Lived Experience~A Situated Ecology

Lived Experience

A Situated Ecology.

Tentative and Open Spatial Bodies, Ceramic. 2026

This practice has not developed through a linear progression of ideas, but through a shifting ecology of encounters.

Ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching, spatial research and collaborative making have remained in correspondence across different periods of the work. Some propositions have receded; others have returned years later in altered material conditions. Earlier works continue to participate in the present, not as resolved historical stages but as active traces within an ongoing search.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its formation has taken place through materials, places, bodies, architectures, organisms, images, texts, tools and other people. Each enters differently, producing correspondences that can alter the direction of the work. Knowledge is not simply gathered and applied, but emerges through these encounters.

The studio becomes a site of this activity: a place where research can remain provisional, where material processes can think alongside theoretical propositions, and where visual and spatial material can hold different ontological positions without requiring them to settle into a single explanation.

Clay has become an increasingly important participant in this ecology. Through making, the material receives traces of pressure, resistance, repetition, weathering, drilling and repair. Surfaces become histories of encounters; cavities become interiors produced by action; minor gestures accumulate into larger spatial conditions.

What appears in the present is therefore never entirely new.

It is a surfacing.

Earlier concerns with the body, absence and trace correspond with current questions of perforation, ecological agency and material interiority. Architectural research returns through the vessel and the cavity. Interiority becomes porous. Repetition becomes difference. A minor gesture can move an entire ecology.

I understand this as a spatial practice of learning to make.

The practice remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research is a gathering of correspondences rather than a search for a final position: a situated ecology in which materials, histories, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures can continue to enter, disturb and transform one another.

The work does not simply record where the practice has been.

It creates conditions for where it might go next.

Thinking Through Making~Design Anthropology~Materiality. Tim Ingold.

Thinking through Making.

Professor Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

31 October 2013.

Ever since Aristotle, it has been customary in the western tradition to think of making 

as a bringing together of a preconceived, ideal form, in the mind of the maker, with an 

initially formless mass of raw material. In this view, all the thinking has been done 

before the making begins. And for those who encounter the finished object, the thought 

can only be recovered by reading back from the work to an idea in the mind of the maker. 

Here I present an alternative account of making, as an inherently mindful activity in 

which the forms of things are ever-emergent from the correspondence of sensory awareness 

and material flows in a process of life. Artefacts and thoughts are the more or less 

ephemeral cast-offs of this process, strewn along the way. Rather than imposing form on 

matter, the maker -- operating within a field of forces that cut across any divisions 

between body and environment -- is caught between the anticipatory reach of the 

imagination and the frictional drag of materials.

Research Lines~Modes of Existence~Inquiry.

Ceramic Passages~Circulations~Volumes : Proposals for experience.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold challenges the traditional model of creation, proposing that genuine creativity arises from improvising with materials rather than imposing pre-existing ideas. 

This approach advocates for understanding knowledge as something that grows from within our active, sensory engagement with the world.

The act of making has increasingly been reframed within contemporary discourse not as a secondary stage of production, but as a primary mode of thinking and knowing. 

This shift recognizes "making" as an epistemological process—a way of creating knowledge, rather than just materializing a pre-existing idea. It moves from a model where thought precedes production to one where knowledge emerges through engagement with materials and tools. 

This paradigm, often referred to as "[Thinking Through Making]" or an "[Epistemology of Making]," is prevalent in design, architecture, and anthropology. 

Key Aspects of Making as Knowing

Embodied Cognition: Knowledge is generated through the body's interaction with materials, often described as "thinking with your hands" or "ping-ponging" between mind and material.

Emergent Process: Forms and knowledge emerge "from the inside" of the process rather than being imposed on materials.

Epistemic Objects: The objects created are not just final products, but active participants in the learning process, allowing makers to see, tinker with, and understand problems differently.

Materiality and Resistance: The constraints and friction encountered during making (e.g., in crafting, digital fabrication) force critical thinking and adaptation, which are essential to developing expertise. 

Context in Contemporary Discourse

Design Research & Pedagogy: Architectural pedagogy is shifting toward a process-oriented approach, where empirical making and experimentation are central to critical thinking.

Design Anthropology: "Making" is used to understand the world by actively participating in its creation, treating design as "world-making" rather than just problem-solving.

Social Constructionism: This perspective implies that knowledge is not static but created through ongoing social and material interactions. 

This reframing moves the maker from an "artisan" filling an intellectual blueprint to an "active thinker" whose understanding grows through engagement with the world. 

What else can thinking do?

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning. 

The spatial body has moved closer to touching. Earlier encounters with architecture, drawing, apparatus and site opened spaces through bodies, movement, ritual and repetition. Working with clay~ceramic, these spatial questions become more intimate and material. The vessel, surface, aperture and interior are not simply forms or descriptors, but places where bodies meet and relations pass through. Clay becomes an atmospheric body—receiving, resisting, registering and shedding traces of encounter. In and out of material, inside and outside, touch and space continually fold into one another. Making becomes a reciprocal attentiveness: a becoming~in~touch with other bodies, their patternings, forces and murmurings.

