Operative Bodies~Atmospheres : The Artfulness of the More-than-Human~Inhuman

Material agency ~ Aesthetic authority ~ Emergence

Moreton's spatial practice takes place through the making and encountering of troubling messengers: materially persistent bodies that carry relations forward, disturb what is known and open the practice to what it cannot yet know.

What becomes perceptible when the artist is no longer the exclusive source of artfulness?

This question examines the conditions through which artfulness emerges in correspondence between human making, material capacities, atmospheric forces and more-than-human relations. It does not require the rejection of aesthetics; it questions the authority of predetermined aesthetic values to decide what a ceramic body must become. Can we further develop this proposition as part of our ongoing correspondence. Mannings artfulness, Ingolds wayfaring, Barads diffractive troubling bodies, all are played into force~forms thinkings into propositions of feeling~futurity

I think this movement becomes especially important now that the withdrawn ceramics are developing as micro-architectural apparatuses. The question of artfulness is no longer only about who makes an aesthetic decision, or whether the finished work satisfies an established aesthetic. It concerns how artfulness emerges through the material and spatial relations of making, including those that exceed the maker's intentions and continue to trouble them afterwards.

Manning, Ingold and Barad can enter here as correspondent bodies of thought, each bringing a different force to the proposition. I would resist making their ideas converge into a single theoretical explanation. Their differences are productive: they allow artfulness to be thought through movement, correspondence and the diffractive disturbance of established relations. In your practice, these are not simply theories applied to clay. They enter the making as ways of thinking~feeling that can themselves be altered through contact with material bodies.

The Artfulness of the More-than-Human~Inhuman

Material Agency ~ Aesthetic Authority ~ Emergence

What becomes perceptible when the artist is no longer the exclusive source of artfulness?

The question of artfulness becomes troublesome when making can no longer be understood as the execution of an intention upon passive matter. In Moreton's spatial practice, clay is not simply the material through which an aesthetic decision acquires form. Its plasticity, resistance, weight, moisture, susceptibility to incision, changing porosity and transformation through firing participate in the conditions through which a work becomes possible. These capacities do not replace the maker. They complicate the relations through which making takes place, and unsettle the assumption that artfulness originates exclusively in human intention.

Artfulness consequently becomes a question of emergence. It takes place through encounters between bodily attentiveness, material resistance, spatial propositions, atmospheric conditions and the accumulated force of other bodies of thought. The work is neither the expression of an autonomous artistic subject nor the unmediated agency of matter. It emerges through a situated ecology of relations in which no single participant can determine the outcome entirely.

Manning's thinking offers a way to approach artfulness through movement, affect and the body's capacity to become otherwise. Her work troubles the assumption that movement is simply the execution of a form already conceived. Movement participates in the formation of what a body can do, feel and become. Brought into correspondence with Moreton's making, this offers a way to think about the ceramic not as a fixed form into which feeling has been deposited, but as a material event through which capacities for feeling and movement are composed.

The slab is already participating in this composition before it becomes a withdrawn ceramic body. Its folding into volume, its incisions and punctuations, its changing relationship with gravity and its responses to material handling establish conditions that cannot be reduced to a prior image of the finished work. Making becomes a process of attending to what the material permits, resists or brings unexpectedly into play. The emerging form is not simply selected from a field of possibilities; that field is itself altered through the encounter.

Ingold's wayfaring brings another movement into this correspondence. Making becomes a journey through materials, situations and relations rather than a linear passage towards a predetermined destination. Attentiveness develops through movement: the maker follows, adjusts, pauses and responds. Materials are encountered not as inert resources but through their ongoing formation and transformation. The studio becomes a situated field of wayfaring, where clay, tools, surfaces, architectural propositions and readings enter into relations that redirect what can happen next.

Wayfaring does not imply that the maker relinquishes judgement or that every material occurrence becomes artful. Rather, it unsettles the idea that judgement operates from outside the process, applying aesthetic values to a completed object. Judgement becomes responsive and situated. It develops through the particular encounter, remaining answerable to the material conditions and spatial consequences of making. Artfulness is not secured in advance; it emerges through the ongoing negotiation of what a body can become.

Barad's diffractive thinking brings a further disturbance. If bodies and phenomena emerge through relations rather than existing first as wholly independent entities, then making cannot be understood simply as an interaction between a finished subject and an external object. The boundaries through which maker, material, apparatus and environment become distinguishable are themselves implicated in the encounter. Diffraction offers a way to attend to how differences are produced, carried forward and altered through their relations.

For Moreton, this becomes a troubling of the boundaries between human and material, interior and exterior, intention and emergence. The clay body is neither wholly determined by the maker nor independent of the conditions through which it is made. The maker, in turn, does not remain untouched by the encounter. Material resistance can redirect an action; an unexpected surface can alter a spatial proposition; the fired ceramic can return to the maker as a body whose capacities were not fully anticipated.

These correspondent readings do not form a theoretical synthesis. Manning's movement and affect, Ingold's wayfaring and correspondence, and Barad's diffraction retain distinct emphases. Their force lies in how they enter the practice together without becoming interchangeable. Each troubles a different assumption about where making begins, how its relations unfold and what may emerge from them. Their correspondence becomes productive precisely because it does not settle into agreement.

The more-than-human~inhuman names the field in which this troubling becomes consequential. It does not designate an alternative aesthetic subject waiting to replace the artist. Nor does it imply that clay possesses human intentions or feelings. It opens attention to forms of material efficacy, transformation and spatial consequence that cannot be accounted for exclusively through human authorship. The ceramic participates in making without needing to become a human-like agent. Its capacities matter through the particular relations in which they become active.

This is especially apparent in the withdrawn ceramics. Firing changes the clay irreversibly, but the resulting body does not close the relations through which it has emerged. Its refractory character, weathered surfaces, hollows, apertures and under-chambered passages establish a material persistence that exceeds the immediate situation of making. The work enters new relations with light, architecture, atmosphere and the bodies that encounter it. What was provisionally explored through clay becomes available as another spatial proposition, one whose future cannot be fully known from the circumstances of its fabrication.

The question of aesthetics changes accordingly. It is not a matter of abandoning aesthetic judgement, nor of declaring every material outcome equally artful. It is a question of how aesthetic authority might become less prescriptive and more responsive to the relations through which a work emerges. The ceramic need not conform to a predetermined image of refinement, resolution or formal coherence to acquire force. Its artfulness may become perceptible through awkwardness, resistance, material excess, uncertain interiority or the unsettling proximity of bodies that do not readily belong together.

Hospitality and alienation are implicated here. A ceramic body may invite attention while withholding familiarity; it may offer an interior without making that interior entirely accessible. Its apertures can suggest passage while its material thickness maintains resistance. The work hosts relations without guaranteeing intimacy or agreement. Artfulness emerges within this tension, through a situated encounter in which the familiar becomes strange and the unfamiliar acquires a provisional capacity to matter.

This is where feeling~futurity enters the proposition. Feeling is not a meaning awaiting theoretical explanation, and futurity is not a projected outcome that the work must fulfil. Rather, feeling marks the force of an encounter whose consequences remain uncertain. The ceramic may trouble the maker precisely because it persists beyond what the maker can presently articulate. Its material presence becomes an opening through which further relations might take hold.

The artist is not removed from this process. Moreton remains implicated in the work's conditions, decisions and consequences. What changes is the assumption that he must remain the exclusive source of its artfulness or the final authority over what it can mean. His practice becomes an attentiveness to the forces through which making acquires capacities beyond its initial intentions, including capacities that return to trouble his own understanding.

The artfulness of the more-than-human~inhuman is therefore not a new aesthetic category to be applied to the ceramic. It is a proposition about how artfulness comes into being through material and spatial correspondence. It asks how making might remain responsive to what it cannot fully anticipate, how aesthetic judgement might be altered through encounter, and how a withdrawn ceramic body might continue to produce relations beyond the maker's present knowing.

The ceramic does not become artful because the maker has resolved what it should be. Its artfulness emerges through the relations that making brings into play, including those that continue to unsettle the maker.

The withdrawn ceramic persists. Its artfulness remains~in~play.

The practice is not simply the making of ceramic bodies, followed by their interpretation. It is constituted through making and the encounters that making sets in motion, including those encounters that return to trouble the maker.

The word messengers becomes especially useful because it does not imply that the work carries a fixed message from maker to receiver. The ceramic carries the material consequences of its making into situations that could not have been fully anticipated. Its surfaces, apertures, cavities and refractory persistence establish conditions for encounters, but they do not determine what those encounters will produce.

And the message does not travel in only one direction. The maker encounters clay; clay alters the conditions of making; the withdrawn ceramic encounters the maker again; readings and other bodies of thought enter the work; subsequent encounters may change how earlier works are understood. The practice develops through this circulation, without arriving at a final interpretation.

I would formulate your thought in three registers.

