Working Notes : Edmund de Waal : How the history of pottery and the philosophy of pottery has informed contemporary practice

Working Notes: Edmund de Waal. 

Independent research for Studio Practice Theory and Analysis. 

UCA Farnham, MA Interiors. 2014.

Why does Edmund de Waal make architectural interventions through the arrangement of porcelain pots?

To what extent, if any is this Ceramist interested in the ability of the single pot to engender meaning?

How is the “innerness” of pots that he talks about so eloquently actually manifested in his architecturally staged installations and exhibitions?

Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramic Galleries 2009. 

During his career Edmund de Waal has moved from that of being a domestic potter to that of an installation artist.

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. This site specific installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Central to Edmund de Waal’s practice is the concern to offer a ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, preservation and display of ceramics.’ (Graves,2009:8)

He has further explored the use of installations and vitrines in the pursuit of framing and underpinning these intellectual concerns. The use of purpose made structures, shelves and boxes adds the aesthetics of a tightly control clean minimalist style of presentation to his assembled collection of pots.

Interpretation and display are now central to these ‘grouped works’ that have become presented as ‘cargoes of pots’ that now seem at home in the collecting environment of the museum.

‘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)

De Waal working with specific settings has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)

‘By altering the character of a known space, by intruding on areas within it that might not usually be associated with the display of art, the viewer’s awareness of both the changes and the space are heightened.’ (Graves,2009:10)

This methodology of display ultimately disappears as if it were never actually present, leaving the underlying fabric of the interior space as it were untouched, the impermanence of the work now resides only in its memory.

What remains of these sensing spaces (interiors) through spectacle, event and place? Proposal for the ceramics department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Site specific work in the new contemporary ceramics gallery that responded to the architecture of the space, and that could remain in place for years. An installation or feature that could remain in place and yet allow the gallery to function as a location for frequently changing displays and exhibitions.

De Waal’s response is Signs and Wonders ‘a lacquer red metal channel tracking the circumference of the dome and housing more than 400 of his pots; is an act both of daring and of breathtaking elegance and simplicity, a magisterial achievement on a scale surpassing anything he has previously undertaken.’ (Graves,2009:10)

Signs and Wonders is in reality a major contemporary architectural adaptation into the very fabric of the historical building. Its very reality creates a physical link between the past and the present, and it represents a long term commitment that began with the redevelopment of the ceramic galleries into the new Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.

Edmund de Waal’s Signs and Wonders is an iconic statement of intent for the Contemporary Ceramics Gallery, it underpins a new platform for the expanding territory of creative practice in ceramics. Signs and Wonders actively seeks to simulate new ways of seeing ceramics.

Architectural feature that comprises of some 425 thrown pots made of porcelain by Edmund de Waal and installed under the oculus of the great dome situated directly above the main entrance hall.

Edmund de Waal reflects on the vitrines that used to be found in the old ceramic galleries (room 137) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1970s.

‘Most of the vitrines were firmly policed into taxonomies of kiln or modeller or religion, less ’pseudo-scientific’ than a slightly desperate attempt to control the vastness of the collection. Some of the vitrines had the work of a single potter. All the pots by Hans Coper used to be in one mahogany case, huge early textured vessels shadowing the fine later Cycladic forms. They barely fitted.’(De Waal,2009:16)

De Waal’s memories of the old galleries in the 1970s was that they were an attempt to compare pots from different galleries, of the strangeness of seeing through one great case into another; the tops of a row of bottles cresting a line of dishes and the layering of one series of forms or colours onto another. And of course the fact that there were very few people.

Signs and Wonders; Edmund de Waal.

‘I have made an installation of pots for Gallery l41. There are 425 vessels made out of porcelain and they are placed on a red metal shelf that floats high up in the dome. You can just see it from the entrance hall through the square aperture in the coffered ceiling if you stand in one of the mosaic circles on the floor. It is called Signs and Wonders.’

I want to make this installation part of the fabric of the V&A. (De Waal,2009:20)

‘It began with the combination of a gesture of a pen and the plans to this austere bit of Edwardian architecture.’ (De Waal,2009:22)

The porcelain vessels are on a red shelf, the colour of lacquer.

The integrity of the shelf is upheld by being made from a proper material so as to form an accord with the historical architecture.

De Waal has experimented with placing porcelain on steel shelves and by having pots placed within lead lined boxes. He is aware of how these materials can form provocative combinations from their inherent densities.

