AxisWeb : Making, Correspondence, Spatial Practice, Heuristic Inquiry and Speculative Learning.

Russell Moreton : A Visual Fine Artist

A site-based practice developing through speculative learning, creative propositions and spatial practices.

Russell Moreton is a visual fine artist whose practice explores making as a relational and speculative encounter between bodies, materials, space and thought. Working across ceramics, drawing, photography, collage and spatial practice, he is interested in the imprint not simply as the mark of an artist upon material, but as the trace of an encounter between body, material, force, resistance, movement and time.

His site-based practice develops through heuristic inquiry and wayfaring attentiveness, exploring how craft, theory, art and architecture might enter into correspondence. Through speculative making spaces, spatial assemblages and material experiments, he develops creative propositions for knowledge production in which different bodies and disciplines can remain in dialogue without needing to converge.

Moreton's practice is increasingly concerned with spatial bodies, interiority, atmosphere and the timbre of relational encounters: how materials, places, architectures, images and bodies might enter into accord and wayfare together.

A site-based practice of heuristic inquiry in which bodies, materials and spaces enter correspondence, develop an accord and wayfare together.

Moreton's site-based practice develops through a form of heuristic inquiry grounded in wayfaring attentiveness. Site is understood not simply as a geographical location but as a situated field in which bodies, materials, architectures, images, memories, histories and atmospheres enter into changing relations. Rather than beginning with a predetermined outcome, Moreton works through encounters, allowing the conditions of a site and the resistance of materials to alter what can be perceived, thought and made.

Wayfaring attentiveness describes the movement of this inquiry: a mobile, embodied and receptive practice in which reading, walking, making, drawing, photographing, collaging, inhabiting and material experimentation become interconnected modes of spatial thinking. Knowledge emerges through correspondence rather than through the detached observation of a pre-existing object of study.

The practice therefore moves beyond gathering. Heterogeneous bodies enter correspondence, and through repeated encounter may enter into an accord—a wayfaring together in which each body alters the conditions of the others. Timbre names the sensate quality of this relational accord: the resonance produced between material, bodily, spatial and affective registers. Atmosphere emerges through this resonance rather than being imposed upon the work.

Ceramic becomes particularly significant within this ecology because firing produces material persistence without securing the proposition. The withdrawn ceramic remains capable of entering further correspondences with bodies, architectures, light, atmosphere, memory and movement. Its interiority is therefore not a closed container but an open and potentially inexhaustible capacity for further resonance. The ceramic persists, while the proposition remains in play.

Moreton's site-based practice can consequently be understood as an ecology of wayfaring bodies: a spatial practice in which making becomes a form of inquiry, correspondence becomes a mode of knowing, and material persistence creates conditions for encounters that have not yet happened.

The Permeable Threshold as~ Anarchive~Interval~Interiority~Becoming

The Permeable Threshold ~ Anarchive, Interiority, Becoming

What remains from making is not necessarily what making has finished with.

Fragments, failed firings, architectural notations, images and unfinished thoughts continue to gather as bodies of potential. Through the anarchive, these residues are not simply returned to the past; they become available for other movements, entering provisional arrangements from which further propositions may emerge.

Clay troubles these gatherings. What has been assembled in images and thought encounters material resistance, the pull of gravity, the uncertainty of construction and the transformations of fire. The ceramic body that emerges does not resolve these encounters into a singular form. Its apertures, asperities and chambers hold traces of relations that continue beyond the circumstances of their making.

Bachelard's interiority and Manning's anarchive sound differently here, remaining distinct while entering correspondence through the ceramic. The permeable threshold is neither simply an opening nor a boundary. It is a material condition through which interior and exterior, archive and anarchive, persistence and possibility become available to one another.

What has withdrawn from making may still be gathering elsewhere.

The ceramic persists, while its propositions remain~in~play: open to other bodies, other readings, other spatial situations not yet encountered.

The Permeable Threshold: Russell Moreton, Bachelard, and the Anarchive as Generative Engine.