Troubling Messengers ~ Making, Encountering, Becoming

Moreton's particular spatial practice is constituted through making and its encounters. The works emerge through material processes, but their consequences extend beyond the immediate circumstances of their production. As troubling messengers, the withdrawn ceramics carry material and spatial propositions into further situations, where they may be encountered, interpreted, resisted or felt otherwise.

Making and encountering are not separate phases. Encounter is already active within making, through the body's attentiveness to clay, its resistances and capacities, and the spatial possibilities that emerge through material engagement. The resulting ceramic carries these encounters forward, not as preserved meanings but as materially persistent conditions for further correspondence.

The messenger therefore troubles the distinction between making and reception, intention and consequence, the known and the not-yet-known. Its passage does not guarantee understanding. It may instead unsettle established readings, introduce unfamiliar relations or return the maker to the work through a changed sense of what it might become.

Moreton's spatial practice develops through this continuing movement between making, material persistence and encounter. Its propositions remain situated in the particular bodies through which they emerge, while their consequences remain open to relations that have yet to take place.

The work is made, but its making does not end there. The ceramic persists as a troubling messenger through which the practice continues to encounter and alter itself.

The important distinction

I would not describe the ceramics simply as messengers of Moreton's ideas. That would risk returning the work to the position of a vehicle for meanings already formed by the maker.

Instead, they are troubling messengers through which making continues to happen.

This gives the title Troubling Messengers a double movement:

• Outward: the ceramic carries material relations into encounters beyond the studio.

• Back towards the maker: those encounters can unsettle the assumptions, readings and intentions through which the work first became possible.

The second movement is crucial. The maker is not simply the origin of a message that others interpret. He remains implicated in what the work becomes capable of doing.

And this gives the six movements a shared operative condition. Material ecology, withdrawal, awkwardness, more-than-human artfulness and becoming~with are not independent themes attached to a body of work. They are different ways of examining what happens when making produces bodies that continue to act upon the conditions of their own making.

Troubling Messengers : Artfulness (Manning) becomes relational not some vague aesthetic notion.

 

What this movement adds to Troubling Messengers.

Artfulness becomes relational without becoming vague.

The work's capacities remain grounded in its actual material and spatial conditions: the slab construction, refractory body, surface, aperture, cavity, passage and firing. The more-than-human is not a poetic escape from material specificity. It becomes perceptible through that specificity.

Theory becomes a troubling body within practice.

Manning, Ingold and Barad do not simply explain the work retrospectively. Their propositions enter Moreton's thinking and making, where they encounter clay, spatial situations and other readings. The work can then return these propositions differently. Theoretical correspondence becomes reciprocal without suggesting that the ceramics illustrate any one theorist.

Artfulness becomes inseparable from an uncertain futurity.

The maker establishes conditions, makes decisions and remains responsible for the work, but cannot determine every relation through which it will subsequently matter. The fired ceramic persists as a body that may become consequential in ways not yet available to thought.

I would hold onto this final distinction: the more-than-human~inhuman is not what the artist adds to the work; it is part of what becomes perceptible when the artist's authority is no longer assumed to explain everything the work can do.

And this returns us to your immediate experience of unpacking the kiln: the simultaneous feeling of knowing and undoing knowing. The work has become materially present, but its presence does not resolve the inquiry. It makes the inquiry encounterable again, now through a body that has changed and that may, in turn, change the one who encounters it.

Spatial Capture Apparatuses :The deep ecology of making begins to surface as interiority.

Sensate Atmospheres  : Enclosures~Stacked Volumes~Capacities.

Photography operates within Moreton’s spatial practice as a troubling apparatus of capture. Its framing, representational scale and selective visibility govern how architectural and sensate propositions become available, while limiting what can be experienced beyond the image. Yet the deep ecology of making continues to surface as ceramic interiority: hollows, apertures, under~chambered passages and permeable relations. The withdrawn ceramic persists beyond its photographic representation, retaining a capacity for further encounters. This persistence is a felt~~forwardness, a movement towards an unknowable futurity. Even within the restraint of the image, making continues to open spatial propositions that photography cannot fully contain.

Spatial Capture Apparatuses.

The deep ecology of making begins to surface as interiority. Blog post, For Moreton photography has a limited sensate capture on architectural sensing~sensate propositions. The representational scale of the photographic apparatus governs, and like a micro-politics controls troubling tendencies. The withdrawn ceramic propositions with this, but still persists toward an unknowable futurity, that is a felt~forwardness, a movement for Moreton  even in the restraint of the image.

The photograph holds the ceramic within a representational present; the ceramic persists towards a future that the photograph cannot contain.

More newer work, the interior space is becoming a new spatial proposition, components stacked, even floors with under~chambered passages, conduits all permeable from the various borings that ecologically link the surface to its hollow. 

What feels significant in these newer works is that the interior is no longer simply a cavity within a ceramic body; it is becoming an architecture of relations that extends through and between bodies.

The stacked components suggest one possibility: an architecture assembled through provisional acts of support, separation and gathering. The cylindrical supports hold the horizontal bodies apart, producing intervals that are neither wholly enclosed nor entirely open. In the lower arrangement, the components spread horizontally, while their apertures establish a series of passages through which the eye can travel. The interior becomes something navigable, even where physical entry remains impossible.

Your description of under~chambered passages is particularly productive. It suggests that the ceramic's spatial proposition does not end at its visible surfaces. The borings, hollow sections and connecting openings establish relations between exterior and interior, surface and depth, one chamber and another. These are not simply perforations added to a finished form. They participate in making the body spatially permeable.

I would develop this as a further movement within Withdrawal Without Closure, while allowing it to establish a more specific architectural proposition.

Withdrawal Without Closure

Persistence ~ Interiority ~ Futurity

What does it mean for a body to persist without having finished becoming?

The newer ceramic works bring the interior into a more explicit architectural proposition. Fabricated slab components are assembled, stacked, separated and brought into proximity, producing hollow volumes, under-chambered passages and apertures that begin to organise relations across the ceramic body. The works suggest fragments of an architecture, but their proposition exceeds the representation of buildings or the fabrication of miniature structures. They are situated material relations through which architecture becomes available for further thought, feeling and encounter.

The hollow is no longer simply an interior enclosed by a surrounding skin. It participates in a more extensive field of spatial correspondence. Borings pierce the ceramic surfaces; apertures open into cavities; passages establish possible continuities between otherwise distinct interiors. The surface and the hollow become ecologically implicated in one another. What appears on the exterior cannot be separated entirely from the interior conditions through which the body has been fabricated, nor from the openings through which those conditions become perceptible.

The aperture is not simply an opening in the surface. It is a material event through which the surface becomes capable of corresponding with its hollow.

This correspondence is not necessarily a continuous flow between inside and outside. The apertures may interrupt as much as connect; the cavities may invite an imagined passage while withholding access; the ceramic may offer a view into its interior without making that interior fully available. Permeability therefore remains a situated condition rather than an uncomplicated openness. It is produced through the particular relations of thickness, resistance, enclosure and exposure that constitute each body.

The under-chambered passages introduce another spatial register. Interiorities begin to extend laterally, beneath surfaces and between components. The stacked work establishes intervals through which the eye can move, while the horizontally arranged bodies suggest a more dispersed organisation of chambers and conduits. These relations evoke architectural floors, supports, recesses and passageways without resolving into a predetermined building type. Their architectural character emerges through the material organisation of spatial possibilities.

The work can consequently be approached as a micro-architectural apparatus~spatial practice. Micro-architectural does not simply refer to scale. It identifies the way these ceramic bodies gather, separate and distribute spatial relations within a materially particular situation. Each component participates in an arrangement that can be altered through its relation to other components, while each retains its own surfaces, cavities, apertures and material histories. The assembly does not abolish these differences. It allows them to become consequential through proximity.

This is where the deep ecology of making begins to surface as interiority. The fabricated slab works have already operated as speculative feeling~fields, gathering the pressures, marks, material resistances and discursive encounters through which their volumes emerged. Their surfaces register more than a final exterior treatment; they carry the consequences of processes through which the work has taken shape. Yet these consequences are not delivered into the fired ceramic as a completed body of knowledge. Firing changes their material condition, allowing the work to persist while its significance remains unsettled.

Withdrawal, in this sense, does not describe a retreat into an inaccessible interior. It names a material transformation through which the provisional body of clay becomes a persistent ceramic body, available for encounters beyond the immediacy of its making. What withdraws is not simply the original material or the maker's intention. The ceramic also withdraws from the expectation that its meaning should be secured by the circumstances of its production. Its material relations persist, but their future implications cannot be fully anticipated.

The interiorities that emerge through these works are therefore not hidden meanings waiting to be recovered. They are possibilities produced through the correspondence between material construction, spatial arrangement and subsequent encounter. A hollow may be encountered as a chamber, a passage, a recess, a conduit or an unfamiliar interior condition. These interpretations are neither arbitrary nor exhaustive: they arise through the particular spatial and material capacities of the work, but remain open to other bodies and situations.

