LEYLINES 2012
Land~ing Sites, Historical Chambers and the Wayfaring of Spatial Practice
Beams and Netting: Negotiations in the Chamber
Clay ~ Hessian ~ Drawings ~ Transparencies ~ Cyanotype ~ Pinhole Photography ~ Artist's Book
“Leylines” has been appropriated and employed as both a practical and as a conceptual strategy to inquiry into places and localities. Site visits and sensitive dialogues with the other artists at a number of locations have further brought materials and processes into the creative realm. The spatial practice of setting-up this work has also produced insightful local knowledge from those dwelling nearby.
Clay, Hessian, drawings and transparencies from architectural openings, drawing frame, antique glass, lead and nylon lines.
Can we view this work through the recent and comprehensive writings on Moretons Wayfaring?
Here we have a 'Land~ing Site' of a number of Moretons interiorities working in the field.
Apparatuses, historical chambers, alternative photography, cyanotype processes, and the artist's book.
This intervention into a listed building has become a temporary refuge for a work in progress. The work attempts to show a creative agency as it encounters a host of installed hierarchies and conditions. The architectural motif on the drawings has been derived directly from the open apertures of the chamber, and these drawings also reference the supportive ironwork (Ferramenta) which has been playfully re-registered as a graphic leyline . A drawing frame similar to that used in archaeology for drawing has been adapted to illustrate the relative positions of the leyline as registered by the ordnance survey grid, both terminuses being labelled on the frames periphery.
Artist’s Book: white and coloured pages, plain brown card covers with cyanotype endpapers of an architectural plan view of Winchester Cathedral.
A hand bound book comprising of five signatures each with four folios. This book contains a collection of postcards made from contact prints and photograms from Tidbury Ring using the cyanotype process. Other pages contain some cyanotype paintings/abstracts around the theme of dwelling and hut. Silver gelatin images of St Catherine’s Hill are present as are some experimental pinhole photography.
Entering the chamber.
Leylines (2012) develops through an inquiry into places and localities, employing the idea of the leyline as both a practical and conceptual strategy. Site visits, encounters with local knowledge and sensitive dialogues with other artists become part of an exploratory process through which materials, processes and spatial propositions enter into correspondence.
The work takes place within a listed building, where an intervention becomes a temporary refuge for a work in progress. Yet refuge here does not suggest a passive occupation of an existing architectural interior. The chamber becomes an active participant in the work, bringing its own historical, material and spatial conditions into the encounter.
The intervention negotiates a host of installed hierarchies and conditions. Its stone walls, architectural openings, supportive ironwork, apertures and accumulated histories are not simply the setting for an artwork. They become apparatuses through which the work is conceived, situated and made available.
The chamber is both a host and a working body.
This distinction matters. The work does not arrive as a complete proposition to be displayed within an otherwise neutral space. Its spatial organisation emerges through an encounter with the particularities of the building. The architecture offers conditions, but these conditions also trouble and redirect the work. The intervention becomes a negotiation between what is already installed and what might be made possible through a temporary inhabitation.
Perhaps this is an early instance of what can now be understood as a Land~ing Site: a provisional gathering in which several of Moreton's interiorities become situated together.
The chamber as a Land~ing Site.
The idea of a Land~ing Site is useful because it allows us to think beyond the familiar relationship between an artwork and its location.
A landing site is not simply a place where something arrives. It is a provisional arrangement of conditions through which an arrival becomes possible. It gathers different bodies, histories, materials, apparatuses and tendencies, without necessarily resolving their differences.
In Leylines, the historical chamber is already occupied by architectural and material relations. The intervention enters this existing body and begins to negotiate its conditions. Clay, hessian, drawings, transparencies, glass, lead, nylon lines and the adapted drawing frame establish another arrangement within it.
These materials do not simply illustrate the architecture. They begin to correspond with it.
The chamber's openings provide architectural motifs for the drawings. The supportive ironwork, or ferramenta, is playfully re-registered as a graphic leyline. The drawing frame introduces another system of spatial registration, bringing the relative positions of the leyline into relation with the Ordnance Survey grid.
The work moves between architectural observation, geographical reference, historical occupation and speculative drawing.
The chamber becomes a landing site for these different spatial bodies. Each brings its own means of registering place, yet none becomes the definitive account of the location.
The work is consequently less concerned with mapping a place as a stable entity than with making visible the different ways in which place becomes situated, interpreted and inhabited.
Apparatuses ~ Registration ~ The drawing frame.
The adapted drawing frame is particularly important.
Resembling the frames used in archaeological drawing, it is employed to illustrate the relative positions of the leyline as registered through the Ordnance Survey grid. Both terminuses are labelled on the periphery of the frame, bringing the local spatial proposition into relation with a wider system of geographical reference.