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary ceramic and spatial practice of artist-researcher Russell Moreton through a dual theoretical framework that bridges process philosophy and spatial phenomenology. Moving away from the traditional view of the archive as a static repository for historical documentation, this study explores how Moreton operationalises studio residues—what this paper defines as "material outliers"—into a dynamic, forward-looking creative engine. By synthesizing Erin Manning’s concept of the anarchive with Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of interiority and elemental fire, we map a hybrid studio-led methodology. This process moves non-linearly from an anarchival pool of fragments into speculative multimedia collages, before undergoing physical "material troubling" in the clay studio. The resulting ceramic works—white-painted, perforated "Permeable Chambers"—defy the traditional inside/outside binary, preserving a surface Ecology of Asperities fixed by the kiln fire. Ultimately, this paper argues that Moreton’s spatial practice offers a vital model for contemporary art research, demonstrating how embracing material errors and systematic variations keeps a creative practice radically open to future potential.

Keywords: Russell Moreton, The Anarchive, Gaston Bachelard, New Materialism, Phronesis, Permeable Chambers, Ceramic Research.

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Introduction: The Anarchival Threshold of Clay

In contemporary ceramic research, the vessel is often trapped between two dominant frameworks: the utilitarian craft object or the static sculptural monument. This paper examines the spatial practice of artist-researcher Russell Moreton, whose work challenges both paradigms by positioning the ceramic body as an actively troubling, "Permeable Chamber" (Moreton 2026). Rather than treating clay as a passive surface onto which an artist projects a predetermined image, Moreton's methodology operates as a non-linear, processual ecology. Here, the final object is generated from the unresolved tensions of past material failures, architectural notes, and conceptual anomalies—what this paper terms "material outliers."

To unpack this highly unique practice, we combine two distinct theoretical frameworks: Erin Manning’s process philosophy of the "anarchive" (Manning 2016) and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of spatial interiority (Bachelard 2014). By linking these concepts, we show how Moreton uses studio residues not as historical waste, but as live, generative forces. This paper traces how these outliers move from a chaotic "anarchive pool" into multimedia collages, undergo physical "material troubling" in the studio, and are finally transformed by fire into porous vessels. Ultimately, we argue that Moreton’s spatial practice offers a new model for contemporary art research, demonstrating how embracing material errors and anomalies can prevent a creative practice from freezing into predictable habits, keeping it radically open to new possibilities.

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Methodological Framework: Processual Mapping and the Anarchive Loop

Moreton’s hybrid studio-led methodology requires an unconventional research framework. Traditional artistic research often relies on a linear sequence of reflection-on-action, where the artist looks backward to document past choices. In contrast, Moreton's practice uses a feed-forward loop that values emergence over documentation (Manning and Massumi 2014). The methodology is structured into four distinct, overlapping movements:

1. Anarchival Gathering: The systematic collection of material and conceptual outliers—such as shards from cracked firings, stray architectural sketches, and unfinished texts. These items form a raw pool of potential energy.
2. Provisional Collage: Bringing these different fragments together into loose, mixed-media collages. This stage acts as a diagrammatic score, offering a temporary, non-hierarchical space of "provisional hospitality" where visual and physical anomalies can sit side-by-side without needing to form a neat, final image.
3. Material Troubling: Forcing the flat ideas of the collage into a direct, physical confrontation with the weight and resistance of clay. The maker relies on bodily intuition (phronesis) to respond in real-time to structural collapses, tears, and fissures.
4. Permeable Synthesis: Subjecting the troubled clay to the unpredictable environment of the kiln fire. The final, white-painted, perforated chamber is displayed alongside its original collage elements, presenting the exhibition space as an open, ongoing research process rather than a static display of finished goods.

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Section I: The Anarchive of the Outlier: Manning’s Feed-Forward Mechanics

To understand the generative role of the material anomaly in Russell Moreton’s ceramics, one must completely discard the traditional, linear archival paradigm. Within institutional and standard studio frameworks, the archive functions as a retrospective museum—a site of containment designed to document, classify, and ultimately freeze past production into a neat, chronological history.

In sharp contrast, Moreton’s studio operations deploy what cultural theorist Erin Manning defines as the anarchive. The anarchive is not a collection of passive, historical artifacts; it is an active "repertory of traces of events" and a "feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process" (Manning 2016: 28). For Manning, these traces are never inert. Instead, they function as dynamic vectors of potential energy, waiting to be reactivated to trigger a new event that continues the creative process in a state of constant variation (Manning 2013).