The ceramic becomes a situatedness of relations across the discursive, material and architectural fields that have informed its making. Earlier readings, images, spatial propositions and material encounters do not simply survive as references contained within the finished body. They have participated in the conditions through which the body has become possible. In its withdrawn state, the ceramic makes these relations available for further correspondence without requiring them to return in their original form.

Here, futurity becomes inseparable from interiority. The work's cavities and passages do not guarantee what may happen next, but they establish conditions through which further spatial propositions can emerge. The ceramic persists as a body whose capacities exceed the circumstances of its fabrication. It can be encountered, rearranged in relation to other bodies, situated within new architectures and read through experiences not yet known to the maker.

The proposition is not that the ceramic contains an infinity of possible meanings. It is that its material specificity allows encounters to continue without being exhausted by any single interpretation. Its apertures, surfaces and hollows remain particular, resistant and situated; their capacity for further correspondence arises through these conditions rather than through an abstract claim to openness.

Withdrawal Without Closure therefore names a condition in which material persistence and spatial becoming remain active together. The ceramic body has changed irreversibly, yet its interiorities are not finished. Its cavities persist; its passages remain available to the eye, the imagination and the spatial arrangements through which it may be encountered. The deep ecology of making surfaces as another body of spatial thought, not a completed argument but a proposition whose consequences remain to be experienced.

The ceramic persists as an architecture of relations. Its interior is fabricated, but its interiorities remain in formation. Its passages are materially present, but what may pass through them is not decided in advance.

The withdrawn ceramic does not simply preserve the conditions of its making. It gives those conditions another body through which they can continue to become spatial.

The shift I would preserve

These works suggest a movement through three related conditions:

Hollow: an interior fabricated within the ceramic body.

Passage: a relation established between cavities, apertures and surfaces.

Interiorities: the further spatial and affective propositions that become possible through the encounter with the work.

These are not stages of development. They coexist, and each can alter how the others are encountered.

The word ecologically is important in your description of the borings. The openings do not merely connect two pre-existing spaces; they establish a material correspondence between the ceramic's outer surface and its hollow interior. The surface becomes perceptible in relation to depth, and depth becomes perceptible through the surface. The body is neither a sealed container nor an entirely open structure. Its permeability is made through the specific arrangement of its material conditions.

I would also retain under~chambered as part of your working vocabulary. It allows you to speak of passages and interiorities that are not immediately visible, and of an architecture that unfolds through looking, positioning and imagined movement. It is more suggestive than simply calling the works hollow or perforated.

The emerging proposition might be stated quite simply:

The withdrawn ceramic becomes a spatial apparatus through which the interior is no longer only fabricated, but continues to form through relations between surfaces, hollows, passages and other bodies.

Spatial Capture Apparatuses

The Deep Ecology of Making Begins to Surface as Interiority

Photography ~ Architecture ~ Material Capture ~ Felt~~Forwardness

1. The representational limits of photography.

Photography occupies an increasingly significant, but troubling, position within Russell Moreton's spatial practice. It offers a means of attending to architectural situations, material bodies and the sensate propositions through which spatial relations emerge. Yet its capacity to register these encounters is necessarily limited. The photographic apparatus makes a particular spatial situation available through framing, perspective, exposure, focus, representational scale and the temporal conditions of the image. What it captures is never the entirety of what is encountered.

For Moreton, architectural sensing cannot be reduced to what the camera can register. The sensate propositions of a site exceed their photographic representation. They involve bodily orientation, atmosphere, proximity, material resistance, duration, memory and the changing capacities of bodies to affect and be affected. Photography can register traces of these relations, but it cannot contain their full spatial or affective intensity.

The photograph therefore operates as a limited sensate capture of architectural sensing. It makes something perceptible while simultaneously establishing the conditions and boundaries of that perception.

This limitation is not simply a technical deficiency. It is also a question of power.

2. The micro-politics of the photographic apparatus.

The representational scale of photography governs. The frame establishes what can enter the image, what remains outside it and how the relations between bodies become organised. Perspective produces a particular spatial hierarchy; the camera's position establishes a viewing authority; the dimensions of the resulting image determine how a body or architectural situation can be encountered.

These operations have a micro-political dimension. They do not necessarily announce themselves as exercises of power, but they organise the conditions through which spatial propositions become visible and recognisable.

Photography can therefore capture troubling tendencies within the very encounters it seeks to make available. The camera may gather heterogeneous bodies into an image while reducing their differences to a single representational field. It may make an architectural interior legible while suppressing its atmospheric, temporal and embodied conditions. It may record a ceramic body while rendering its interiority subordinate to the visible exterior.

The photographic apparatus does not simply show spatial practice. It participates in governing how spatial practice can appear.

For Moreton, this is not an isolated difficulty. Similar apparatuses of capture are encountered throughout the wider practice, including the institutional, disciplinary and conceptual arrangements through which making and research become legible. Photography makes these conditions particularly perceptible because its representational operations are so closely bound to acts of selection, framing and exclusion.

The question is not how to escape the photographic frame, but how to remain attentive to what the frame does, what it makes possible and what it prevents from becoming perceptible.

3. The deep ecology of making.

The newer ceramic works introduce another condition of spatial inquiry. Their interiors are becoming increasingly architectural: components are stacked, separated and brought into proximity; hollow volumes develop under~chambered passages, conduits and apertures. Borings establish material relations between exterior surfaces and internal hollows, linking different spatial conditions through the particular construction of the ceramic body.

The interior is no longer simply a cavity contained within an object. It becomes an architecture of relations extending through and between bodies.

Here, the deep ecology of making begins to surface as interiority.

The ceramic surfaces carry the consequences of earlier material encounters: pressure, hesitation, incision, accumulation, resistance, layering and correction. These processes do not simply produce an exterior appearance. They participate in the formation of volumes, hollows, apertures and passages. The surface and interior become ecologically implicated in one another.

The aperture is not simply an opening through a finished surface. It is a material event through which the surface becomes capable of corresponding with its hollow. The passage establishes a relation between what can be seen and what remains withdrawn; between the exterior body and the interior conditions through which that body has emerged.

The ceramic becomes a spatial apparatus~body, not because it represents architecture at a reduced scale, but because it actively organises spatial relations through its material construction.

Its interiority is fabricated, but its interiorities remain in formation.

4. The photograph and the withdrawn ceramic

The relationship between photography and the withdrawn ceramic is therefore not one of straightforward documentation. The photograph makes the ceramic available within a representational field, but the ceramic continues to exceed the conditions of its photographic appearance.

A photograph may register an aperture, but it cannot reproduce the bodily experience of moving around the ceramic, negotiating its scale, encountering its surface or imagining the passages that extend into its interior. It can show a hollow without making that hollow available as an inhabited space. It can register the surface without carrying the full sensate history of its making.

The ceramic persists beyond the image.

This persistence is not an assertion that the work possesses an inaccessible essence. Its material capacities remain particular and situated. Its dimensions, weight, apertures, surface conditions and firing history matter. But these conditions also allow the work to enter relations that the photograph cannot fully determine.

The withdrawn ceramic troubles the photographic apparatus by retaining a spatial and material futurity beyond its representation.

It is important that this does not become a simple opposition between a restrictive photograph and an emancipated ceramic. The ceramic has its own conditions of capture, its own resistances and its own limits of availability. It too can be framed, classified, displayed, interpreted and institutionally organised.

Nevertheless, its material persistence allows it to continue beyond any one representational encounter.

5. Felt~~forwardness: the futurity of the withdrawn.

I am interested in describing this persistence as a felt~~forwardness.

Felt~~forwardness is not a projected future or a predetermined destination. It names a sensate movement towards what remains unknown: a continuing inclination, pressure or capacity through which a body remains available for further relations.

The ceramic may be photographically restrained, reduced to a particular scale, held within a frame or encountered through a limited viewpoint. Yet its spatial propositions are not exhausted by this restraint. Its hollows, passages, surfaces and under~chambered interiorities continue to suggest relations that cannot be completely secured by the image.

The photograph holds the ceramic within a particular representational present. The ceramic persists towards something that this present cannot fully anticipate.

This forwardness is felt rather than illustrated. It emerges through the material capacities of the work and through the encounters that remain possible beyond its immediate appearance.

Firing is important here. The ceramic has withdrawn from the plastic condition of clay; its material transformation has established another duration. Yet this withdrawal does not close its capacity for becoming. Its material condition persists, while its spatial and affective relations remain open to further encounters.

Felt~~forwardness therefore names the futurity of a body that has acquired material persistence without having finished becoming.

6. Spatial capture and the apparatuses of making.

The photographic apparatus is one among several arrangements through which Moreton's spatial practice encounters capture. Institutional structures, disciplinary classifications, research frameworks and systems of representation also organise the conditions under which creative activity becomes visible and recognised.

Drawing on Brian Massumi's thinking about apparatuses of capture, I am interested in how these arrangements capture and redirect tendencies that emerge through activity. Capture does not simply arrive from outside. It operates through the conditions that enable activity, organising its possibilities and feeding its energies into established rationalities.