Yes. I think this is another very coherent spatial correspondence~cluster, and it is slightly different from the previous four. The previous cluster traced the development of scaffolding, situation and spatial bodies; this one brings vessel, drawing, ritual, repetition, apparatus, memory and the human body into much closer proximity.

There is a particularly interesting movement across these four:

apparatus → body → vessel → overlapping space → repetition → interiority

And Inside This Clay Jug becomes a crucial hinge because the clay body is already explicitly described through its sensuality, interiority and architectural capacity. The post asks us to think about the vessel not simply as an object but as a way of investigating our experience of interior and exterior space.

Molecular Sieve / Performative Apparatuses

A spatial apparatus becomes a body in motion. Carried through the temporal conditions of a site, the Molecular Sieve gathers light, movement, memory and encounter through its small aperture. The chamber of the camera becomes a place of attention: something between inside and outside, between looking and being situated. Photography here is less an image-making procedure than a way of becoming~in~touch with a place, allowing time and material presence to register through the body of an apparatus.

Inside This Clay Jug

The vessel opens a question of interiority. Clay becomes more than a surface enclosing an empty space; it becomes a body through which interior and exterior can be sensed together. Touch, volume, air, light and memory gather within the vessel, making space something experienced rather than simply described. The clay body carries traces of its making while opening onto other bodies and spaces. Here, ceramics begins to become a way of thinking through the intimate correspondence between material, body and the spaces we inhabit.

Drawing Into the Human Form / The Architectural Body

Drawing becomes a way of moving between bodies. The human body and the architectural body are not fixed forms but spaces of relation, scale, movement and inhabitation. Through drawing, gesture and trace, one body begins to enter another. The image becomes less a representation of space than an encounter with it—a way of sensing what happens between body, surface, interior and surrounding space. Drawing opens a spatial vocabulary that is tactile as much as visual.

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces

Spaces are never encountered only once. Through presentation, ritual, repetition and movement, each encounter leaves another registration, another layer of memory and material presence. Space becomes something continually made and remade through bodies and their actions. Repetition does not reproduce the same situation; it alters it. The trace becomes a form of remembering, while the surface becomes a place where encounters accumulate. These overlapping registrations begin to suggest space as something lived, touched and continually becoming.

Russell Moreton

Bodies of Things

“For me, ceramics has gradually become a way of thinking through material, space and encounter.”

I work with clay through a process of making, looking and responding. Ideas about space, architecture, interiority and material relations run alongside this process, often discovered through the work rather than determined beforehand.

I work mainly with hand-built clay, constructing bodies from slabs and developing them through drawing, cutting, piercing, layering, painting and firing. The work moves between vessel, sculpture and architectural fragment, but these distinctions are never quite fixed. I am interested less in form as a resolved object than in the forces that gather through and around a body—pressure, resistance, movement, gravity, touch, fire and time.

These forces become registered through the material. Surfaces are layered and weathered; openings and perforations allow light and air to pass through; interiors become active spaces of relation. The ceramic body is not considered in isolation, but through its correspondence with other bodies—material, architectural, spatial, atmospheric and human.

Increasingly, ceramics has become a way of thinking through relationships between bodies of things: between surface and interior, enclosure and permeability, material and space. The work develops through these encounters, where making, looking and learning remain closely connected.

I studied Ceramics at Epsom School of Art and Design (1981–84).

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Tensions and Correlations : Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies

Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies

Tension is what happens between bodies.

Correlation is what allows those tensions to become relations.

Ecology of Asperities : Notes on a Particular Spatial Practice

Matter(s) of Space~Surfacing

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

The surface is where the body records its relations.

Scoring → tension becomes visible.

Wrapping → relation becomes operative.

Bandaging → vulnerability becomes perceptible.

Refractory layering → endurance becomes possible.

Together they produce the body.

The ceramic body is also encountered through acts of wrapping, tensioning and bandaging. White brushed refractory materials form protective layers across the surface, recalling earlier propositions around the bandaged body: a body marked by vulnerability, repair, protection and the forces acting upon it.

The refractory layer introduces a particular material correspondence. It protects the ceramic body from the extreme conditions of firing while simultaneously preparing it to undergo transformation. Protection therefore does not remove the body from force; it enables its passage through force.

The surface becomes a place where these forces are gathered.

Scored lines crossing the white areas establish temporary demarcations across the body. They can be understood less as drawn images than as traces of tension: lines through which pressure, resistance, division and movement become perceptible. The scoring interrupts the apparent stability of the coated surface, making visible something of the forces passing across and through the body.

Wrapping extends this condition. Wire, cloth and layered materials bind separate ceramic elements while also producing tension between them. The body is held together, but not resolved. Its parts remain perceptibly separate, caught within a temporary arrangement of pressure, restraint and correspondence.

Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies therefore describes a ceramic condition in which protection and exposure, binding and permeability, vulnerability and endurance remain active together.

The bandage does not simply repair the body.

It records that the body has been subject to force.