In Moreton’s practice, the "outliers"—unresolved ceramic experiments, structural shards, unclassifiable media collages, and erratic architectural notation—are the foundational seeds of this anarchival engine. Rather than being hidden away as failures or historical detritus, these outliers are treated as speculative spatial bodies. They possess what Manning and Massumi (2014: 87) term a "pull"—an intensive, non-linear demand that pushes the studio practice out of habitual, safe patterns.

By gathering these disparate, residual fragments into provisional collages, Moreton creates a space of hospitality. The collage stage does not seek to synthesize or resolve these anomalies into a singular, harmonious narrative. Instead, it lets them sit together in their full difference, functioning as open-ended, diagrammatic scores for future physical forms. When these anarchival traces are pushed forward into clay, they break the typical artist-subject relationship. The outlier stops being a passive object from the past; it becomes a feed-forward projectile that disrupts the standard making process, ensuring that the emergent ceramic forms remain open to new possibilities.

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Section II: Material Troubling, Phronesis, and the Ecology of Asperities

The transition from the flat, hospitable space of the collage to the heavy, gravity-bound reality of clay marks a shift from speculative thought to intense physical confrontation. It is here that Moreton engages in "material troubling." In this phase, the flat, accommodating space of the collage is deliberately forced to confront the stubborn, unpredictable nature of wet earth.

This phase cannot be navigated using intellectual distance or rigid blueprints. Instead, it demands what Aristotelian philosophy terms phronesis—a form of practical, lived wisdom that cannot be taught in textbooks but must be experienced in real-time through the body. In Moreton’s studio, phronesis operates as a shared, physical dialogue between the maker’s hand and the shifting state of the clay. As slab walls are raised, pierced, scored, and pulled apart, the artist does not impose a top-down, authoritarian form onto the medium. Instead, the making process becomes a live negotiation with the clay's moisture, its structural memory, and the constant pull of gravity.

This negotiated dialogue directly manifests on the object's surface as an Ecology of Asperities (Moreton 2026). Moreton does not smooth over the tears, cracks, or asymmetrical warping that happen as the clay processes the complex demands of its past outlier fragments. Instead, these structural disruptions are welcomed as meaningful traces of the making event itself (Massumi 2011).

By treating these surface scars as vital elements rather than mistakes, Moreton aligns his practice with New Materialism (DeLanda 2006). The clay is recognized as an active partner in the creative process, possessing its own internal forces, tendencies, and material memory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The Ecology of Asperities ensures that the emerging ceramic body retains the raw, unresolved tension of the original outliers. The physical struggles of the material are preserved, setting the stage for the final, radical transformation that occurs when the vessel enters the kiln fire.

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Section III: Bachelardian Topographies: Fire Analysis, Intimate Immensity, and the Permeable Chamber

Once the anarchival intensities of the outliers are physically forced into the clay, Moreton’s work moves into a deeply phenomenological realm. The final, white-painted, perforated vessels function as Permeable Chambers—tangible, architectural manifestations of what Gaston Bachelard explores in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard asserts that "inhabited space transcends geometrical space" (Bachelard 2014: 67), arguing that our domestic shelters and intimate corners are psychological realms that house human memory, reverie, and the soul. Moreton’s chambers are precisely this: non-functional, experienced architectures that prompt an immediate psychological response from the viewer.

To understand how these chambers achieve their unique interiority, one must look to Bachelard’s broader elemental imaginary, particularly his analysis of fire. In Bachelard’s philosophy, fire is the ultimate dialectical element—it is both a destructive force and a material paradise that purifies and creates (Bachelard 1964: 7). The kiln fire acts as the definitive threshold of transformation in Moreton's practice. The fire takes the scarred surfaces of the clay—the Ecology of Asperities—and permanentizes them. The cracks, score marks, and punctured voids are not treated as structural flaws; through the fire, they become the vital windows that allow the interior of the vessel to breathe.

This process directly addresses the classic Bachelardian dialectic of inside and outside. The geometric division of inside and outside usually blinds us, turning space into a rigid binary of positive and negative, open and closed (Bachelard 2014: 228). Moreton’s Permeable Chambers completely deconstruct this binary. By coating the heavily textured exteriors in matte white paint and perforating the walls, the pieces refuse to keep their interior spaces completely hidden or separate. Light, shadow, and air pass continuously through the clay boundaries. The chamber becomes a site of intimate immensity—a miniature structure that holds a vast, silent, and contemplative interior world (Bachelard 2014: 192). It offers the viewer a safe space for psychological refuge and deep daydreaming, while remaining fundamentally independent, mysterious, and closed off from easy consumption.