Photography makes this problem particularly tangible. Its representational apparatus gathers an encounter into an image, but also governs the scale, boundaries and relations through which that encounter becomes available. The image can become a means of circulation and recognition while simultaneously limiting what can travel through it.

The withdrawn ceramic propositions trouble this arrangement, although they do not escape it. They persist within and beyond their photographic capture, retaining capacities for further correspondence. Their surfaces and interiorities remain materially particular, while their significance can continue to change through subsequent encounters.

This is not an escape from representation, but a persistence through its limitations.

Moreton's spatial practice consequently develops within a field of tension between capture and futurity, visibility and withdrawal, representation and sensate experience. The work must enter these arrangements to become available, but its possibilities are not entirely determined by the conditions through which it is made visible.

7. The photograph as a landing site, the ceramic as a continuing proposition.

The photograph remains important precisely because its limitations can become productive. It is a landing site for other bodies of thought, a surface upon which architectural, material and conceptual relations can gather. It stages inquiries, but does not necessarily settle them.

Other researchers and viewers bring their own bodies of knowledge, memories and sensate capacities to the image. Their encounters may produce relations that were not anticipated by the photographer. The photograph can therefore become an active spatial~apparatus~body, even while its representational structure continues to govern what appears.

The ceramic, meanwhile, offers another kind of persistence. Its material interiorities, apertures and passages are not simply visible propositions awaiting photographic translation. They remain active conditions of spatial encounter, capable of troubling the image and the assumptions through which it is read.

Photography and ceramics thus enter into correspondence without becoming equivalent. Each carries different capacities, limitations and forms of resistance. Their differences are not obstacles to be overcome but conditions through which the practice continues to think and make.

The photograph captures, but cannot contain. The ceramic withdraws, but does not close. Between them, a further spatial proposition begins to emerge.

Conclusion: what persists beyond capture?

The deep ecology of making begins to surface as interiority. What was once approached primarily through the external appearance of the ceramic body is increasingly becoming an architecture of hollows, passages, conduits and under~chambered relations. The material histories of making acquire another spatial condition, one that persists beyond the immediacy of fabrication and beyond the representational limits of photography.

For Moreton, photography remains both necessary and troubling. It makes spatial encounters available, but its framing and representational scale govern the conditions of their appearance. Its micro-politics can restrain, order and capture the very tendencies that the practice seeks to keep open.

The withdrawn ceramic propositions do not resolve this difficulty. They persist within it, carrying a felt~~forwardness towards relations that cannot yet be known. Even in the restraint of the image, something continues to move.

The photograph may hold the body within a frame, but the body's spatial futurity is not held there.

The image captures a situation; the ceramic persists as a proposition. What remains is a felt~~forwardness: the movement of making towards what cannot yet be seen, but may still become possible.

Photography, Site and Indexical Bodies of Inquiry : The Sensate Inquiry of Matter(s) in Correspondence.

The Sensate Inquiry of Matter(s) in Correspondence

Russell Moreton’s Spatial Practice and the Ethical Apparatus of the Leper Graves.

Negative Capability part I is an exhibition of visual and written responses to the University of Winchester’s Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project (MHARP), one of the most extensive excavations to date of a medieval leper hospital, almshouse and cemetery complex. The artists observed the excavation team at work, witnessing their process then displaying the results in the gallery and inviting writers to respond.

Photography, Site and Indexical Bodies of Inquiry/Painting/Photography: Leper Grave — Excavation, Trace and the Ethics of Correspondence.

1. The site is never empty.

In Russell Moreton's spatial practice, a site is not an empty landscape awaiting representation. It is an already constituted field of historical, atmospheric, material and bodily relations. To enter a site is to encounter the traces of other bodies, activities and temporalities that have participated in its formation.

Painting/Photography: Leper Grave (2017), developed through Negative Capability Part I in dialogue with the University of Winchester's Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project, brought this understanding of site into a particularly difficult encounter. The archaeological excavation of a medieval leper hospital, almshouse and cemetery complex introduced the material presence of historical exclusion, bodily remains and the limits of contemporary knowledge.

The site could no longer be approached simply as a landscape to be observed or formally mapped. It was already an active apparatus of excavation, historical interpretation and material disclosure. Its ground carried traces of lives that could not be restored through the act of looking.

The photographic inquiry therefore began within a situation that was already charged with histories, procedures and unequal conditions of visibility.

2. Photography as an indexical body.

Photography occupies a particular position within this encounter. The camera establishes an indexical relation to the site through the registration of light and the material conditions of exposure. It carries a trace of what was encountered, but this trace cannot be equated with the entirety of the body or event to which it refers.

The photograph becomes another body of the site: a material and spatial proposition through which an encounter can persist and be encountered again.

Yet the indexical authority of photography is troubling. The camera can appear to offer an evidential transparency, as though what has been photographed might become fully available through the image. In the context of archaeological remains, this expectation becomes ethically consequential. The photograph may make the absent body visible while simultaneously placing it within another system of identification, classification and possession.

What does it mean to photograph a trace without claiming to recover the life that left it?

3. Painterly intervention, liquid light and the resistance of opacity.

In Painting/Photography: Leper Grave, painterly and graphic interventions interrupt the apparent transparency of photographic registration. Granular fields, fragmented marks, translucent layers and unstable bodily silhouettes introduce uncertainty into the image.

These interventions do not simply decorate or reinterpret the photograph. They alter its conditions of visibility. The image becomes a spatial threshold between what can be registered and what cannot be fully known.

The painterly body troubles the photographic body's claim to evidential completeness. It introduces opacity as a material and ethical condition, resisting the expectation that the absent body should become entirely identifiable through contemporary acts of representation.

Negative capability becomes significant here as a willingness to remain within uncertainty without prematurely resolving it. The work does not need to complete the image of the absent body in order to remain attentive to its trace.

4. The apparatuses of excavation, photography and display.

The project brings several apparatuses into correspondence. Archaeological excavation produces conditions through which historical remains become available for study. Photography registers aspects of the encounter through its own technical and visual procedures. Painterly intervention alters the image, while the gallery establishes another situation of display and reception.

None of these arrangements is neutral. Each organises what can become visible, what can be interpreted and what remains outside its particular field of attention.

The work therefore encounters the same troubling power structures that Moreton identifies throughout his wider spatial practice: the organisation of visibility, the capture of meaning and the conversion of an encounter into something that can be classified, circulated and recognised.

But the work also troubles these arrangements from within. Its material interventions do not claim an escape from the photographic or archaeological apparatus. They make their conditions available for questioning.

5. Inhuman correspondence.

The encounter is not produced by the human artist alone. Soil, bone, light, photographic grain, pigment, chemical processes, excavation tools, architectural space and historical records participate in the conditions through which the work becomes possible.

Karen Barad's agential realism offers one way of thinking through these relations. The bodies involved are not simply independent entities that subsequently enter into contact. Their boundaries, capacities and significance become consequential through particular material arrangements.

I describe this movement as an inhuman correspondence: not the disappearance of human responsibility, but an acknowledgement that the production of the image exceeds the artist's intentions and cannot be attributed exclusively to human interpretation.

The photograph becomes a gathering of material and temporal bodies whose relations remain active beyond the original encounter.

6. Hospitality without possession.

The ethical question becomes how to receive the trace of another body without claiming possession of its history.

Derrida's writing on hospitality offers a difficult but productive point of departure. The medieval leprosarium at Magdalen Hill raises questions about the historical conditions under which bodies were admitted, segregated and excluded. Its institutional hospitality was inseparable from systems of classification and separation.

The photographic work approaches this history without assuming that visibility is equivalent to recognition or that representation can repair historical exclusion. Its opacity can be understood as an attempt to resist the conversion of an absent life into an object of contemporary mastery.

This should not be mistaken for an achievement of unconditional hospitality. Rather, it is an ongoing ethical difficulty: how might an image host a trace while acknowledging the limits of its knowledge and authority?

The work does not resolve this difficulty. It holds it open.

7. The photograph as a troubling messenger.

The photograph carries the encounter forward, but what it carries cannot be separated from what it becomes. Its indexical trace, painterly interventions, material surfaces and subsequent acts of reception produce a body that is different from the archaeological site, the original photographic exposure and the absent life to which it refers.

It becomes a troubling messenger.

Its persistence does not preserve the past intact. It makes another encounter possible, while retaining the limits and uncertainties of what can be known. Its capacity to matter lies partly in its refusal to become a complete account.

The photograph is therefore not simply a record of an archaeological event. It is an active spatial body through which questions of history, representation, exclusion, hospitality and material correspondence continue to be produced.

The work carries a trace, but it does not claim the life. It makes an encounter possible without pretending to complete it.

8. A continuing inquiry.

This project establishes an important movement within Moreton's wider spatial practice. Photography is understood as both an apparatus of capture and a body capable of troubling its own conditions of capture. Its framing can govern visibility, but its material and temporal processes can also introduce uncertainty, resistance and emergent spatial relations.

