Life Search, Time-Life Books.
05/03/2013
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.
Slow Philosophy/Discursive Attachments : Gathering Materials/Objects/Things
Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.
Duration, Steven Holl
Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.
The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.
The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.
SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional
The Enchantment of Modern Life.
Attachments, Crossing and Ethics
The performativity of social representations
When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.
Jane Bennett
Be not inhospitable to strangers
lest they be angels in disguise
Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate
David Childers, Heart In My Soul
Collage Works : Architectural Studies. Outpost Studios, Norwich.
Studio Works : Praxis between theory and practice. Outpost 2020.
Outpost Studios Norwich, collage, textual, intermedia,
spatial practice, resource, project space, art practice, research, book works
Architectural Inquiry : Metaphysical Surfaces
Blue Spaces Of Everyday Enchantments : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal
Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things
Few boundaries are impenetrable
They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce
In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'
Tim Ingold 2011
Materials, Tim Ingold, slow philosophy, studio works, textile, clay, painting, yellow ochre
New works around fired clay, painting, wrapping forms, metal, textiles and stones.
Architectural research for a library within a studio.
clay, textile, wrapping, painting, natural objects,
photographic surface, asperity, poetics of process, studio
Palimpsest/Surface Sprays : Spaces Between Objects
Site based inquiry for sculpture trail at Raveningham
collage, research, spatiality, art practice, alternative photography,
drawing, architectural, intervention, visual fine art, craft
studio, metaphysical space, collage, Palimpsest, Cristina Iglesias, Steven Holl, Jackie Leven, Tim Ingold, Julian Stair, drawing, sprays, Jane Bennett, Russell Moreton, Lucio Fontana,
For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.
Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016
Affective~Ecologies~Immersive Atmospheres.
Matterings~Un-doing theory into the making of the everyday.
The Anthropology of Skill.
Architecting with experience.
On the distinction between Art and Technology.
Yet speech is no ordinary skill. Weaving together in narrative, the multiple strands of action and perception specific to diverse task and situations, it serves, if you will, as the 'Skill of skills'. And if one were to ask where culture lies, the answer would not be in some shadowy domain of symbolic meaning, hovering aloof from the 'hands on' business of practical life, but in the very texture and pattern of the weave itself.
Tim Ingold. Beyond Art And Technology.
Circulation Diagram~Lines of Flow amongst Clay.
.jpg)
.jpg)
2025 Diary Content.
May 26 - June 1
Readings and their speculations of theory into the realm of everyday practices.
Interior Spaces.
Infra~Bodies of Immediacy
Becoming Volatile, matter(s) entering into movement, creating in~with bodies.
The permanency of ceramic objects both reflect and indexically link clay with its very nature of uncertainty and change through the very extreme and volatile processes of firing.
Clay is about the primacy of the corporeal human body as it attempts to express~abject itself through bodily metaphors or nesting, dwelling, nurturing and enduring.
The Inner Life of Pots~Ceramics
Tunings~Innerness~Thresholds~Change
Sounding Voids/Muted Light
Brian Clarke
Concordia
Film, analysis, organisation of human access, wonderous, the best of myself.
Elements of flight, collage, and sensate fictions.
Hannsjorg Voth
Working with intensity(building structures)
Architectural Reflexive Spaces
Inhabitation's into the continuous weather world.
Landscapes~Making~Building~Ecologies
Innovative Objects~For Critical~Philosophical Thinking~Living.
Cognitive nature~potentiality of matter(s) of making worlds.
Tectonics materials, matter(s) of wood, light, clay and water.
Outposts, observatories, places of inquiry, dwelling, self builds.
Independent researcher, artist in residence, works manager, project development.
Constituting Consistencies.
Bodily/Corporeal Metaphors, Analogies and Poetics.
Calvino, exactitude, lightness, quickness, visibility, multiplicity.
Outpost Correspondence 270224
Studio 3.16 Russell Moreton
The Minor Gesture : Manning/Artaud / Newman
Within the body of knowledge there is a mind in the flesh, quick as lightning.
Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties.
* The haptic engagement.
* The stage of drawing.
* Gesture and act.
Drawing exists in a state of potentiality. It is the instability of the framed image or object that resists definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself as at its suggestion—its possibility within a formation that has yet to occur. The drawing remains suspended in becoming, producing an uncertainty, and with it an anxiety, about what stage of language it inhabits.
To look with the eye and touch of an artist is to observe with sustained scrutiny while remaining aware of the social conditions from which forms emerge. The connection between the drawings in the exhibition lies in the value given to gesture as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace upon the paper.
— Catherine de Zegher, on Avis Newman
Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.
Within the realm of visual representation, drawing functions as an act of tracing absence.
The mark both opens and closes. It is an inscriptive game that is simultaneously motional and emotional, allowing an active participation in, and temporary mastery over, separation anxiety, while also marking the child's movement towards independence.
The earliest drawings are guided less by the visual exploration of space than by an exploration of movement and spatial relations.
Drawing begins in bodily response. Through acts of inscription it attempts to bring forth a visible language. Gestural traces reveal a continuous process of situating being within becoming.
Drawn from the body of knowledge onto the surface of experience.
For me, drawing continually manifests the endless repetition of remaking. As sensation, it occupies the space of anxiety—perhaps even a childhood anxiety.
## Moving Bodies / Spatial Thresholds
Architecture is entered physically, but also imaginatively. We inhabit not only space but its poetics.
### St Jerome in His Study (1474–75)
Antonello da Messina examines earthly limits through the image of St Jerome seated within a carefully constructed study, seemingly dissected to expose its interior. The room becomes both a place for thought and an architecture of the mind: a space containing books, writing, and the material conditions necessary for intellectual cultivation.
The painting suggests that space may be crossed by a mind capable of moving beyond physical boundaries. This capacity to transcend limits is shared by architecture itself.
In the work of Carlo Scarpa, particularly at Brion Cemetery, physical thresholds become poetic thresholds. Crossing from one space to another also becomes a passage between life and death, humanity and nature, memory and landscape. Alongside the tangible forms of architecture exists an invisible architecture of transition.
Brion Cemetery — Carlo Scarpa.
Ina Macaione, 2017.
## Enric Mestre
### Architectures for Silence and Meditation
Building models become blueprints for larger constructions.
Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed, and the enclosed.
Enric Mestre's work draws equally upon the principles of classical form and the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He possesses an exceptional sensitivity to mass, planar relationships, and spatial proportion, translating the language of architecture into intimate sculptural objects.
His sculptures are enriched by the subtle and controlled colouration of their clay surfaces. The patinas possess a quiet complexity, relating more closely to the fabric of buildings than to conventional sculpture. Rough textures and smooth planes temper the austerity of the forms, while restrained colours distinguish individual surfaces and volumes.
Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist architecture. It carries the same austerity and asceticism while evoking a profound sense of memorial and elegy. These are deeply contemplative objects that move beyond formal exercises in harmony, proportion, chromatics, and composition.
Their quietness contains an unmistakable sense of *memento mori*. David Whiting describes many of Mestre's sculptures as possessing a sepulchral quality: repositories of memory, perhaps, or silent sentinels of an unspecified commemoration. They invite the imagination to wander through unsettling landscapes of urban fragments and industrial architectures.
Their cenotaph-like solemnity produces isolation and stillness, leaving the viewer to construct their own narratives.
— David Whiting
## Invisible Cities
*Italo Calvino*
"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire—or its reverse, a fear."
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears. Even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules
Outpost 091124
Spatial Bodies~Human Bodies
.jpg)
Architecture understood as a collection of collective parts.
A diagrammatic art of lived abstraction and lived-in abstraction.
A space for inhabiting experience.
An inhabiting event is the medium of architecture.
Zuzana Kovar, notes that the shortcoming of Tschumi's event is that while it introduces a processual understanding of architecture and mobilises the body in space, space it self remains static.