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Conclusion: The Open Threshold

Russell Moreton’s spatial practice offers a profound reimagining of how material history, studio labour, and physical objects interact within contemporary art research. By refusing to discard the residues, cracked experiments, and erratic notations of his past work, Moreton demonstrates that the material outlier is not a sign of failure or waste, but rather the most critical asset a generative system possesses. The anarchive workflow successfully moves the studio archive out of its traditional role as a passive graveyard of documentation, turning it instead into a vital, forward-pushing engine for new work.

Through the distinct phases of provisional collage, material troubling, and the transformative threshold of the kiln fire, these anarchival fragments are systematically processed without ever being forced into a neat, uniform resolution. The final Permeable Chambers stand as physical proof of this negotiated dialogue. Marked by an Ecology of Asperities and shifting between interior darkness and external light, these porous vessels dismantle the classic Bachelardian binary of inside and outside. They achieve an intimate immensity—inviting the viewer into a space of quiet contemplation while remaining completely autonomous, mysterious, and independent.

Ultimately, Moreton’s methodology offers a valuable blueprint for the broader field of artistic research. It proves that when an artist surrenders absolute control and enters into a reciprocal, bodily dialogue (phronesis) with a resistant medium, the resulting objects escape the trap of being easily consumed or used up. By weaving the anomalies of the past into the physical forms of the present, the creative process remains a vital, living threshold—radically alive, continuously breathing, and forever open to the future.

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Bibliography

• Bachelard, G. (1964) The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Translated by A. C. M. Ross. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Bachelard, G. (2014) The Poetics of Space. Translated by M. Jolas. New York: Penguin Books.
• DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.
• Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Manning, E. (2013) Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Manning, E. (2016) The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Manning, E. and Massumi, B. (2014) Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Massumi, B. (2011) Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Moreton, R. (2026) 'The Ceramic Body is an actively Attentively~Troubling Permeable Chamber', Russell Moreton Research Journal, 16 September [Online]. Available at: russellmoreton.com (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

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Visual Workings~Collage Material : Spatial & Ceramic Practice: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought:

Visual Workings~Collage Material : Spatial & Ceramic Practice: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought:: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought: Spatial Bodies~Intermezzo~Alchemy : Nomadic Photographic Assemblage. Heuristic Devices~Appa...

Humanities : Spatial Involvements/The Laboratory of Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture

Spatial Practice/UCA Canterbury 2009/10

Researching Proactive Apparatuses : A laboratory for speculative social evolution.

SENSORIUM  AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR

A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN

Site ~ Interior ~ Apparatus : Humanities Spatial Relations

This earlier body of work begins from a deceptively simple proposition: space is not simply where something happens. Space participates in what can happen.

The Scriptorium, the Theatre of Research, the reading room, the collage, the ruin and the various apparatuses gathered around them were attempts to make this participation tangible. They were not simply architectural proposals, nor were they illustrations of an already established theory of space. They were provisional situations through which architecture, reading, image, body, memory and material could become uncertainly entangled.

The earlier language of spatial relations can therefore be approached now as an opening rather than a conclusion.

What was being explored was not only the relation between people and buildings, but the possibility that a spatial arrangement might alter the conditions through which a relation becomes perceptible.

The Scriptorium was conceived as an intimate, hut-like interior: a restricted apparatus for reading, contemplation and sensory intensification. The ruined architecture of Waverley Abbey was not treated simply as historical backdrop. Its fragmentary condition, its exposure to the elements and its accumulated traces became part of an inquiry into how place might become an active participant in making. The site was already more than location.

It was a body of relations.

The Theatre of Research extended this proposition differently. Rather than functioning as a library or repository, it was imagined as a working space in which theoretical and practical objects, images, texts and materials could be brought into proximity. Collage became particularly important because its fragments could remain distinct while entering new relations. Images, texts and architectural propositions could occupy the same field without needing to resolve their differences.

This now appears remarkably close to what might be called correspondence without convergence.