The frame is an apparatus of measurement and registration, but it also becomes a spatial proposition in its own right.
It establishes a relationship between the immediate chamber and an external geography. It makes a particular set of positions visible, while also revealing that the act of registering place is never entirely neutral.
A frame selects. It establishes boundaries, relationships and points of reference. It organises what can be seen and how different positions become legible.
This connects Leylines to the wider inquiry into apparatuses of capture.
The archaeological drawing frame, the Ordnance Survey grid, the architectural opening and the photographic apparatus each establish particular conditions through which place becomes available for investigation. They do not simply record a pre-existing reality. They organise relations between observation, measurement, representation and interpretation.
Yet the work does not merely reproduce these systems. It reworks them.
The ironwork is re-registered as a graphic leyline. The architectural opening becomes a drawing motif. The drawing frame is adapted from one apparatus of investigation into another. A system of geographical registration is brought into a temporary correspondence with the material interior of the chamber.
This is a form of speculative apparatus-making: taking an existing means of spatial organisation and allowing it to enter a different field of relations.
The apparatus becomes available for another reading.
Beams and Netting: Negotiations in the chamber.
The title Beams and Netting: Negotiations in the Chamber suggests a relationship between structural support and spatial tension.
Beams establish lines of support, direction and connection. Netting suggests a more permeable arrangement: a gathering of lines that creates a field without necessarily producing a solid boundary.
Together, they offer a way of thinking about the work's spatial organisation.
The chamber is not simply enclosed by its architectural walls. It becomes permeated by other lines, materials and systems of reference. Nylon lines, lead, antique glass, transparencies and the drawing frame introduce further divisions and connections.
The intervention produces a temporary architecture within the existing architecture.
This is not necessarily an architecture of enclosure. It is an architecture of negotiation.
The work establishes relationships between the fixed and the provisional, the structural and the delicate, the visible and the partially obscured. The materials are not simply assembled into a finished installation. They establish conditions through which the chamber can be encountered differently.
The lines may be read as routes, supports, measurements, traces or speculative connections. Their significance does not rest upon a single interpretation.
They become spatial tendencies.
Here, the idea of wayfaring begins to emerge through the work itself. The intervention does not simply follow a predetermined route through the chamber. It develops through attention to what is encountered, what resists, what becomes available and what might be made possible.
Architectural openings ~ Drawing ~ The production of interiority.
The architectural motif on the drawings is derived directly from the open apertures of the chamber.
This is an important movement.
The opening is not treated as an isolated architectural detail or a shape to be copied. It becomes a means through which the chamber's interiority enters another body: the drawing.
The drawing carries a trace of the architecture, but it also changes the conditions through which that architecture can be understood.
The aperture becomes a graphic proposition. The drawing establishes another interior, one that is related to the chamber but not identical to it.
This movement between architectural opening and graphic registration anticipates the later interest in permeable chambers and interiority as something produced through relations rather than simply contained within a physical enclosure.
An interior is not only what lies behind a wall. It may be produced through an opening, a line of sight, a drawn boundary, a temporary arrangement of materials or an encounter between different spatial bodies.
The drawings therefore become more than representations of the chamber. They are working interiors: provisional spatial bodies through which the architecture can be re-entered, reconsidered and further inhabited.
The aperture becomes a passage between material and graphic thinking.
Alternative photography ~ Cyanotype ~ The temporal body of place.
The photographic processes extend this inquiry into other material and temporal conditions.
The artist's book contains a collection of postcards made from contact prints and photograms from Tidbury Ring using the cyanotype process. Other pages contain cyanotype paintings and abstracts concerned with dwelling and hut. Silver gelatin images of St Catherine's Hill are also present, alongside experimental pinhole photography.
These processes establish distinct ways of encountering and registering place.
Cyanotype is particularly significant because it makes the photographic image through the direct action of light upon a sensitised surface. Contact, exposure, duration and the relationship between an object and its support become active conditions of image production.
The photogram does not simply reproduce a view from a particular position. It registers a contact or interruption between light-sensitive material and the bodies placed upon it.
The resulting image carries an indexical relation to the conditions of its making, but it also has its own material character. Its blue field, tonal differences, irregularities and areas of exposure become part of the spatial proposition.
Pinhole photography introduces another temporal and optical condition. The camera's small aperture, extended exposure and particular relationship to light can unsettle familiar assumptions about perspective, focus and the stable photographic moment.
The silver gelatin photographs introduce another photographic materiality and another relation to the history of photographic representation.