The controlling presence of the vitrine is an intervention itself of its own display, (decommissioned mahogany vitrines from the V&A, illustrate the phenomenal weight of these enclosures)

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 Modem era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists.

‘This is not a simple linear relationship, but part of a flow around into Modernism and back again. It is a perpetual rediscovery.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

On Pots Behind Glass:

The shadows of the stacked pots.

On the memory of objects, the afterimage, its distillation, and the blindness of looking away that gives it its form. What is left to be adapted or to be pared down through volume and angle into these new reflective forms?

Derrida on drawing from ‘blindness’. 

‘I wanted to work with objects that have been part of my life for 30 years, and to make sense of my memories of how pots lived in the galleries.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

‘Other sections, one run of bottles that are in different celadons for instance, are a memory of vessels from disparate parts of the ceramics collections brought into a taxonomic focus. This is the use of memory and the after-image as the intense holding of a form on the retina.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

In Heidegger’s work ‘not least in his use of etymologies, his writings are imbued with a sense of historicity; a sense of the passage of time, of destiny, and of the past as a reservoir of thinking available to contemporary life.’ (Sharr,2009:99)

The Architecture of Place :

Architects that were sensitive to site, dwelling, inhabitation and place. Form Making as a Response to Site and Inhabitation.

In The Ethical Function of Architecture 1997, Karsten Harries seeks to reclaim a sense of meaning in architecture that he feels has been lost to a scientific rationality. He sees ornament as being able to convey meaning by linking and reflecting stories and in so doing it gives us an appreciation of nature. This type of ornament has a poetic function in that it helps to locate people with their place and community.

Dalidor Vesely believes that architecture can manifest the attitudes of its builders, and that this can describe through the very fabric of the building the very thinking of the society that implemented its construction.

Vesely ‘explored what he considered to be the tensions between instrumental and communicative, or technological and creative, roles of architecture. He argued that these roles have become divided; a split which is recorded in the respective roles of architects and engineers. Vesely traces the historical origin of this division to that of mediaeval optics and the development of perspective; to the first attempts to privilege a scientific description of light over immediate experiences of the qualities of vision. This division is a crisis of representation, that that is displacing meaning in architecture from human experience to the visual qualities of surface and appearance.’ (Sharr,2009:103)

For Vesely, creativity remains the antidote to technology.

Zumthor shares with Heidegger in that he believes in architecture’s potential to evoke associations and invite meaning.

Regionalism, a critical dialogue with the site, a rapport between place and building as if it had always been there.

‘Stone and water are more than materials or phenomena for Zumthor; they’re also intellectual notions, traditions of thought with a long history.’ (Sharr,2009:104)

Critical Regionalism, see Kenneth Frampton, ‘Zumthor aligns himself with Frampton when he writes about a critical dialogue between his designs and their sites, unafraid to claim meaning from locality.’ (Sharr,2009:105)

Choreographing Experience.

Zumthor ‘I need time to create an atmosphere, I have to be careful about things otherwise I won’t have this atmosphere and the whole objective of my work somehow would be gone. That’s the way I work.’(Spier,2001:19)

‘Much of the installation uses memory in a different way to produce the blurred after­ image.’ (De Waal,2009:28)

De Waal cites the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto as being a revelatory influence on this notion of memory and the blurred after-image. In particular the series

‘Architecture’ which features blurred photographs of Modernist architecture. These images seemed to have the ability to take ‘you back to a particular moment standing in front of a particular building. It was that they seemed to be simultaneously images of a memory of place.’

Sugimoto ‘Architecture’ The German Pavilion from Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe. ‘A graduated run of whites into greys is a memory, for me, of the archive photographs of Bauhaus ceramics with their regimented attempt at teaching pottery by breaking forms down to component parts.’ 

(De Waal,2009:30)

Hans Coper builds up spatial interiors in his pots by using component parts thrown on the wheel.

The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

‘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)

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer 2009 

Procession, the choreography of light for the moving eye.

Iconic works of space in motion: The Perceptual Flow.

‘Related concepts relevant to architecture are found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom cinematic flow is a living rather than linear experience, achieved when film is stretched and lengthened by human memory and by images that evoke something significant beyond what we see before us, allowing time to flow out of the edges of a frame. ’(Tarkovsky, 1986:117)

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vais.

Donald Judd’s Untitled 1980.

Jean Nouvel’s Culture and Congress Centre 1999.