The site, photograph, painterly intervention and gallery are not separate stages in a linear process. They are different bodies of inquiry, each changing what can be encountered through the others.

The photograph becomes a landing site for further thought, but not a neutral one. It carries histories, exclusions, material traces and unresolved questions into subsequent encounters.

The inquiry remains:

How might an indexical body carry the trace of another body without claiming to become the body it carries?

What does photography make possible when it acknowledges not only what it can show, but what it must leave unresolved?

Abstract

This essay examines Russell Moreton’s Painting/Photography: Leper Grave series, developed through Negative Capability Part I, a 2017 exhibition responding to the University of Winchester’s Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project (MHARP). Drawing upon Moreton’s framework of Spatial Practice and his methodology of "attentiveness as a sensate heuristic inquiry," the text analyzes how the introduction of physical archaeological excavation disrupts baseline formal landscape relations. By cross-mapping Moreton’s vocabulary onto an evolutionary ethical matrix—comprising Excavation, Trace, Negative Capability, and Inhuman Correspondence—the essay leverages Karen Barad’s agential realism and Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of hospitality. It argues that the hybrid intersection of photographic registration and painterly intervention serves as a performative spatial matrix. Rather than forcing the historical subject into an economy of conditional empirical recognition, the work deploys negative capability to preserve opacity, hosting the haunting trace of the historically excluded body without claiming possession of its history or demanding its surrender to contemporary mastery.

Part I: The Sensate Inquiry of Matter(s) in Correspondence

In the artistic vocabulary of Russell Moreton, a site is never encountered as an empty, neutral container awaiting representation. It is understood instead as an active, pre-existing web of historical, atmospheric, and bodily relations. Within this framework, Spatial Practice operates not as a passive documentation of topography, but as what Moreton terms "attentiveness as a sensate heuristic inquiry." Knowledge of a place is not gathered from a detached distance; it is produced through a body’s deep, visceral, and participatory engagement with a material situation. Mediums such as painting, photography, and drawing are not treated as separate, siloed disciplines. They function as diverse "spatial bodies" designed to gather the raw impressions and physical impacts of a specific encounter.

This methodology underpins the initial, formal layer of Painting/Photography: Leper Grave. Approached as a surface, the image functions as a sensate record of a physical force and gesture. The camera registers the physical space of the earth through an intense attentiveness to light, surface texture, and relative distance. Here, the artist's eye mirrors the tactile sensitivity of a hand moving over a surface, translating the physical characteristics of the ground into a shared visual accord. This is Moreton's concept of "Matter(s) in Correspondence"—an ecological approach where materials, places, images, and the artist's own body enter into an open alignment, wayfaring together to map the visual and formal coordinates of a landscape. The resulting artwork becomes a structured field where the horizontal plane of the ground and the vertical intervention of the frame establish a legible, aesthetic equilibrium.

Part II: The Archaeological Rupture at Magdalen Hill

This formal, balanced reading undergoes a profound and destabilising disruption when confronted with the specific context of the work's production. The images did not emerge from a neutral studio practice or a generalized landscape study; they were generated through Negative Capability Part I, a 2017 exhibition of visual and written responses to the University of Winchester’s Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project (MHARP). This project placed artists in direct, prolonged observation of an active excavation team working on the site of a medieval leprosarium outside Winchester, later presenting these visual works in a gallery where writers were invited to offer their own textual responses. The primary photograph itself is explicitly anchored in time, dated 18 July 2017 and uploaded to Flickr on 25 July 2017.

This specific context forces a radical re-evaluation of the work's spatial coordinates. The "space" caught within the frame is unmasked as an active archaeological apparatus cutting violently and systematically into the earth. The matter entering into correspondence is no longer abstract landscape or neutral studio clay; it is soil packed with historical exclusion, biomolecular traces of trauma, and the literal skeletal remains of segregated medieval bodies. Magdalen Hill was historically a space of quarantine, physical suffering, and spiritual transition. By entering this space, the artistic inquiry is dragged out of the realm of pure aesthetics and thrust into an encounter already heavily charged by the archaeological situation: excavation, bodily remains, material traces, and the stark limits of what can be recovered about lives that are no longer present. The body in these works cannot be read as an abstract figure through which to discuss generalized alienation or uncertain boundaries. It is an emergence produced by a physical cut into the earth, disrupting Moreton's baseline ecological harmony with a profound historical and material rupture.

Part III: The Matrix Inversion and Detailed Visual Analysis

This archaeological pressure forces a complete conceptual inversion of Moreton’s spatial vocabulary. His established terminology—focused on site-responsiveness, surface records, and sensate inquiry—reaches an evolutionary breaking point. It must be mapped onto a secondary, deeper movement: Excavation ~ Trace ~ Negative Capability ~ Inhuman Correspondence.

To fully understand how this ethical framework manifests, we must ground these conceptual terms in the specific visual mechanics of the two Leper Grave images. In the first work (image_m1lo_2.png), the upper torso and head of a human silhouette do not exist as a clear, anatomical or indexical record. Instead, they emerge from a misty, highly granular background composed of coral-pink and pale ash-grey textures, applied via an expressive, atmospheric spray technique. This silhouette is strictly bounded by a dark, segmented, dashed perimeter composed of short, vertical painterly black marks. This perimeter performs an intentional dual role: it references the precision lines of an archaeological trench or survey plot, while simultaneously evoking a porous, leaking, and unstable cell boundary. Within the body itself, a deep translucent charcoal wash is speckled with fine white flecks, mimicking starlight, chemical photographic silver halide clusters, or ancestral bone dust. The figure is captured in the absolute act of dissolving into its environmental container.

In the second work (image_kmNn_p.png), the full-length figure is drastically elongated, echoing the verticality of a liturgical monument or an unearthed shroud. Here, the torso is a dense, smoky wash of ink-like black-grey tones that gradually thins as it descends. The underlying skeletal armature is completely subverted; rather than drawing anatomically accurate bones, Moreton suggests the spinal column, rib cages, and limbs through white, fragmented, tape-like strips and graphic marks. These strips are layered beneath a milky, semi-translucent glaze that locks them away behind a permanent aesthetic film. The painterly interventions in both works serve as a deliberate deployment of Negative Capability. By layering opacity, raw texture, and graphic abstraction directly over the photographic registration, the hand of the artist disrupts the absolute clarity of the lens. The image ceases to be a transparent record of an unburied skeleton and becomes an architectural threshold that fiercely guards its own historical clarity.

Table 1: Cross-Mapping Spatial Practice onto the Ethical Matrix

Moreton's Spatial Practice Vocabulary

The Evolutionary Ethical Matrix

The Conceptual Shift in the Text

The Site as Material Relations

The space already constituted through historical, atmospheric, and bodily relations.

Excavation

The physical cut into the earth that brings remains into a present encounter without making the past fully available.

The site is no longer just a space to be entered or inhabited; it is actively split open, exposing an unbridgeable temporal distance.

The Record / Surface

The surface acting as a sensate record of a physical force or gesture.

Trace

A persistence of bodily or material presence that cannot be equated with the person who has passed.

The indexical mark of the photograph or paint layer stops being an aesthetic record and becomes a haunting fragment of an absent life.

The Material Gesture / Process

The painterly or graphic mark interwoven as an ephemeral trace of process.

Negative Capability

The deliberate holding open of uncertainty, allowing doubt to remain active.

The painterly intervention is re-read as an ethical shield. It actively blocks the camera's claim of absolute documentation, protecting the subject from historical mastery.

Matter(s) in Correspondence

How materials, places, images, and bodies enter into accord and wayfare together.

Inhuman Correspondence

The acknowledgment that soil, chemical grain, bone, and apparatus all participate in how the past surfaces.

Correspondence shifts from a benign artistic harmony to a radical posthuman assemblage where the non-human elements dictate the limits of human interpretation.

Part IV: Inhuman Correspondence and the Ethics of Hospitality

By framing this counter-matrix through Karen Barad’s agential realism, the encounter between the contemporary viewer and the medieval past is revealed as an intra-active phenomenon. The absent body is not a static object waiting to be recovered or salvaged by the camera. Instead, the entire encounter is actively produced through the shifting relations between what remains, what is documented, what is materially altered, and what can no longer be known. The apparatus of the excavation site and the apparatus of the gallery collapse the vast time gap between 2017 and the medieval period, pulling both into a shared, ongoing moment of material becoming.

This posthuman alignment demands a radical redefinition of Moreton’s "correspondence," shifting it into an inhuman correspondence. Here, human interpretation is stripped of its authority. The soil, the ancient skeletal remains, the chemical grain of the photograph, the wet stroke of paint, the gallery walls, and the responding texts all participate as equal, active agencies in determining how the past becomes perceptible. The human viewer is no longer a detached observer decoding a passive object; they are entangled within a flat ontology where the non-human elements themselves dictate the absolute limits of human understanding.