The earlier work did not yet use this vocabulary. Nor should it be made to.

What it did was construct situations in which things could interfere with one another.

The fragment could remain a fragment.

The image could remain an image.

The text could remain unresolved.

The ruin could remain ruinous.

The interior could remain provisional.

The apparatus could remain awkward.

And yet something could happen between them.

This is where the question of the heuristic becomes important. You asked whether these miniature architectures might become relational: whether they might be encountered through a hands-on process of finding-out rather than through recognition alone. The question remains remarkably open. russellmoreton.com

It suggests that spatial practice is not primarily the production of an answer.

It is the production of conditions in which another encounter becomes possible.

The earlier interest in voids, cavities and spaces between things can be understood in this way. The void is not simply an absence. It is an interval in which relations can occur. The cavity is not merely an empty interior. It is a condition of potential occupation, sensing, memory and exchange.

This makes the Scriptorium's interior particularly significant.

It was conceived as a refuge, but not as a sealed refuge. Its sensory intensity depended upon proximity: the occupant, the material, the doorway, the surrounding architecture, the remembered ruin, the act of reading. The interior became meaningful through its relation to what was beyond it.

The interior was already permeable.

The same is true of the Theatre of Research. Its importance was not that it could contain research, but that it could stage relations between different kinds of research — theoretical, practical, visual, architectural, social and material.

Research became spatial when it began to alter the conditions of encounter.

This is perhaps where the older notion of the apparatus begins to move towards the present notion of the chamber.

An apparatus establishes conditions.

A chamber gathers those conditions.

A surface allows something of what has gathered to become perceptible.

The later ceramic body takes up this movement materially, but does not simply repeat it.

The hut becomes chamber.

The chamber becomes body.

The body becomes permeable.

The aperture becomes hole.

The collage becomes gathering.

The palimpsest becomes material memory.

The theatre becomes atmosphere.

The spatial proposition becomes in~play.

What changes is not the existence of the earlier spatial inquiry, but the material body through which it can now be encountered.

Clay enters this genealogy differently from architecture. It resists. It records pressure. It allows correction, interruption, collapse, incision and repetition. It becomes an especially responsive material through which spatial relations can be felt rather than only constructed.

Yet the ceramic should not be understood as the fulfilment of the earlier architectural work.

It is another chamber.

Another threshold.

Another way of asking what happens between things.

This is why the earlier work remains active.

Not because it predicted the ceramic.

Not because the Scriptorium was secretly already a ceramic work.

But because it established a recurring spatial question:

What happens when an arrangement becomes sufficiently open for bodies, materials, images, ideas and places to alter one another?

The question moves from architecture into clay.

It moves from the designed interior towards the material interior.

From spatial apparatus to spatial body.

From representation towards encounter.

From place towards site.

From enclosure towards permeability.

From object towards proposition.

And perhaps this is where the earlier humanities inquiry becomes newly available.

The humanities are not simply a body of texts to be gathered and interpreted. They become another collection of correspondent bodies: philosophy, architecture, literature, image, memory, ruin, material, place and lived experience entering a spatial field.

The work does not need to reconcile them.

It needs to keep them in correspondence.

The old Theatre of Research therefore begins to look less like a proposed institution and more like a proto-spatial apparatus for the practice that is now emerging: a place where different bodies of thought could meet, become troubled, and produce propositions that were not contained in any one of them.

The ceramic chamber continues this operation at another scale.

It gathers without containing.

It opens without becoming transparent.

It withdraws without disappearing.

It surfaces without exhausting what lies within.

Site ~ Interior ~ Apparatus ~ Chamber ~ Surface

The site remains capable of undoing place.

The interior remains capable of undoing enclosure.

The apparatus remains capable of disturbing perception.

The chamber remains capable of gathering.

And the surface remains capable of surfacing otherwise.

Perhaps the spatial practice has always been concerned with this threshold:

not where things are, but what becomes possible between them.

What was once called spatial relations can now be encountered as relations remaining in~play.

The earlier work does not need to be brought forward intact.

It can be re-entered.

And in that re-entry, something from the earlier spatial inquiry becomes available again — not as an origin, but as another body with which the present practice can correspond.

Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).

Drawing a relationality through others in site.

VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM

THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :

The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.

THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.

CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES

THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL

PAINTING, Robert Mangold.

TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY

BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO

ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS

GESALT, 

GRISAILLE, 

LEITMOTIF, 

MATRIX,

FORMAL PATTERN,

SURFACE

John Wood, The Virtual Embodied, (London: Routledge, 1998)

The Virtual Embodied, “ explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge and space to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence,” these parameters are being investigated and researched in my creative practice.

Embodied knowledge and virtual space.

Physical, Psychological and Virtual Realities, Max Velmans.

List of “typical beliefs about physical, psychological and virtual realities”. PHYSICAL REALITY

Extended in space-in the world

Exists independently of the observer

Has tangible properties, e.g. Mass and solidity

Descartes s proposed our classical view of the mind/body split into res extensa ( material that extends in space) and res cogitans (thinking material). We commonly associate the physical world as having both extension and location in space.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY 

Non-extended in space-in the mind 

Existence depends on the observer

Is relatively intangible and insubstantial

Psychological realities do not have spatial dimensions, and their location is only metaphorically “ in the mind”. It is crucial to note that psychological realities are only real for a given observer. Velmans notes” these intuitions are confirmed by the fact that physical realities have tangible, substantial properties such as mass, solidity and weight. Whilst psychological properties are, by comparison, intangible and insubstantial”.

VIRTUAL REALITY

Appears to have extension in space, but has no actual extension Appears to be in the world, but is actually in the mind

Existence depends on the interaction of the observer with VR equipment

Can appear to have tangible properties ( with suitable equipment) but does not have such properties.

Virtual realities via appropriate headsets which give “feedback” from bodily movements and visual displays, conspire to give the appearance of a virtual world extended into our physical space, but they have no actual 3D physical extension. Interestingly such worlds are physical in the fact that they rely on the physical existence and placement of equipment, virtual realities seek to create apparent changes in “self location” which do not correspond with actual changes in location. New developments can now give a physical realm into the virtual by the use of body interfaces that can restrict the movement of the body to correspond to the visual perception of a virtual identity.

Fragment from material resonances project, spatial practice research, CSA.

THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION

Perception is in the “condition” of an interruption. 

Rehearsal is the creative part of any performance.

Humanities : Spatial Relations

Interested in the speculative nature of work-sites that contain a narrative intervention via a device that registers and records the documentary and its rehearsal.

Work as revealed into a final sequence of superimposures on a surface created from the collective transparency of the text.

Thresholds that reveal the interspace between the Human and its condition/environment.

Photographic surface of events, a visual entropy resolved as a history of consolidated exactitudes/enactments.

The photographic surface shows that which no longer exists, it concretizes contingences on offer into an image of irreversibility.

Double Occupancy , Dwelling with the critique and its realization of an uncovering event, criticism collides with and into the work. Deleuze, Baroque house (65).

Presenting both a virtual walk through “text” ,using the transparency of “text” both as a literal transparency and its phenomenal “physicality” as applied to surface and structures within the site. Using the body of the visitor to enable

enactments/sensitivities to be derived from the site encounter. Enactments triggered by the singularity of an individuals engagement with walking amongst the working site. The final experience/superimpose remains uniquely a product of the visitor. This site driven explorative experience undertaken by both a passitivity and a curiosity on the part of “the guest” creates a self /space/time/ place relation, a localised intimacy that promotes an encapsulated sense of enchantment/wisdom.

The entirety of the “text” is stored latent in the interlocutor as they investigate the physicality of material relationships and spatial significations. In this respect the interlocutor defines his/her “traits” through a recognition and curiosity with their own body as it weaves a narrative of navigation through the experience of “site”. This theorizing by the body of its encounters, material and spatial, alone or within the proximities of others interests me as a “trace” of the encountering space through the human agent. This working notion and its site begin to posit the idea of an 

“interspace” between the human and its environment. This theoretical and abstracted site could be utilized to research interventions and their effects, to attempt to register the spatial relations/traits of contemporary society. How might this material and its spatial census (human/ site temporalities) be gathered, registered and finally presented.

10 days, Observational material from site, They sense this articulating moment, their consolation becomes recursively and inexplicably consolidated with others unfamiliar undistinguishable, they are rendered into the resultant homogeneity of a surface relation bonded by specifics of space and time.