Equation becomes a spatial assemblage for occurrences.
For Deleuze, an 'assemblage' extends the understanding between bodies and spaces.
Program is determinate.
Event is indeterminate.
A program gives a fixed outcome, a fixed spatial experience. An event does not, critically the 'notion of event' is that it activates potentialities. Each space, may be thought of as composed of multiple singular potentialities that lay dormant, unless activated.
All spaces contain multiple potentialities.
Event Is Not Program.
There is no architecture without actions, no architecture without events, no architecture without program.
Architecture=Space + Event.
Tschumi.
Program is to be distinguished from 'event', a program is a determinate set of expected occurrences, a list of required utilities often based on social behaviour, habit or custom. In contrast events occur as an indeterminate set of outcomes, revealing hidden potentialities or contradictions in a program and relating them to a particularly appropriate (or possibly exceptional) spatial configuration that may create conditions for unexpected events to occur.
Generating uncommon or unpredictable events through particular spatial configurations of the in-between.
Abject(ion) Studio Space.
Subjectivity~Spatial Bodies.
.jpg)
Discursive Objects/Architectural Occurrences/Resonances.
Assemblages, fired, raw pigments, paint, chalk, wax, plaster.
The Enabling Constraint.
Objects decode relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.
Erin Manning.
Ceramics Speculative/Exploratory Practices.
New Ceramic Forms of Research/Theoretical Objects.
Outpost 090124
Indexical and Sensate Bodies
Drawing(s) on the sensate perceived and interiorities~affect of other bodies.
I am interested in the sensate nature and social interiorities that are surfacing through drawing.
.jpg)
.jpg)
The Tentative Trace ~ From Living Body to Ceramic Body
Moreton's Indexical Bodies as Spatial Research.
In Moreton's later ceramics, the gathered interiority of reading and spatial collage begins to become unstable. The opening emerges not simply as an aperture within an object but as a force~middle: a material event through which accumulated relations can escape their enclosure. In Shivering Openings: The image is not an object but a process, the ceramic is understood through changefulness, painted light and the force gathered to make voids and bore holes.
Here the image is no longer understood as a representation of a ceramic object but as another stage of its becoming. The photographed ceramic enters a further process of reading, where surface, light, opening, withdrawal and spatial tension produce another body of correspondence. “Shivering” names the instability of this threshold: an opening between interior and exterior, image and object, memory and forgetting, language and its exhaustion.
The ceramic consequently gathers and releases at once. It is a chamber, but also a perforation; an interior, but also an escape; an alluring body that simultaneously withdraws from possession. What has been gathered through years of reading, collage and spatial research does not finally become a unified form. It becomes a material force capable of generating further openings.
And perhaps the most concise proposition emerging from this particular work is:
Moreton gathers bodies until the material needs to open.
That feels very close to what we have been circling around.
The force~middle isn't simply where things meet.
It is where what has gathered becomes too alive to remain contained.
The opening shivers.
The image becomes process.
The ceramic withdraws.
And the research, rather wonderfully, escapes again.
Different chambers of the same spatial research.
How can a spatial condition gather bodies sufficiently for something to happen between them, while allowing what happens to remain partially unknown?
That question seems to be present in the 2010 chamber, the spatial collages, the Scriptorium, the reading archive, the ceramic chambers and now your institutional propositions.
And perhaps this gives us an even stronger definition of Moreton's interiority:
Moreton's interiority is the space generated when a body enters an apparatus of correspondence and leaves something behind that another body can encounter.
The trace, the collage, the ceramic, the archive and the institution are therefore not different subjects.
They are different chambers of the same spatial research.
Drawing/Poetry/Images.
Sensing/Drawing Energy.
Water/Clay/Fire.
The mental energy of engagement in drawing and how 'markers' of an action translate the murmurings of the mind.
Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, through a synthesis/reciprocity of reverberations of matter and its mental movement.
Gaston Bachelard illustrates how images bridge the sensate perceived world and the interior affective life.
Bachelard's seminal philosophical and phenomenological interests are always connected to matter. To what he calls the psychology of the familiar, the rapprochement with real objects, and the friendship of things.
Matter sparks inner images which in turn imbue matter with memory and values. He creates an ever renewing reciprocity of the reverberations between inner and outer qualities, which obliterates any absolute separation between objective and subjective experience, a perspective recognized by modern physics. Bachelard explodes the potential imprisoned in an image. It is the quality of the 'livingness' of the flame that triggers Bachelard's musings of correspondences.
Joanne H. Stroud.
The Flame of a Candle.
Student Work.
Charcoal on paper.
Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw.
Winchester School of Art. 2003.
Drawing The Line.
Affirmations from a Primal Site.
Corollaries between being and becoming.
The Mirrored Self.
Coded Imprints.
Invented Bodies.
Chronicling Space.
The Moment/Instants of Engagement.
The conditions of making where the image was not a priori to its making.
The Simultaneity of Effects.
A 'Graphism' In A Corporeal Field.
I am concerned with the movement and process of articulation, of marking and sensing of things across the works surface/duration. I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation, both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind.
So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstances?
For Newman, it seems to me that the thing made becomes like a temporal spatial/sensate matrix, composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual, but similar inscriptions, and that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts, are only subsequently reflected on the image. Marking the image, these marks suggest an endless repetition and while also existing as a series of relations. The marks suggest the thing could fall apart at any moment.
Acts Of Inscription.
Drawing on Bodily Impulses.
Images from the mind.
The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.
Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.
Drawing on the sensation of seeing and sensing that always seems to register the endless repetition of remaking, as such drawing constitutes the space of anxieties.
I understand the page to be a mobile space in the physical presence of its weightless surface and as such it is a place of time and movement. The evokes the consciousness of that limitless space that is embodied in the reality of the white page. Which I would say is a place of fragmentation that has since Modernity been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness.
In a drawing the page keeps open the gaps between the marks. It refuses closure and is an active participant in conjunction with the mark. It is part of a negotiated reality of void and presence. The limitlessness white space of the page disperses the notion of its body as substance, its body is phantasmic and intangible space/surface.
The notion of the white page as being boundless, also alludes to that space of our inner reality, where the immaterial world of dreams/imagination and the mental impressions that run through us and evaporate into other thoughts. They dissipate in the fragmented world of our senses and defy any totalizing.
Avis Newman
Mark Making : On the fascination and the fear of the white page.
For Avis Newman, the paper is an undifferentiated space in that it references the primitive undifferentiated space of the infantile body that has to be claimed by the self.
Drawing is a site in which one enacts differentiation, as soon as a mark or sign is made, it changes the non-ness and establishes a place of action, as soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something, it moves towards, moves with its potentiality into language.
Could we state that one aspect of drawing tends to be more linked to the bodily impulse and the other to the mind?
Catherine de Zegher
The image that Antonin Artaud conjures when he says 'There is a mind in the flesh, a mind as quick as lightning,' situates it well for me. I have the impression that the act of inscribing opens a fissure through which some staged psychic event, operations of consciousness, take existence. They are primary forces with no particular visibility.
Avis Newman.
Marks both coded and uncoded originate in an urge from a space of uncertainty to participate in language. The potentiality of even a blank page is in itself the unbounded space of language. Drawing is both a system and a method of a sensing inquiry. To draw is often a paradoxical act in which two extremes of practice can exist in the same space.
When we come to look at another's markings in the world. We see an extraordinary event. We see attempts at articulating the unbounded space that momentarily binds that aspect of us that is eternally fragmented. Essentially in the very act of drawing we have a wish to externalize thought and communicate existence.
Avis Newman.
From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.
Bodily Boundaries : Transactions between body-intimate and the social body image.
Organism-Person-Environment.
Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.
Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.