These processes should not be collapsed into a general category of alternative photography. Their differences are important. Each establishes its own relationship between light, time, surface, contact, apparatus and representation.
Together, however, they make photography available as a material inquiry into place.
The photograph becomes a body that carries the conditions of its production. It is not simply a transparent window onto a locality.
The artist's book ~ A portable chamber.
The artist's book is an important extension of the installation.
A hand-bound book, with card covers bearing a cyanotype of Winchester Cathedral, it comprises five signatures, each containing four folios. Its white and coloured pages gather postcards, contact prints, photograms, cyanotype paintings, abstracts, silver gelatin photographs and experimental pinhole images.
The book is not simply a catalogue of the intervention.
It becomes another chamber.
Its pages produce a sequence of provisional interiors through which different localities, photographic processes and material propositions can be encountered. The reader moves through these interiors by turning, pausing, returning and comparing.
The book establishes its own architecture of access.
Its covers create a threshold. Its signatures gather distinct bodies of material. Its pages establish intervals, juxtapositions and sequences. Its images become landing sites through which the reader may enter different spatial and temporal relations.
The book also makes the work portable.
The chamber is temporary, but the book allows aspects of the inquiry to travel beyond the building. It carries the work into other places, where its images and propositions can encounter different bodies of knowledge.
This is an important form of wayfaring.
The work does not remain attached to one location. It moves through a series of material and representational bodies, each of which alters the conditions of its reception.
The book becomes a portable interiority: a space for further readings rather than a definitive record of what took place.
Local knowledge ~ Dwelling ~ Reciprocal situatedness.
An important aspect of the original account concerns the local knowledge produced through site visits and sensitive dialogues with artists and people dwelling nearby.
This introduces another dimension to the work.
Place is not encountered only through architectural observation, geographical systems or photographic processes. It is also encountered through the situated knowledge of those who inhabit and move through it.
The work's spatial practice therefore extends beyond the chamber and its material arrangements.
The locality becomes a wider field of correspondence.
Knowledge is produced through conversations, encounters, observations and the histories that people carry. These are not simply supplementary sources of information gathered to support an artwork. They participate in the creative realm itself.
This makes the work more than an individual act of interpretation.
The artist enters a field of existing relations, where other people have already established their own ways of knowing, inhabiting and understanding place.
The practice becomes a negotiation between different situated knowledges.
This is important to the developing idea of hospitality. The artist does not arrive as the sole authority on the locality. The work becomes possible through encounters with others, and those encounters may alter the direction and meaning of the work.
The locality is not simply represented. It participates.
Wayfaring ~ A spatial practice in movement.
Viewed through the more recent writings on Moreton's Wayfaring, Leylines can be understood as an early and particularly rich Land~ing Site.
Several interiorities are brought into relation:
The historical interiority of the listed building.
The architectural interiority produced through apertures and openings.
The graphic interiority of drawings and spatial registration.
The geographical interiority of leylines, localities and Ordnance Survey references.
The photographic interiority of cyanotype, photogram, silver gelatin and pinhole processes.
The material interiority of clay, hessian, glass, lead and other elements.
The book's portable interiority, through which the work becomes available for further readings.
The social interiority of local knowledge, dialogue and dwelling.
These are not separate compartments. They overlap, interrupt and transform one another.
The work's wayfaring takes place through the movement between them.
This is not simply a journey from one site to another. It is a process of becoming situated through encounters with the conditions of each site. The artist follows lines of inquiry, but those lines are altered by what they encounter.
The leyline becomes a particularly useful figure here. It offers a way of thinking about connection across distance, locality and history, while also raising questions about how such connections are registered, represented and made meaningful.
It is both a practical strategy and a speculative proposition.
The work does not need to establish the leyline as an objectively verified explanation of place. Its significance within the intervention lies in the spatial and conceptual relations it makes available for inquiry.
The line becomes a way of thinking through place rather than simply drawing a route across it.
Apparatuses ~ Capture ~ Further readings.
The work also offers an important early point of connection with the later inquiry into apparatuses of capture.
The listed building has installed hierarchies and conditions. The architectural openings, ironwork and historical fabric establish particular ways of organising space. The archaeological drawing frame and Ordnance Survey grid introduce systems of registration. Photography establishes its own conditions of visibility and representation. The artist's book arranges the resulting materials into a sequence for reading.
Each apparatus enables something, but also governs the terms through which it becomes available.
The question is not whether these apparatuses can be escaped. The work takes place through them.
Its generative force lies in the possibility of reworking their relations.
The ironwork becomes a graphic leyline. The architectural opening becomes a drawing. The drawing frame becomes a speculative spatial instrument. The photographic process becomes a material inquiry into locality. The book becomes a portable chamber.