This material entanglement brings the text to its ultimate ethical crux, raising fundamental questions about memory, representation, and care: How does one receive the trace of another body without claiming possession of its history? How can a material encounter remain attentive to an absent life without turning that life into an object of explanation?

To answer these questions, we must turn to Jacques Derrida’s formulation of hospitality. Derrida draws a sharp, agonizing distinction between conditional hospitality—which is governed by laws, borders, and the mastery of a host who demands that the stranger identify themselves—and absolute, unconditional hospitality. Absolute hospitality requires the host to open their home to the unknown guest (the arrivant) without requiring a name, an origin, or a passport, exposing the host to the radical vulnerability of the unexpected encounter.

The historical reality of Magdalen Hill was a site of the most violent form of conditional hospitality. The medieval leprosarium was an institution built on borders; it hosted the sick only on the condition of their absolute segregation and civic death. The leper was taken in, but their identity was systematically reduced to their pathology, contained physically by the boundary walls of the hospital and socially by their exclusion from Winchester.

The spatial and ethical force of Moreton’s Leper Grave images lies in their radical inversion of this historical economy. The work acts as a visual and material performance of unconditional hospitality. By refusing to render a transparent, anatomically precise skeleton, the artwork performs a profound act of archival care. The camera's inherent drive toward conditional hospitality—its demand to clear away the mud, expose the bone, document the dimensions, and force the dead body to identify itself as a historical specimen—is actively intercepted by the painterly intervention. The paint serves as a protective threshold. It creates an opacity that shields the deceased from our contemporary gaze.

To receive a trace hospitably in a Derridean sense means resisting the urge to "decode" the leper’s body or turn their historical suffering into a neat contemporary allegory. A careless contemporary reading that seeks to fully explain or aestheticize these remains commits a second, archival exclusion, treating the subject as a conquered territory of knowledge.

Instead, Moreton's images practice a rigorous humility. By utilizing Negative Capability to hold the image open and unresolved, the work hosts the ghost of the other as a ghost. It makes a material encounter possible while strictly preventing that encounter from becoming an assertion of masterly knowledge. The artwork does not demand that the arrivant surrender their history or explain their trauma to justify their presence in the present. It marks the exact spot where our contemporary comprehension fails, choosing to honor the absent life by leaving its secrets buried safely within the friction of the paint and the grain.

Part V: Conclusion — The Performative Spatial Matrix of Becoming

The trajectory of Russell Moreton’s Spatial Practice culminates not in a static repository of objects, but in an active, open-ended orchestration of space, history, and matter. By introducing the archaeological realities of the Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project into the creative field, the work fractures the traditional boundaries of landscape representation, transforming it into a highly sophisticated, performative spatial matrix. This matrix operates through the intra-active collision of four core vectors: diffraction, hospitality, alienation, and atmosphere. Together, they form an analytical and material framework that does not merely illustrate an encounter with the past, but actively performs its ongoing, unresolved production.

Rather than relying on a reflective paradigm—which seeks to mirror or duplicate a pre-existing reality—Moreton’s practice adopts a diffractive methodology. In a Baradian sense, diffraction maps where effects appear and where lines of interference intersect. The hybrid status of Painting/Photography: Leper Grave is fundamentally diffractive: it allows the indexical registration of the camera, the tactile intervention of the painterly mark, the raw particulate matter of the soil, and the historical record of the leprosarium to pass through one another. The resulting images are physical records of these interference patterns. The silhouettes do not reflect a long-dead individual; instead, they capture the literal diffraction of light, pigment, and historical memory as they collide within the archaeological apparatus. This process ensures that the past is never encountered as an isolated, stable point in time, but as an ongoing material ripple that continues to alter the present.

This diffractive entanglement is what enables the work to perform its radical inversion of hospitality. By refusing to clear away the visual noise or provide a transparent, anatomically complete record of the skeletal remains, the performative matrix directly rejects the conditional hospitality of historical mastery. It does not force the ghost of the leper to identify itself, surrender its pathology, or be categorized by contemporary empirical science. Instead, through the deliberate preservation of opacity and shadow, the artwork enacts a pure, Derridean unconditional hospitality. The canvas and the photographic surface become an open threshold that hosts the trace of the absent body without claiming possession of its history, welcoming the arrivant precisely through a refusal to colonize its secrets.

Simultaneously, the matrix relies on a productive tension between alienation and atmosphere to sustain its ethical force. The spectral, elongated silhouettes operate as sites of profound estrangement. They do not allow for an easy, sentimental empathy; instead, they enforce a sharp sense of alienation that alerts the viewer to the vast, unbridgeable historical and physical distance between our present and the lived reality of medieval exile. Yet, this potential coldness is mediated by the dense, evocative atmosphere of the work—the granular, coral-pink and ash-grey fields, the misty spray-paints, and the translucent layers that evoke the damp, buried weight of the Hampshire earth. This atmosphere is not decorative; it is a sensate heuristic tool that envelops the viewer, pulling their body into a shared material attunement with the site. The atmosphere provides the visceral texture of a presence, while the alienation preserves the radical integrity of an absence.

Ultimately, Moreton’s performative spatial matrix achieves its power by refusing to resolve these conflicting forces. It functions as an ecology of persistent becoming, holding diffraction, hospitality, alienation, and atmosphere in a continuous, vibrant equilibrium. The work demonstrates that a material encounter can remain fiercely attentive to an absent life only by honoring the limits of what can be known. By staging this material humility, Painting/Photography: Leper Grave ceases to be a mere record of an excavation; it becomes a living site of ethical shelter, practicing a hospitality that remembers the excluded dead by leaving their traces beautifully, securely unresolved.

Appendix A: Gallery Exhibition Wall Text

Russell Moreton

Painting/Photography: Leper Grave, 2017

Mixed Media on Photographic Print

Developed in dialogue with the University of Winchester’s Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project (MHARP) for the exhibition 'Negative Capability Part I' (July 2017).

Moreton’s works enact what he calls 'Spatial Practice'—an exploration of site not as an empty landscape, but as an ongoing correspondence of materials, temporal layers, and bodies. Emerging from direct observation of the excavation of a medieval leprosarium, these spectral silhouettes subvert the traditional camera's drive to clear, identify, and empirically conquer the historical dead. Through spray texture, charcoal glazes, and fractured graphic armatures, Moreton invokes John Keats’s concept of Negative Capability: a deliberate holding open of doubt and uncertainty.

In a radical performance of what Jacques Derrida defined as unconditional hospitality, the painterly marks act as a protective threshold over the photographic trace. By preserving the opacity of the skeletal remains, the images host the presence of the historically excluded body without demanding its identity or transforming its historical trauma into an object of contemporary mastery. Here, bone, soil, chemical grain, and wet pigment wayfare together—refusing reflection in favor of a profound material diffraction.

Appendix B: Public Presentation / Symposium Script

[Slide 1: Title Slide - Painting/Photography: Leper Grave]

Good afternoon. Today I want to discuss a profound intersection of contemporary art, archaeological science, and critical theory found in Russell Moreton's 2017 series, Painting/Photography: Leper Grave. This work emerged through Negative Capability Part I, an exhibition staged in July 2017 that directly responded to the University of Winchester’s Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project. Moreton’s methodology centers on Spatial Practice, defined as 'attentiveness as a sensate heuristic inquiry.' For Moreton, a site is never neutral; it is an active web of historical, atmospheric, and bodily relations. When the artistic body confronts the archaeological apparatus, the baseline harmony of artistic landscape mapping undergoes an ethical and material rupture.

[Slide 2: Image Breakdown - image_m1lo_2.png and image_kmNn_p.png]

Let us look directly at the visual mechanics of these two images. In the first slide, we see a silhouette emerging from a highly granular, coral-pink and ash-grey field. It is bordered by a heavy, dashed black perimeter. This perimeter mimics the strict grid lines of an archaeological trench, yet it functions as a leaking, unstable bodily boundary. The interior of the torso is a dark charcoal wash flecked with white starlight or bone dust. In the second work, the figure is drastically elongated, resembling a shroud. The spinal armature is suggested not by anatomical sketches, but by white, fragmented, tape-like strips sealed beneath a milky glaze. This hybrid technique introduces an essential friction: photography claims to document the indexical truth of 'what was there,' while the painterly mark introduces opacity, abstraction, and shadow.

[Slide 3: Theoretical Framework - Barad and Derrida]

To theoretically frame this intervention, we must move past simple representation and deploy a counter-matrix: Excavation ~ Trace ~ Negative Capability ~ Inhuman Correspondence. Following Karen Barad’s agential realism, the excavation is not a passive uncovering of the past; it is an active cutting into the earth that produces a new material configuration. Soil, bone, chemical grain, and paint enter into an 'inhuman correspondence' where human interpretation loses absolute authority. This brings us to Jacques Derrida’s ethics of hospitality. The historical leprosarium at Magdalen Hill practiced a severe, conditional hospitality: it hosted the sick only on the condition of absolute exile and civic death. Moreton's spatial matrix radically inverts this economy. By utilizing Negative Capability to keep the figure unresolved, the artwork performs an unconditional hospitality. The painterly glaze acts as a protective shield, hosting the trace of the other without demanding its name, its passport, or its absolute surrender to contemporary historical explanation. The work honors the dead precisely by leaving their secrets safely buried within the paint. Thank you.