In drawing some marks escape their visibility, because there is no dynamism to underpin the possibility of internal cohesion. There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it is all pressure from the inside outwards.
Conduits of perpetual potentiality.
The articulation of marking thoughts, which by definition are open-ended, in a state of flux in which things can pass through and are suggestive of a perpetual potentiality.
Some marks are seeing, some are feeling, some are for thinking, some are from memory, others from a blindness when seeing.
.jpg)
Gestures and Acts.
Conversation/Correspondences.
Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with the infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?
In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time. Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?
Catherine de Zegher.
The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional to the boundary we project onto the work. When one looks for example at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17' ' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space, this is not part of drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.
Avis Newman.
In Drawing : One is not so much looking at the thing itself, as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. In that sense, drawing is both fugitive and embodies a lack, it is implying qualities of incompleteness and that which conjures to be only a trace of a thing.
Drawing/Corresponding to a mobile field of properties that only during the process of marking is a cohesion found, a somewhat precarious frame constructed, almost as a byproduct of the articulation of marking thoughts.
Drawings are beyond the conceptual anxiety found in connection to the frame of painting.
In drawing the surface maintains its separate existence. There is an ambivalence of status between the mark and its support, consequently the lack of integration has always been more complex, corresponding as it does to a mobile field of properties.
Drawing as a site, a meditation of a self regarding consciousness. Where consciousness is understood/expressed as a process that 'figures/thinks' a state of existence. Drawing and the drawn become a site of inquiry, response and invention, and in that sensing space it becomes a philosophical activity.
Drawing, even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation. The fractured, open-ended, and incomplete that are inherent characteristics of drawing practice seem very pertinent as materializations of our present experience of the world.
It is that space of anxiety and fragmentation in contemporary practice that offers a potential of infinite diversity. Drawing is a record of the working of thought, that we see embedded in the drawn.
Conversation, Avis Newman. Catherine de Zegher.
The Stage Of Drawing : Gesture And Act.
Hans Coper and the Egyptian Vessel/Wallace Stevens 'Anecdote of the Jar'.
Studio As A Becoming Apparatus~Threshold
Clay~Fire~Ceramic.
Sensual Object~Allure~Withdrawel
The ceramic inhabits the liminal territory not by mediating certainty, but by becoming an intercessor between what can be sensed and what remains unknowable.
Other Bodies : Investigating the transition from responsive weather~world clay to fired ceramic as a radical ontological, spatial and material threshold.
Re-reading ~ 2026
The ceramic remembers the relations that made it, but does not belong to them.
The fired ceramic allows an interiority of making to be read in two temporal directions. Its surfaces, cavities, folds and asperities carry traces backwards towards the plastic field from which they emerged, while its autonomy simultaneously projects forwards into propositions that cannot yet be known. The ceramic becomes a temporal intercessor: memory and propulsion held within the same sensate body.
Clay ~ making ~ ceramic ~ withdrawal ~ propulsion
What remains unknowable is not empty. It is a force-field of possible correspondence.
The older Moreton is still there, but the present research has passed through him and returned him to us differently. Your original proposition about the vessel as an interior space is now encountered through withdrawal, propulsion, surfacing and intercession. The earlier writing becomes a different body through which the present can think.
Russell Moreton.
Sensing Outposts with Totem. 2025
Studio Spaces : Whitewashed with Breathing Forces. 2025
Held Together an exhibition of 70 small works to celebrate ncas 70th anniversary.
Anteros Art Foundation, Norwich. 2026
Innerness and Interior : Surface Pleasures
In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?
Theory and Analysis. Russell Moreton
Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. 2015
This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.
In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?
Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.
This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)
A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.
Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.
There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.
‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson, 2009:36)
Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)
Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)
The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?
Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.
I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)
Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.
‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.
Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.
Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.
Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.
The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.
Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.
His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.
Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)
Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)
In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)
His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.
Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it helps us to gather in our surroundings.
‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson, 2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves, 2009:8)
This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.
His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?
Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.
Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)
.jpg)
.jpg)
We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.
In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.