An apparatus is not simply used for its intended purpose. It is brought into another correspondence.
This suggests that Moreton's later interest in institutional capture, photographic framing and material withdrawal is not an entirely separate development. It can be read as an intensification of questions already present in Leylines.
How does a spatial practice work within existing conditions while retaining the capacity to make other relations possible?
How can a temporary intervention inhabit a historical structure without simply reproducing its installed hierarchies?
How can the apparatus be made available for another reading?
A troubling messenger ~ The work beyond its location.
The photographs of Leylines, the artist's book and the surviving material documentation now carry the work beyond its original installation.
But they do not simply preserve the chamber.
The photograph is not the chamber, and the book is not the installation. Each is another body through which the work persists.
The photographic images establish particular views of the intervention. They make the arrangement of drawings, lines, frames and architectural surfaces available for later encounter. Yet they cannot reproduce the full spatial and temporal conditions of inhabiting the chamber.
The book carries another kind of persistence. It gathers photographic and graphic bodies into a portable sequence, allowing the work to be encountered through a different architecture.
Both become troubling messengers.
They carry traces of the intervention, but they also produce new conditions of reception. Their relation to the original work is one of return-with-difference.
The work does not simply remain in the chamber. It travels through its photographic and book forms, entering other situations and making further readings possible.
Perhaps this is where Leylines becomes especially important to the current inquiry into felt~~forwardness.
The work was conceived as a temporary refuge for a work in progress. Its spatial and material propositions were never entirely settled within the original intervention. Through the book, the photographs and the later research, they continue to move.
The work persists not by remaining unchanged, but by entering new correspondences.
Land~ing Site ~ A concluding proposition.
Leylines can now be understood as a gathering of Moreton's interiorities in the field.
The historical chamber, architectural openings, drawing frame, geographical references, photographic processes, material assemblages, local knowledge and artist's book establish a provisional ecology of making.
Each is a distinct body, with its own histories, capacities and apparatuses. Their correspondence does not require them to become equivalent.
The work develops through their negotiation.
The chamber offers refuge, but also imposes conditions. The drawing frame registers, but also frames. The photograph records, but also transforms. The artist's book carries, but does not contain. Local knowledge enters the work, but cannot be reduced to the artist's interpretation.
The intervention remains temporary, yet its propositions persist.
This is the significance of reading Leylines as a Land~ing Site. It is not simply a work situated in a building. It is an arrangement through which different spatial bodies become temporarily situated together, producing further possibilities for thought, making and inhabitation.
The work offers an early articulation of a spatial practice that has continued to develop through ceramics, photography, drawing, writing and institutional research.
It suggests that wayfaring is not a method of moving towards a predetermined destination. It is a practice of attending to the conditions encountered along the way, negotiating their resistances and making new passages through them.
A Land~ing Site is not where a journey ends. It is where different trajectories become situated long enough to make another journey possible.
The work remains in progress.
Its lines continue elsewhere.
Reading the images as part of the research body.
The photographs show different conditions of the work, rather than simply presenting a finished installation.
The artist's book
Open pages bring the photographic and graphic material into a portable sequence. The handwritten notes and mounted images retain the character of an evolving research document.
The chamber intervention.
The drawing frame, architectural fabric and material supports establish a temporary apparatus within the historic interior.
Transparency and registration.
Overlapping drawings, translucent supports and photographic traces produce an unstable relationship between the chamber's surfaces and its graphic representations.
Cyanotype and locality.
The cyanotype pages bring place into a different material and temporal register through exposure, contact and photographic abstraction.
Some important connections to the wider Wayfaring inquiry.
The chamber anticipates the permeable chamber.
The historic building is not merely a container. The intervention produces another interior within it, using openings, lines, transparent materials and graphic registrations. This provides a useful historical precursor to your later ceramic chambers, where interiority is produced through apertures, passages and material relations.
The drawing frame anticipates the apparatus of capture.
The frame is both a practical instrument and a governing device. It registers positions, establishes a field and determines a relationship between local observation and geographical systems. Your later inquiry into photographic framing and institutional apparatuses can be traced back through this operation.
The artist's book anticipates the body of research.
It is a portable, hand-bound gathering of distinct material and photographic bodies. It does not simply document the installation; it establishes another space in which the work can be encountered. This is close to your later proposition that the researcher becomes a body of research for others to inhabit.
The locality introduces reciprocal situatedness.
The conversations with people dwelling nearby are not peripheral to the artwork. They are part of its creative agency. This gives the idea of wayfaring a social and hospitable dimension: the artist's movement through a place is affected by the knowledge and experiences already present there.
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