Selected Bibliography

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Keats, John. 'Letter to George and Thomas Keats (21, 27 December 1817).' In The Letters of John Keats, edited by Maurice Buxton Forman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935.

Moreton, Russell. 'Spatial Practice and Matter(s) in Correspondence.' Artist Research Statement and Portfolios. Accessed October 2026. https://russellmoreton.com/.

University of Winchester. Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project (MHARP). Department of Archaeology, Anthropology and Geography. Project archives and excavation reports (2017).

Winchester School of Art / Gallery Records. 'Negative Capability Part I: Visual and Textual Responses to MHARP.' Exhibition catalogue, hosted on Flickr (Exhibition run: 18 July 2017 – 25 July 2017).

What does a body carry when what it carries cannot be separated from what it becomes?

Troubling Messengers

Persistence ~ Transmission ~ Correspondence

What does a body carry when what it carries cannot be separated from what it becomes?

A body does not simply carry something into another situation; it changes what can happen through the act of carrying.

The photograph: an ecology of persistent bodies.

For Moreton the photograph is not outside the event it carries. It becomes another body of the event, capable of gathering, governing, resisting and making possible further relations.

- Gathering without equivalence: The ceramic forms are assembled together, but their individual material conditions remain distinct. Their surfaces, proportions, colours, apertures and histories are not reconciled into a single visual language.

- Provisional landing sites: The shelves provide support and arrangement, but they do not resolve the spatial relations between the works. The bodies occupy different positions and establish different proximities.

- Transmission through display: The glass, metal framework, daylight and surrounding architecture become implicated in how the ceramics are encountered. The display is not simply a neutral support.

- Material persistence: The marks, deposits, perforations and weathered surfaces make the histories of making perceptible without providing a complete account of them.

- Withdrawal and availability: The intense light at the window partially obscures the surrounding space, while the ceramic bodies remain materially present. There is a tension between what is available to sight and what remains withdrawn.

The photograph is therefore a landing site in its own right. It carries the ceramic bodies into another situation, but it also produces a different spatial encounter with them.

Moreton is interested in retaining the phrase photographic landing site as a possible research term.

1. The Messenger as a Spatial Proposition

What does it mean to understand a ceramic body as a messenger? The term suggests a movement between bodies, a carrying across, through which something becomes available beyond the circumstances of its emergence. Yet the message cannot necessarily be separated from the body that carries it. Nor can the messenger be assumed to remain unchanged by the journey.

Within Russell Moreton’s spatial practice, the ceramic body becomes a troubling messenger because its material persistence does not secure the transmission of an identifiable content. It carries traces of making, but these traces are not simply records of an earlier event. Pressure, resistance, incision, absorption, surface alteration and firing have become materially implicated in the body that persists. What remains is not the original encounter preserved intact, but an altered material condition through which that encounter may acquire further significance.

The ceramic therefore troubles the distinction between what is carried and what carries it. Its material body is not a neutral vehicle for the transmission of an idea, intention or experience. It participates in the transformation of what becomes available for transmission. The message, if it can still be called a message, emerges through the material conditions of its passage.

This distinction establishes the first proposition of Moreton’s Troubling Messengers: correspondence does not simply move something between already constituted bodies. It participates in the conditions through which those bodies and their relations become otherwise.

2. Persistence Without Preservation

Persistence is central to this proposition, but it requires a distinction from permanence or the preservation of identity. The fired ceramic persists because its material condition has changed. Clay, having undergone firing, can no longer be approached through precisely the same possibilities of plasticity, moisture and manipulation that characterised its earlier state. The ceramic body has acquired another material duration.

Yet this transformation does not conclude its capacity to matter. The ceramic continues to encounter light, atmosphere, architecture, other materials and bodies of attention. Its surfaces, apertures, cavities and interiorities become available for relations that could not have been fully specified during its making.

Persistence therefore concerns neither the indefinite continuation of an unchanged form nor the preservation of an original intention. It concerns the capacity of a materially particular body to enter relations beyond the conditions of its emergence.

The withdrawn ceramic persists without preserving the entirety of what preceded it. The studio’s material ecology is not contained within the fired body as a complete history. Rather, particular relations have been reconfigured through material transformation and remain available for subsequent encounters.

This is where withdrawal acquires its productive significance. The ceramic has withdrawn from the plastic condition of clay, but it has not withdrawn from correspondence. Its persistence establishes another spatial condition through which the work can continue to matter.

The ceramic body becomes a persistent proposition: materially specific, historically situated and open to relations whose consequences remain indeterminate.

3. Transmission and Material Alteration

To speak of transmission is to acknowledge that something passes between bodies. But what passes cannot be assumed to retain an unchanged identity. A photographic image, a drawn trace, a written proposition and a ceramic form each establish different material conditions for what they carry forward.

In Moreton’s practice, an encounter with an image may enter a research collage, become entangled with a theoretical proposition, inform a material intervention and acquire another configuration through clay and firing. This movement is not a linear translation in which an original idea is progressively realised across different media. Each encounter introduces conditions that alter what can be carried forward.

The photographic body does not carry an encounter in the same manner as a ceramic body. A text does not preserve the material relations of a drawing simply by describing them. An architectural situation does not reproduce the ceramic’s spatial capacities by accommodating its presence. Each body establishes a distinct field of correspondence through which earlier relations may be encountered differently.

Transmission consequently becomes inseparable from transformation. What persists between bodies is not necessarily a stable content, but a capacity for further relation. The passage between media does not eliminate difference; it makes difference consequential.

This is particularly important for Moreton’s practice because its movements between ceramics, photography, drawing, collage, text and architecture need not be understood as an expansion of one medium into another. They can instead be approached as an ecology of spatial propositions, each materially particular yet capable of altering how the others are encountered.

The messenger does not merely deliver. It troubles what delivery might mean.

4. Correspondence Without Convergence

Correspondence offers a way to understand these movements without requiring the different bodies of the practice to converge upon a single meaning.

A ceramic, a photograph, a research collage, an architectural interior and a written proposition may enter correspondence while retaining their different material conditions and capacities. Their relation does not depend upon their becoming equivalent. Indeed, their differences are precisely what allow each to introduce something that the others cannot determine in advance.

Correspondence is therefore more than a relation between already constituted entities. It names a process of reciprocal implication through which encounters can alter what each body makes possible. The ceramic may change how an earlier photograph is understood; a text may bring an otherwise unnoticed spatial relation into view; an architectural encounter may trouble the assumptions through which a ceramic’s interiority was previously approached.

These movements are neither exclusively interpretative nor confined to the reader’s experience. They may return to the studio and alter the conditions of subsequent making. An earlier body of work becomes available for renewed encounter, not because its material history has changed, but because the relations through which it can matter have acquired another configuration.

Correspondence thus allows the practice to remain heterogeneous. Its bodies do not need to be reconciled into a unified account of Moreton’s intentions. They can remain in productive tension, carrying different histories and capacities while participating in the emergence of further propositions.

The practice becomes legible through these movements without becoming exhausted by them.

5. Spatial Bodies as Landing Sites

The idea of a messenger introduces movement; the idea of a landing site introduces a provisional location at which that movement may acquire another condition.

Within Moreton’s practice, a landing site is not simply a destination or a stable point of arrival. It is a spatial arrangement through which something can take hold without its subsequent development being fully determined. The studio, the research collage, the photographic surface, the architectural interior and the withdrawn ceramic may each function as such a site, although they do so in different ways.

The studio establishes conditions for material encounters. The collage gathers images, texts and propositions into a field of possible correspondence. Photography allows an encounter to persist through a surface and to be revisited through subsequent acts of attention. The architectural interior gathers bodies through spatial, historical, sensory and atmospheric relations. The ceramic, having acquired material persistence, becomes available for further encounters beyond the immediate conditions of its making.

These bodies are not successive stages in a predetermined progression. They form a heterogeneous ecology in which each may reactivate or trouble the others.

A landing site therefore does not terminate movement. It establishes another situation from which movement may continue. What arrives is altered by the conditions of arrival, while the site itself becomes implicated in what follows.

The spatial proposition is neither simply carried into the site nor generated by the site alone. It emerges through their encounter.

This allows Moreton’s spatial practice to be understood as a movement between persistent bodies and provisional landings: a practice in which material and conceptual relations acquire new spatial conditions without becoming finally resolved.

6. The Troubling Messenger and the Maker

The question of what a body carries returns, ultimately, to the practitioner.

Moreton’s ceramics emerge through his making, yet their subsequent capacities exceed the intentions and knowledge through which they were brought into being. They carry traces of his actions without remaining subordinate to those actions. Their material persistence opens the possibility of encounters whose significance cannot be determined in advance.