‘More important still to de Waal’s project is the way that Judd’s stacks use interval. These cantilevered boxes are literally, one thing after another; but they do not touch. Rather the positive steel and plastic elements are separated by negative spaces that are their exact equal in volume. The works operate according to a binary, on/off logic, suggesting temporal as well as spatial extension.’(Adamson,2009:40) see also 

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews: Chicago, 1967/1998.

Fried recognizes the durational aspect or dimension of minimalist sculpture, but condemned it for its “quasi-theatrical presence” that by occupying the time of the viewer this sculpture became mundane and everyday rather than transcendent.

Stacking is a way for de Waal to engage with the history of sculpture. It can be thought of as a compositional tool that suggests the storeroom, the kiln or a way of just putting pots together. Stacking produces a visual syntax through ‘exploring the formal and implicitly psychological relationships that pots can have with one another. ’(Adamson,2009:38)

Simultaneous Temporal Structures: Windows or Objects in Sequence.

‘Pictures in motion have long been exploited by Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, who describes his buildings as “scenographic” with routes composed along a series of camera angles and apertures.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

‘Another technique Tarkovsky employs to loosen time from any rigid progression is the directorial power to endow not only the entire film, but also its segments and even separate frames, with simultaneous temporal structures that are not unlike William’s “ice in March” or Viola’s “parallel times”.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

Steven Holl ‘movements are threaded rather than linear, pulled vaguely along by what Holl calls sequences of shifting and overlapping perspectives. Beckoning light draws the visitor onward step by step, and image by image, through a fragmentary rather than comprehensive narrative. (Plummer,2009:56)

Gianni Vattimo, Italian Philosopher.

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. 1991. 

Weak Ontology/Fragile Thought.

A latent learning under the safe light of the darkroom. The red pages of the signs and wonders catalogue links a narrative with spatial object of his installation by its colour, but it might also reflect the inner space of the photographic darkroom.

‘Light neither centres nor aligns space, as in the past, but appears in the periphery as a vague and marginal background event.’(Vattimo, 1991:85)

‘Filled with intricate constellations’: (Adamson,2009:34) Looking/seen from the oculus of the dome.

‘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)

“When they are so high up they become blurred”

Rather than the object stranded on the plinth attempting to flag you down, if you place it elsewhere there is a feeling of possibility and latent discovery, similar to the feeling that you get if you are lucky enough to see the stores of the museum. 

(De Waal,2009:30)

In between spaces/stores and other latent spaces, re Mike Nelson, photographic darkroom between rooms. London 2007.

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919) Heidegger, The Jug, “gathering vessel”

“What is de Waal charting in these looping circles within circles?”

De Waal acknowledges the influence of Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Glenn Adamson remarks how the special qualities of the round perhaps thrown pot is itself both an object, brought into the being by the world and encircled by it. (Adamson,2009:34)

In so “being” the vessel brings its own order, a subjectivity that acts and takes dominion everywhere. This communion (spatial relation) between the vessel and its environment is further echoed in the lines of the poem “the wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild”(Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)

Signs and Wonders is about seeing 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/we gather our surroundings. 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.

‘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 sherd, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44)

Temporal Zones/Re-Imagined Social Landscapes: Archaeology/Making : Pot Shard/Pottery.

See Tim Ingold the four A’s, Anthropology/Archaeology/Art and Architecture.

Working Notes : 26 February 2014

Theory and Analysis/Tutorial with Simon Olding CSC. 

COMPONENTS :

Essay 2000-3000 words and a research journal that informs the essay/texts. Interested in using this research to inform my “Object Analysis” and its exploratory  essay. 

The Object:

Ceramic Vessel made by Hans Coper.

A Level Ceramics at Farnham Sixth Form College. Workshop experience locally at the Hop Kiln Pottery, Farnham and at Grayshott Pottery. 

HND in Ceramics, Epsom School of Art and Design. 

Self employed and freelance as a ceramist until 1992.

Currently working with clay in a contemporary practice that includes Architecture, Fine Art and Performance.

Research Questions.

What “anthropological traces” remain within the vessel of the “Pot” 

What is its Symbol-Function-History.

How much of the artist’s social biography is caught up in its making. 

Does the object in question underscore a deeper humanity/ a visionary present. How does the craft of making affect the perceptions of our surroundings. 

The worn vessel/telluric values and the sensuality of humans.

Making: The Contemporary Craft Praxis. Research Texts.

Making, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of The Environment (Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill) Tim Ingold.

Heideggar for Architects, Adam Sharr. A Potters Book, Bernard Leach,

Hans Coper, Tony Birks/Contemporary Potters/Ceramic Review. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard.