The wrapping does not simply hold the body together.

It makes tension perceptible.

The refractory layer does not prevent transformation.

It allows the body to enter the fire.

refractory layer ~ protective skin ~ bandage ~ accumulated surface ~ preparation for fire

force → relation → body

Tensions and Correlations is the conceptual proposition. Wrapped~Tensioned describes the material operation, and Bandaged Bodies brings the work back into corporeal and affective territory.

Capturing Forces~Material Events : Sites of Difference and Multiplicity that precede Identity.

 

Axis Web~Fellowship Proposal 2025.

My practice begins with making as a site of encounter: a way of thinking through materials, bodies and spaces rather than simply producing objects. I work primarily with clay and ceramics, using exploratory, research-driven processes in which material behaviour becomes an active participant in the work. Clay is not treated as a passive substance awaiting form, but as a material with its own tendencies, resistances, temporalities and capacities to transform intention.

Informed by materialist and process-based thinking, including the work of Tim Ingold, Erin Manning and Karen Barad, I understand making as an ecological and relational practice. My ceramic works emerge through an ongoing negotiation between human gesture and material agency. They register the minor actions of making—touching, folding, assembling, piercing, scoring, washing and marking— while retaining the instability of the processes through which they come into being.

I am interested in the point at which intention becomes entangled with material behaviour. Through this entanglement, surfaces, interiors and spatial propositions emerge. The resulting works are not simply objects, but material events: sites where bodies, gestures, histories and ideas meet. Making becomes a form of navigation through which thought is distributed across matter, space and time.

Alongside my studio practice, I am developing an ‘anarchive’ of research material gathered throughout my academic and professional studies. Rather than preserving this material as a fixed archive, I am interested in activating it through encounters between practitioners, ideas and materials. This could take the form of an institutional context, an online resource, or a non-disciplinary gathering of active practitioners.

My earlier studies in Spatial Practice at Canterbury and subsequent work at Farnham, where I proposed a ‘theatre of research’ within an interior design project, continue to inform this direction. The fellowship would enable me to develop a practice in which making, research and spatial encounter operate as mutually generative forms of inquiry: a process of making-with in which materials, ideas and bodies can meet and produce unforeseen relations.

Making Intensified Surfaces~Spatial Propositions

Making Intensified Surfaces : A Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

My practice begins somewhere between the hand and the structure.

Clay is not simply a material to be formed. It is a body in negotiation: resistant, absorbent, unstable, enduring. Through making, I enter into a process of continual adjustment in which the work is never entirely known in advance. Form emerges through a reciprocal encounter between intention, matter, gesture, tool, surface, gravity, failure, and time.

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

I am interested in ceramic bodies that begin to exceed their own material designation. Slab-built, perforated, scored, drilled, painted, weathered, and reconfigured, they occupy an unstable interval between vessel, sculpture, architectural fragment, diagram, ruin, and spatial apparatus. Their surfaces become intensified fields of activity. The hole is an aperture; the grid is a structure; the line is a proposition; the surface is a record of becoming.

Making is therefore not the execution of an idea but a mode of inquiry.

I understand the studio as an expanded environment: no longer a retreat from the world, but a site of continuous exchange. Ideas enter through materials, bodies, texts, places, conversations, architectures, and acts of attention. The work develops through an iterative process of monitoring, correction, combination, and transformation.

My site-based practice extends this inquiry into environments and situations. I construct provisional spatial compositions in which craft, architecture, theory, drawing, sociality, and embodied experience become entangled. These works are not fixed objects but relational propositions: spaces for inhabiting, encountering, sensing, imagining, and thinking.

I am interested in what happens when the distinction between object and environment begins to collapse.

A ceramic body becomes a spatial body.

A surface becomes a threshold.

A structure becomes an event.

Making becomes a way of producing knowledge through the material, the embodied, and the situated.

The work emerges through an excess of form: something always remains unfinished, unresolved, overspilling the structural integrity of the object. This excess is not a failure of construction but its generative condition.

I work within this instability.

Between craft and architecture.

Between matter and thought.

Between the body that makes and the space that is made.

Between the object and the world it begins to produce.

Towards~Making a holding in place : Tentative Architectures/Ecologies~Wayfaring : Clay/Prebiotic World/Correspondences

Cairns-Smith suggested that the present essential elements of biology-nucleic acids and catalyzing proteins-evolved on a kind of prebiotic scaffolding. Ultimately the scaffolding disappeared, leaving behind the biochemistry that now controls the processes of all living things. The vanishing supporting structure, in the view of Cairns-Smith, could have been clay.

Life Search, Time-Life Books.

05/03/2013

Leylines : Modes of Articulation~Speculative Making

Research~Creation : Art Begins In the Manner~Way of Practice.

Clay Matter(s) as innate knowledge, intuition, speculation.

A Serious Place : Pronouncements of both play and inquiry.

Artist's Book. Collage and drawings, research images from Josef Albers.

The Call of Indigenous Philosophy as story, as performance, as practice.

Modes of Articulation~Speculative Making.