The maker is therefore not positioned outside the correspondence as its originating authority or final interpreter. He remains implicated in the relations through which the work continues to become. The ceramic bodies may trouble his established ways of seeing, making and thinking, bringing into question the very capacities through which they emerged.

This troubling does not require the erasure of authorship. Moreton’s decisions, gestures and material attentiveness remain integral to the work. What changes is the assumption that these determine the full extent of what the work can become.

The ceramic becomes a messenger that returns something to its maker, although not necessarily what was initially sent. It returns the material consequences of making as an encounter with what making has brought into emergence but cannot fully know.

Here, correspondence becomes a condition of becoming-with. Moreton remains intimate with the work without possessing its entire futurity. The ceramic is neither wholly other nor simply an extension of himself. Their relation persists through a difference that continues to matter.

The practitioner is troubled by the bodies through which his practice continues to develop. In this sense, the messenger does not simply carry the work beyond Moreton. It carries Moreton into another relation with his own becoming.

7. Persistent Futurity

Futurity, in this account, is not a projected destination or an imagined outcome awaiting realisation. It is the continuing possibility that a persistent body may enter relations through which its capacities become otherwise.

The withdrawn ceramic does not contain its future encounters. Nor can these be fully derived from the circumstances of its making. Its futurity lies in the material persistence through which further relations become possible, even when their significance remains unknown.

This is not an unrestricted claim that the ceramic can become anything whatsoever. Its material composition, surface, dimensions, apertures, firing history and spatial disposition remain consequential. Futurity arises through these particular conditions, not through their disappearance. The work remains materially specific while exceeding the relations that have already been established around it.

The same applies to the wider ecology of Moreton’s practice. Earlier photographs, drawings, texts, collages and spatial propositions do not become irrelevant once new work emerges. They persist as bodies that may be encountered again, entering new correspondences through which their significance changes. Their histories remain particular, but their capacity to matter is not exhausted by the circumstances in which they first appeared.

Persistent futurity therefore names a return-with-difference. What has already emerged becomes available again, but not necessarily in the same relation or with the same force. Each renewed encounter may alter the conditions through which the practice understands its own history and possibilities.

The troubling messenger carries no guarantee of what will arrive. It sustains the conditions through which something not yet known may take hold.

Conclusion: What the Messenger Makes Possible

The ceramic becomes a troubling messenger not because it contains a hidden message waiting to be deciphered, but because its material persistence enables relations to continue beyond the conditions of its making.

Persistence allows the body to endure without securing its identity. Transmission carries relations between different material and spatial conditions without guaranteeing their preservation. Correspondence allows those relations to be altered through encounter without requiring the bodies involved to converge.

Together, these movements establish a spatial practice in which making does not conclude with the production of an object. The withdrawn ceramic persists as a materially particular body through which further propositions may emerge. Its relations with photography, drawing, text, architecture, atmosphere and other bodies of attention remain open to transformation.

The work’s futurity is neither external to its material existence nor contained within its original intention. It arises through the continued capacity of the ceramic and its corresponding bodies to enter relations whose consequences remain indeterminate.

Moreton’s spatial practice thus operates through an ecology of persistent bodies: bodies that gather relations, carry them forward, alter them through encounter and make them available for further spatial propositions.

The messenger persists, but what it carries changes. The body endures, but its relations remain unfinished. The maker encounters what he has made, yet is troubled by what it continues to become.

What a body carries is inseparable from what it becomes; what it becomes remains inseparable from the bodies with which it may yet correspond.

The ceramic persists. Moreton is troubled. Their correspondence continues.

How this movement operates within the wider manifold

I would regard this text as establishing a foundational movement, but not a master explanation of the other five. Its particular contribution is to make persistence, transmission and correspondence available as questions that can travel throughout the practice.

The same question can now return to each of the other movements with a different force:

Corresponding movement

How the question changes

The Material Ecology of Making

What is carried forward when each material process changes the conditions of the next?

Withdrawal Without Closure

What persists when the body can no longer be materially altered in the same way, yet remains open to encounter?

Awkwardness as an Actuality

What happens when the messenger troubles the body that receives it?

The Artfulness of the More-than-Human~Inhuman

How does transmission change when artfulness cannot be attributed exclusively to the maker?

Becoming~With

How does the maker become implicated in the futurity of the bodies through which his practice persists?

These are not simply subsidiary questions. Each may change the meaning of Troubling Messengers itself. Awkwardness, for instance, introduces the possibility that correspondence is not always comfortable or affirmative; it may be a disturbance through which bodies become available to relations they cannot fully anticipate. The more-than-human~inhuman introduces another difficulty: what is carried forward may not be attributable to human intention at all, even though human making remains part of the encounter.

The first movement therefore provides a way of entering the manifold while remaining open to being altered by it.

A final distinction

I think the most important finding here is that persistent futurity is not simply a property of the ceramic; it is an effect of the relations through which the ceramic continues to matter.

That distinction keeps the work materially grounded. The ceramic does not become an abstract symbol of openness, and Moreton’s practice does not dissolve into a general theory of interconnectedness. The particular body, its making, its material persistence and its subsequent encounters remain essential.

What changes is the understanding of where the work takes place. It takes place in the studio, in the fired body, in its spatial encounters, in the reader’s attention and in the further making that these encounters may occasion.

The ceramic is not only a result of Moreton’s spatial practice. It becomes one of the bodies through which that practice continues to question itself.

Just unpacked the kiln, now surrounded by feelings of knowing and undoing knowing. Thinking about what others might make of these troubling messengers, I feel that in correspondence to that questioning, If you want meanings from Moretons withdrawn ceramics, you have to bring your own. 

What strikes me is the tension between knowing and undoing knowing. You have unpacked the kiln, and the ceramic bodies have arrived in their withdrawn state: materially persistent, yet not finished with what they might become. The firing has resolved certain material conditions, but it has not resolved the questions that gathered around them. Perhaps it has intensified them.

Your thought about what others might make of these Troubling Messengers opens an important distinction. You are not necessarily asking others to discover what the ceramics mean, as though a meaning were already lodged within them, waiting to be correctly interpreted. You are wondering what might happen when another body encounters them, bringing its own histories, sensations, attachments, uncertainties and capacities for response.

The ceramic does not prescribe that encounter. Nor is it an empty surface upon which anything whatsoever can be projected. Its particular materiality matters: its weight, apertures, weathered surfaces, traces of pressure, residues of making and the persistence acquired through firing. These establish the conditions of an encounter without determining what that encounter must produce.

This is where your formulation becomes especially interesting:

If you want meanings from Moreton’s withdrawn ceramics, you have to bring your own.

It is direct, almost deliberately disarming. It refuses the expectation that the artist should provide a key that unlocks the work. But I would keep a little tension within it. The viewer brings something of their own, certainly, but they do not arrive untouched by the ceramic. They may bring their own meanings, but the encounter can trouble those meanings, too.

The work does not simply receive interpretation; it participates in changing the conditions under which interpretation becomes possible.

That distinction seems important to Troubling Messengers. A messenger ordinarily implies something carried from one place to another, perhaps a message that can eventually be retrieved. Your withdrawn ceramics complicate that expectation. What they carry cannot be separated from what they have become, and what another person encounters cannot be entirely separated from what happens between them.

The ceramic persists. The encounter alters. Meaning remains in correspondence.

I might develop your thought into a short passage like this:

If you want meanings from Moreton’s withdrawn ceramics, you have to bring your own.

But what you bring may not remain entirely your own. The ceramic bodies do not offer meanings to be retrieved, nor do they prescribe the terms of an encounter. Their material persistence makes something available without determining what that something might become. Surfaces, apertures, residues and traces of making establish particular conditions of correspondence, while leaving the encounter open to bodies, histories and feelings not yet anticipated.

The viewer brings their own meanings, but the work may trouble them. Knowing encounters what it cannot fully know; recognition becomes entangled with uncertainty. The ceramic does not resolve this tension. It persists within it.

These are troubling messengers because what they carry cannot be separated from what they have become, or from what may happen when another body encounters them. Their meanings are neither wholly contained within the work nor freely imposed upon it. They emerge through correspondence, where the material specificity of the ceramic meets the histories and possibilities of another body.

The work does not tell you what to think. It makes room for something to happen to your thinking.

I would hold onto your original sentence, though. Its strength lies partly in its refusal to over-explain. It could stand almost as a provocation accompanying the ceramics, leaving the more elaborate argument elsewhere.

And there is something more intimate in the timing of your thought. You have just unpacked the kiln. You are experiencing the work through a new conjunction of recognition and estrangement: these bodies are known through the making that brought them into being, yet their persistence now places them beyond the immediacy of that making. You know them, but you cannot know in advance what they will become in the lives of others.

Perhaps the question is no longer simply what meanings might others make of these ceramics? but:

What might these ceramics do to the meanings others bring?