we must reverse the equation. Not space and time in architecture, but architecture in space and time, in an  concepts of the former acceptance of Harvey’s conclusion that ‘neither time or space can be assigned objective meanings independent of material processes, and that it is only through investigations of the latter that we can properly ground ourselves’.

ARCHITECTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

Jeremy Till | Collected Writings | Architecture in Space, Time 1996

There is a feeling of intimidation for the architect faced with a broad cultural landscape, and so an understandable reaction is to look for stable elements. In this way architecture, fixed and permanent, shrugs off the ephemeral and the present, and enters into dialogue with the deeper structures which may condition culture. The language of traditional anthropology (mythic, ritual, cosmic, symbolic) is used as a vehicle for architectural exploration, with the intent that architectural will engage with enduring and stable cultural factors. The architect here reverses the role of the anthropologist. Where the latter may investigate and describe social practices through their inscription in space and time, the architect describes temporal spaces in which to set those practices. There is an emphasis on architecture as a setting for ritual and as the embodiment of archetypal human situations, all constituted within cultural tradition. At its worst this approach reeks of conservative nostalgia, at its best it is a project of interpretative re-visioning of an active tradition in which to set human action. It is an architecture that is firmly rooted in space and time, but in very particular interpretations of them. The space is one of concrete representation, informed by the search for authentic meaning. The time is one which combines the cyclic movements of cosmology and nature with a backward-looking naturalisation of history, both characterised by the sense of reinterpreted repetition. The implication is that time and space should stand outside the contingent forces of the present, and that production must resist immanent distractions in an attempt to ground architecture in a more profound cultural horizon. It is this detachment that is both the real strength of this approach but also its weakness, because in looking for the truth it bypasses the real.















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Studio Works/Research Explorations : Praxis between theory and practice. Outpost 2020.









Research Explorations : Creative Humanities

Orange School Graph Books

Harleston 2020-2021


A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy


We have all the choice in the world in terms of products, but very little choice in terms of the kind of economy within which those things are made, accessed and used

Whose Economy

Reframing the Debate

After Neoliberalism

Doreen Massey


Other 'material interventions' and the revaluation of making through strategies of repair and maintenance


Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities

Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us

All agency is 'distributive' it always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett


Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010


Making is central to who we are as individuals, what we make as part of everyday practice forms our identities and place in the world


The mundane experience of making, and thus of labour, is resolutely political, a geographical imperative, and a critical means of operating a meaningful relationship with this material life

The Quarry as Sculpture : The Place of Making

D A Paton 2013


The making of a building does not stop when the building work is (temporarily) finished. But only really begins upon occupation, when the work commences of maintaining the buildings integrity against an onslaught of wilfully destructive elements, insects, rodents, fungal infestations, corrosion, damp, harsh sun, water, wind

Evocative Thoughts on Building, Alvaro Siza


The social life of making

Making good is about maintaining continuity with the past, in the face of efforts to rupture that continuity

The need for repair is a remorseless and necessary process that keeps society ticking over




Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve


Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically


Geographies of Making

ReThinking Materials and Skills for Volatile Futures

The skill to sustain the life of something through repair and reappropriation

Collecting is an example or a pre-emptive activity that people who are skilled with their hands commonly share


Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010


Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010


New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay


The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object


Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad


Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012


From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

Materials-Centered Perspective


Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010


Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies


Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them


Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008


Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers


Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate



Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability


The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution


Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice


Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy


Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline


The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)


The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary


So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002


Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006


The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions


A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour


New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative


Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's


New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006


Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it


The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries


Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011


Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997


Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection


Expressing itself expressing


Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions


Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact


The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement


Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions


A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside


Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce


Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside


The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017


Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice


'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey


Ceramics In The Environment

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005


With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility


Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence


Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994


The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler


Choreographing

Events and Demolition

Trace and Encounter


Brian Massumi refers to all arts as 'occurrent' because any and every perception, artefactual or natural is just an experiential event

It is an event both in the sense that it is happening, and in the sense that when it happens something new transpires

Semblance and Event, Activist Philisophy and the Occurrent Arts

Brian Massumi 2011


The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world


Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities/modalities for thinking about the world


Frames, Handles and Landscapes

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things

Eduardo de la Fuente 2016


Simmel, ecological approaches to aesthetics, shares the insight of ecological thinkers regarding how aesthetic perception is not reducible to either the internal mechanisms of the perceiving subject nor to the properties of the external environment, but rather the complex interplay of both


Materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process or participation. Looking at materials that obstruct, disrupt or interfere with social norms, surfacing as impure formations and messy unstable substances.