10 Days, Observational/Reflection, Journal notes Their erasure by the transits of change and chance of others over-writing themselves to reveal the transparency of temporalities as registered by the photographic duration of capture.

What remains is an exactitude of “what occurred” in a form/manner unknowable to those present, by dwelling in this visual interface of the photographic surface, things become inexplicably and irreversibly compounded with a time stretched and stilled.

Photography has the unusual attributes to be able to act as a particle accelerator on the human subject, it can present material assessed from numerous durational encounters with time. It can render a seduction and conversely an invisibility.

Spatial Practice is in effect a laboratory (of the self and worlds) from which I define and register and relate material tested under those conditions. This makes me part of the process and part of the results, part also of the problem of the investigation.

Reflections on the use of “the Negative” expedient use of material creates this inherent property, interesting analogy with human process of vision, in as much as the after-image rendered by the eye is always in the negative. This final image of what was is in effect being erased by the negative/negated. The perspective of the negative reveals more informative relations about the spatial/displacement of the environment in which the “objectivity” is being both immersed and conversely displaced. Like the displacement of a solid form by a liquid of the same displacement, the negative reveals the object displacing/relating in spatial terms. The negative gives proof to our mutual dependency and our forgetting of air as both surface and support.

In Drawing and Mapping it is tensions between the negative and the positive objectivity of things that helps to define a limit, a definition of form that is both simultaneously relational and indexical. The “Trace” also maintains these properties but interestingly it contains a transparency, a dimensionality that makes it both reflective and confrontational, it remains registered to the present but unable to escape its signification of the past.

Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts. Giuliana Bruno.

Series of "essays" on the relations between Architecture and The Arts. Bruno notes the critical role in which architecture constitutes and supports a "public intimacy" initiated through both historical references and Contemporary Art. This spatiality of a public constructed space that grants the reception of an intimacy is seen by Bruno as being a "new moving space- a screen of vital cultural memory". She proposes a view that Architecture is mobilized as a screen/vessel in which to define a frame of memory. Architecture in this sense becomes not just "a matter of space but an art of time." Interestingly it is in the work of Rebecca Horn that she notes the combination of both the scientific and the artistic. This combination has a resonance with the architectural model and intended purpose of the anatomical theatre. Rebecca Hom and a growing number of contemporary practitioners are actively engaged in creating "works" which use architectonics and situation to create personal and profound experiences, intimacies evolved from public spaces. This new conceptualization of "body space" and its relationship to the production of space is ultimately being absorbed back into Architectural practice, the work of Nigel Coates "Guide to Ecstacity" and Rem Koolhaas use of materials and interventions that challenge our sensory and cultural aesthetics about architecture illustrate issues around the spatialisation of the body and its intimate consumption in the public realm of the senses.

To Live is to pass from one space to another. Georges Perec.

Bruno Taut, The New Dwelling, Women as Creator, (Leipzig : Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1924).

Taut asserts that it is a woman's way of inhabiting space that creates and modifies architecture, see also Mark Wigley, White walls, Designer dresses: The fashioning of Modern Architecture. (Cambridge: MIT press , 1995)

I would say that my fiction is set in the visionary present. J G Ballard.

Underlining the Hostility of the external world, The Autopsy Room/Theatre.

Victims surrender all that is left of their unique identities, what is left after the basic components are separated, nothing much to claim not even a faint presence of existence. We feel pity and the oblivion patiently waiting for us. J G Ballard on CSI

Frozen frames of a perverse geometry, flickering into a narrative of their own volition. The work is accompanied by a critical voyeurism that has the ability to reveal a prognosis.

Ballard, Every paragraph of this "fiction is frightening obscure and an obtuse puzzle. Surreal geometries, with a pervasive atmosphere of doom and imminent cataclysm that "exposes" the sordidly within us all.

Ballard, Obsessions- Dystopias/Sexuality/Technology and their discontinuities' Ballard, Abstractions-Science/Psychiatry/Mathematics.

Questions the "concrete delinearations of morality, ethics and sanity". 

Notion that Aesthetics/Landscapes can harbour relations, The Gaze, male/female. 

THE RESEARCH POSTER, a document outlining a field of inquiry, placing ones pitch into the public domain. 

Life is Data

Progress is Optional

Understanding is a product of good marketing.