Rethinking Materiality, Colin Renfrew. (At The Potters Wheel)

How Things Shape The Mind/A Theory of Material Engagement, Colin Renfrew.

Diffracted Bodies/Matter(s) in Movement : Speculative/Performative Space-Time Drawings

Evidencing Atmospheres/A Calling To Think.

Reading diffractively through reimagined patterns/atmospheres that penetrate the body-text-space-time compositions. 

Spatial blueprints/propositional and emergent diagrams on speculative readings from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.

Apparatuses and Intermediaries.

Everyday Practices, Harleston. 2022

Clay/Ideas in motion : Emergent Physical/Processual Matterings

 

Bricolage Processes : Creative Audit of Research Topics and Processes

Interiors/UCA Farnham. 2014

THE ARCHITECTURE OF NATURAL LIGHT, Henry Plummer. 2009 THE OTHER ARCHITECTURE, Constructing metaphysical space.

Catching The Light.

The Entwined History of Light And Mind. Arthur Zajonc

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time PROCESSION

Choreography of light for the moving eye VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light in a diaphanous film ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light through a porous screen CANALIZATION

Channelling of light through a hollow mass ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

ADVENTURES OF THE FIRE, VESSELS THROUGH TIME CERAMIC GATE

“The existing architectural environment is thought to be more or less official through the hierarchical arrangement, providing an rigidity to the public. The base for a creation is a freedom and I proposed an asymmetrical form for the gate to break the official space, bringing an atmosphere for freedom of creation. ”

Jung-mook Moon. CERAMIC PAVILION

“People make space, and space contains people. ” Seong-chil Park. (Exhibition Space Designer)

PALIMPSEST AS REMAINS OF A CREATIVE PRAXIS STUDIO SPACE AS A PHILOSOPHICAL WORKSHOP

PALIMPSEST IN ARCHITECTURE

“Architects, archaeologists and design historians sometimes use the word to describe the accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time. Whenever spaces are rebuilt or remodelled, evidence of former uses remain. ”

Wikipedia

RODIN AND BEUYS

THE ALCHEMY OF BUILDING WORKING PRACTICES

RUINS, REDUCTIONS, and the LOSS of SUBSTANCE.

FRAGMENTS, ASSEMBLAGES and INTERIORS that re-enter the world of creativity.

The Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities.

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche Can one achieve architecture without resorting to ‘design’? What if, instead of designing a new building, you keep the one skated for demolition? How do you insert an original program inside the old and new structures simultaneously? How do you reconcile coherence with multiplicity? Bernard Tschumi 2012

 PROGRAM. Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 1999/2012 Architecture was no longer an autonomous and isolated discipline but participated in the movement and confrontation of ideas. Tschumi, Red Is Not A Color. 2012

Questions of Space

Abstract Mediation and Strategy

CREATIVE AUDIT of RESEARCH TOPICS The Craftsman, Richard Sennett. 2008

“Making is thinking, the good craftsman uses solutions to uncover new territory; problem solving and problem finding are intimately related in his or her mind. For this reason curiosity can ask, “Why" as well as “How " about any project. ”

Prologue: Man as His Own Maker CRAFTSMEN

The Troubled Craftsman The Workshop Machines

Material Consciousness CRAFT

The Hand

Expressive Instructions Arousing Tools Resistance and Ambiguity CRAFTSMANSHIP Quality-Driven Work Ability

Conclusion: The Philosophical Workshop BRICOLEUR BRICOLAGE, Barkow Leibinger. 2013

“Bricolage indicates an approach that is inclusive, ie open-ended, and can come either from within architecture itself or from external sources. ”

CASTING WEAVING

FOLDING BUNDLING PRINTING ANTICIPATING

FROM MODELS TO DRAWINGS, Marco Frascari. 2007 CRITICAL STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURAL HUMANITIES

THE WAVERLEY PROJECT

Imagination and Representation in Spatial Practices (Architecture, Fine Art and Performance).

Historical Perspectives Emergent Realities Critical Dimensions

CRISTINA IGLESIAS Guggenheim Museum 1998

“Concrete and iron, glass, yellow, terracotta and tapestry, aluminium and photo etching, leather and amher glass, wood, resin and bronze powder, blue glass and alabaster. ”

Introduction, Carmen Gimenez

Screen Memories, Nancy Princenthal Stained With a Pale Light, Adrian Searle Wanting Shelter, Barbara Maria Stafford

CHRIS WILMARTH. 1986 Delancey Backs (and Other Moments)

Etched float/polished plate glass, steel and bronze, blown glass.

BURNING ISSUES AND PRACTICAL CONCERNS

THE READING ROOM

The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries.

‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’

Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)

‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)

Reading The Landscape.

What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism. (Woodcock,2000:55)

Radio On by Chris Petit.

The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear. (Woodcock,2000:115)

England Dreaming.

Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, ‘Each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog.’ Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place. 

(Woodcock,2000:31)

The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday.

WATER AND DREAMS

AN ESSAY ON THE IMAGINATION OF MATTER Gaston Bachelard

Viscosity/Water in Combination.

Tacit and intimate contact, relationships and encounters between water and the potter. Water is his/her first auxiliary.

WORKING NOTES for InDESIGN Document/Mood Board.

Old Buildings/New Designs: Architectural Transformations. Charles Bloszies. Knocktopher Friary is a quiet place of contemplation. The new residential cloister unifies the friary and the church. The composition of the architecture is a knitting together of two original forms with a ribbon of concrete, glass and wood. The new buildings are crafted from a minimalist vocabulary where the palette of materials was kept to a minimum. One of the interesting design features is that the new elevations never touch the old facades with a solid-to-solid intersection; the new is either set back from the old (Ashley Castle) or the joint is glazed. The existing church floor is used as both a datum for maintaining the new floor level in the new construction, and as a vein of closely controlled changes of materials and finishes. The resultant architecture is played between subtle material exchanges of concrete meeting wood, concrete meeting glass, and concrete meeting concrete with slightly different surface qualities. What results is a clear differentiation between the old and the new, both are remarkably quiet architecturally reflecting the concerns of the site as a Carmelite monastery in the southeast of Ireland.

Working Thoughts

The Phenomenology of Reading. GLAS, Derrida Literature and Language.

Barbed Nature, Pierced Flesh. Graham Sutherland 1903-80

He never worked in situ but collected information to be worked on in his studio. The detailed sketches and notes he had made when through a transition in his mind before the final painting, culminating therefore in an inner landscape rather than a factual rendition.

These landscapes were no idyllic reverie but evoked a sense of the mysterious and dangerous. In many ways they emitted a foretaste of the approaching Second World War. (Woodcock,2000:25)

Ruins, Shadows and Moonlight. Elizabeth Bowen

“It is a fact, that in Britain, and especially in London, in wartime many people had strange, deep. Intense dreams. We have never dreamed like this before; and I suppose we shall never dream like this again.” Elizabeth Bowen.

The awareness of the social changes which broke through wartime society is evident in her novels and short stories, the feeling of boundaries being broken, physically, psychologically and also on a spiritual level, where the sense of the living and the unaccounted dead, caused by the bombing, mingle. Her evocative descriptions of the quality of light, the particular smell of a room, of a garden after rain of walking over charred wood and broken glass following an air-raid, and even the effect atmospheres have on the individual all contribute to evoking a strong sense of place. She is a master at conjuring up the minutiae of the everyday world and the presence of another dimension. (Woodcock,2000:74-75)

Rogue Male. Geoffrey Household.

The novel evokes the solitude of the landscape as it was before the advent of the mechanisation of farming and the availability of the countryside created by the growth in transport of the following decades. (Woodcock,2000:77)

Tn the heart of this hedge, which I had been seeking all the way from London, the lane reappears. It is not marked on the map. It has not been used, I imagine, for a hundred years. The deep sandstone cutting, its hedges grown together across the top, is still there; anyone who wishes can dive under the sentinel horns at the entrance and push his way through and come out in a cross hedge that runs along the foot of the hills. But who would wish? Where there is light, the interior of the double hedge is of no conceivable use to the two farmers whose boundary fence it is, and nobody but an adventurous child would want to explore it.’

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male 1939.

The Stride of The Mind

Reading Rooms. Figuring Space. Text/Fumiture/Dwelling Reading with Paths

Relativity through Walking and Thinking. Subjectivity. Space - Politics - Affect

Waverley Abbey. Cistercian Monastery

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre- spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg

Scarpa, extensive use of concrete with different aggregates and finishes.

Ashley Castle, restoration of ruin into a domestic dwelling, sensitive use of materials and methods of joining or revealing the historical fabric (allowing the ruinous to remain visible) of the building.

The Dovecote Studio, a building made of CORTEN steel built within the interior of a ruined Victorian dovecote (see further notes).

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

Claywork/Correspondences/Vibrant Matter : 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. 

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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)