Materiality that surveys the relationships between materiality and bodies, exploring the vitality of substances and the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality that have emerged in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation

Materiality, Whitchapel 2015


Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen


Artisanal, pre-industrial trades, firmly rooted in context, often evocatively sketching out the relations between material and place


Dispositions that open possibilities, experimental alternatives opened up by small scale non capitalist and self provisioning crafting


Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially


In the small-scale culture of domestic craft enterprise, there is a rapidly expanding, fetishized and globally networked economy, premised on continued consumption of stuff


Idea is, the invisible of this world, which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible

Merleau Ponty


For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for the materialization of the idea force

A methodology of connecting phenomenal properties with a conceptual strategy


Responds to every project by re-evaluating the physical, cultural, historical references of the site-time or program, through which he achieves a 'limited concept' that establishes an order, a field of inquiry, a limited principle for each architectural design process


As the body-subject is perceptually situated into the world by inhabiting space and time, a building is rooted into a specific site and situated by inhabiting, 'the visible and invisible of the site and situation'


By locating the body, 'at the very essence of our being and our spatial perception' Holl redefines architectural space as perceived space with reference to the perceiving-body-subject


Steven Holl uses 'parallax' as an experiential tool as well as a design tool in which architectural space is redefined with reference to the moving body's constantly changing spatial perceptions


Merleau Ponty's main thesis that phenomenology has potential to put the essences back into existence by re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world through the realm of perceptual experiences drives Steven Holl to search for vitalizing these essences through the experiences of architectural forms, spaces, materials, light and colour


Intellectual and Phenomenal

Philosophical Inquiry

Interplays in his thinking on and making of architecture

Utility/Interpretation


Bachelard's Poetics of Space, explores the essence of being as it resides in the perceptual situadedness of the body-subject into the world


Perception fundamentally 'acts' enabling human beings to inhabit space and time


When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes, what we perceive


Architecture

That which begins as an interaction with the formation of an abstract idea, the formation of a concept out of this idea and its transformation into a material, a spatial and formal reality on a physical site


Creating the experiential power of architecture

Intertwining, idea-space-material

Anchoring, physics and metaphysics of site


A path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. An architectural journey in which the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site force interact with each other


Frames Handles and Landscapes


Gibson's theory of affordances

Behavioral complexities of affordances, grow exponentially through the production of tools, utensils, weapons. Are our aesthetic sensations therefore determined by the environment or do we impose qualities through observation, sensation and perception.

Affordance points in both directions at the same time


Substances also guide the kind of practical actions that the organism senses from elements of the environment, something flat, vertical, convex, concave, rigid, flexible, determines whether something affords support


Art and Aesthetic Patterns

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


Fittingness/Ecological Approaches to Aesthetic Perception

Colour, Light, Time: Quintessentially relational phenomena in which location, background, density will provide different perceptual relations

Steven Holl


Symmetry appeals because symmetrical patterning provides for the observing mind a maximum of insight with a minimum of intellectual effort, quintessentially relational phenomena ( colour, light, time) and location, provide a background density that will provide for different perceptual relations


Relatedness, connected to the place and function of things within a field

The rational organization of society has its own aesthetic attraction


Redundancy is a synonym for patterning

A pattern is a method for coping with the redundancies of messages emanating from the environment

Patterning of message material always helps the receiver to differentiate between signal and noise

Bateson 1973


Elaborations (Dynamic aesthetic totalities) of such everyday patternings in Art, Music, Ballet, Poetry

Initiating causal consequences, agency as persons and things


Camouflage takes away the ability to block out the irrelevant things in the environment, thus camouflage (which is designed to subvert communication) achieves its aims by breaking up the patterns and regularities in the signal, or by introducing similar patterns into the noise.

But what unambiguous codes gain in noise reduction, they lose in richness and expressiveness



Somewhere in between is the effective use of redundancy in which the blocking out of redundancies paradoxically heightens our attention to what is important


Frames, Handles and Landscapes

Simmel 1965


A tools beauty springs from the many unintended and absolute causalities, instead of being a materialization of an aesthetic idea

The Thinking Hand

Pallasmaa


Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things

Gibson


A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things

Donald Norman 2002


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

Gell






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