Attempting to keep the moment from being realized. Robert Rauschenberg 

On Photography, Rauschenberg.

My photography is supported by a personal conflict between curiosity and shyness. Rauschenberg uses his camera as a social shied, he has "a need to be where it will always never be the same again." He comments that "photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts". His concern is to move at a speed within which to act in the "archaeology" of what light or its darkness touches.

The object itself is dictating your possibilities.

Validity, cannot exist without standards. How long are standards fresh? Every minute everything is different everywhere. Where is the basis for criticism. Criticism collides into the work ,it attempts to arrest it, it deliberately attempts to affect a stop.

Oren Lieberman, The "Plastic Wallet thing/Spatial Practice interview Canterbury" They promote attention, They are seductive in their surface, they "house" temporalities into a permanent/recognisable system or archive. They are deterministic in the sense of belonging to an instantly recognisable protective and presentational system of storing information. The indexical "holes" themselves promote the notion of a terminology on the material within them, sort of ironic when they contain thoughts and issues about methodologies. Perhaps these useful wallets have just become another material victim of contemporary homogeneities. Corrupt their inherent homogeneity by removal or adaptation of their indexical register (the punched holes) thereby making them unique or of a non­ purpose, or for a purpose not yet disclosed/realised.

Tim Ingold

MAKING 2013

Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Practical Geometry

The Architect and The Carpenter

The Cathedral and The Laboratory

Templates and Geometry

The Return to Alchemy

Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.

UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.

The marked agency and its absence of the artist leaves the site live and open. Oxford MOMA 2006 Jannis Kounallis left his coat hanging by a window adjacent and in the same room as his installation.

RUSSELL MORETON. MA SPATIAL PRACTICES.

Artist Statement used to accompany promotional powerpoint display at UCA Canterbury, 2009.

Spatial Practice provides an interesting set of methodologies in which to explore our own “relationality”1. This is particularly relevant in respect to my understanding and subsequent proposal for the role of the interlocutor within my work. Becoming increasingly interested in the concept of “ open text ”2 to explore the nature of space and its relational properties that create place, or rather a self placed. At present using Photography (large pinhole chambers) embedded in working environments to further explore properties of latency, transparency and the peripheral dwelling of spatial material.

The Practice.

Currently exploring the dynamics and dwellings of spatial relations. The use of a large oil drum as a “pin hole camera” creates a tool that records/witnesses a specific duration (dwelling) in place. This duration of approximately 45 minutes renders visual data that underpins our temporality as we constantly re-form spatial relations with each other and that of the architectural environment. The internal architectonics of the chamber gives a sense of both the proximity of peripheral space and the distance/dislocation of a filmic surface concretized by time. These imaged surfaces render a sense of place, an aura and a psychosis/pathology around images and their representation.

1 Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality ( London: Sage Publishing, 2005) 

2 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between ( London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)

METHODOLOGIES/PROJECT PROPOSAL

TIME 

RELATIONALITY 

CONTINGENT 

SURFACE 

CONSOLATIONS 

The Trace becoming a material witness to an event/situation

Use of “information” gathered from site being re-invested with another sense of time and ambient light.

Transparent/Translucent materials “surfaced” by contemporary digital technologies, corporate media presentational light boxes, large format 24 square metres.

Use of “interventions” liquids between visual and haptic membranes, utilization of direct drawing within and amongst the “media technologies”.

Direct more of “working practice” into larger scale painting investigations with drawing and photography as inclusions. Suggest notion of temporary space situated in fine art.

Explore relationships of “objects” as the custodian of place. Analysis of the Reception and relations generated by this “first objectivity”.

Relation of “what was ”to what is left being a “spatial involvement” placed back into the continuum of ongoing spatial relations.

Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).

Drawing a relationality through others in site.

Drawn inscriptions that leave traces for others to respond

Documents of a theoretical investigation over the surface from both beneath (the place) and from above (the event). 

A performative membrane/drawing/diagram/script that gains its authenticity/performativity from being there and allowing what might occur to be witnessed.

Drawing as a “open text” that allows a perspectival immersion/situatedness, because it is still active, un-resolved needing to be taken further under the authorship of viewer.

These fragments of precise interventions/enactments  engender a dynamic of relational possibilities.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience