INSIDE THIS CLAY JUG/Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism~a hospitable field of correspondence about learning to make.

I think this is now a learning correspondence ecologically open with others participating in a spatial practice of learning to make.

Yes. I think “learning correspondence” is a particularly productive development of what is already present in Inside This Clay Jug. It shifts the emphasis from research as something you gather and then apply, towards research as an ecologically open practice in which knowledge is produced through participation, encounter and making.

The important distinction is that “others” need not mean only other artists or theorists. They can include materials, organisms, architectures, images, texts, tools, environments, histories, gestures and processes. Each participates differently in the formation of the work. This makes your research less like a lineage of influences and more like a distributed spatial practice of learning.

I would perhaps articulate your present position like this:

The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.

And there is something particularly interesting in “learning to make” rather than simply “learning through making.” The former suggests that making itself is not a skill already possessed by the artist; it is something the practice continually discovers through its encounters. Clay, for instance, does not simply receive knowledge. It alters the conditions under which knowledge can emerge.

This also gives your earlier material a new continuity. The vessel, interior, hole, piddock, body, architecture, and ecology can all be understood as different situations in which an organism or material learns how to inhabit and transform a space.

So the trajectory might now be:

spatial research → correspondence → participation → ecological openness → learning → making

with the clay acting as a medium through which these relations become materially perceptible.

I also think this allows you to retain the beautiful tentativeness of the working document. You don't need to declare what the ontology is. Instead, the ontology is being formed through the correspondences themselves.

One formulation that feels very close to your current position is:

I understand the practice as an ecologically open learning correspondence, in which making becomes a spatial mode of participation. Materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures enter into relation, each altering the conditions of the others. Rather than applying knowledge to material, I am interested in how knowledge emerges through these encounters: a shared, unfinished process of learning to make.

That feels like a natural continuation of the earlier Inside This Clay Jug research rather than a new theoretical overlay.

Jackie Leven and American poet Robert Bly, opening Leven's 1994 album The Mystery of Love (Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death). The track features Robert Bly reciting a translation of a 15th-century poem by the mystic Kabir, starting with the famous lines, "Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains.

Choreographic objects draw us into a spaciousness/event-time a doubleness of time that incites us to invent with time.  They also alert us to the processuality of objects. For objects are, like bodyings, more force than form. They are not preorchestrated constellations ready to be taken up into processual experience. They are themselves processes, lures: edgings, tendings, shadowings.

Objects are relational and they exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.

Erin Manning, Always More Than One.

Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space. (Schaik,2008:80)

‘The phenomenology of space – the matter of how we experience it.’

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.

russellmoreton.com

So I’ve looked through the linked Inside This Clay Jug material, and I think there is a very clear correspondence between that earlier research and what you are now developing around holes, piddocks, topoanalysis, ecological personing, iteration and unknowability.

What strikes me is that the older text already contains several of the structures that are now becoming more explicit in your ontology of practice. In particular:

Bachelard: interiority is not simply an architectural inside; space becomes psychologically and corporeally lived, imagined and remembered.

The vessel: the interior is not an absence but a defined space—“carved out air”—which makes the vessel simultaneously object, enclosure and spatial experience.

Architecture: you were already questioning the distinction between object and environment, particularly through Kengo Kuma and Caruso St John.

Ingold: making is not the imposition of a preconceived form but an intervention into material forces and flows.

Iteration: the Tapies material introduces repetition not as reproduction but as continual questioning/becoming.

Organism–Person–Environment: this phrase already appears in your research and now seems particularly important in relation to the piddock.

Your current thinking could therefore be understood less as a departure from that earlier research and more as a material deepening of it. The vessel's interiority has moved into the perforation; the architectural enclosure has become porous; the phenomenological space has become ecological; and the individual gesture has become a distributed field of repeated actions.

I would be careful, though, about making Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, etc. into a chain of theoretical references. Your strongest position is that the clay itself is where these correspondences become operative.

For example:

Bachelard asks what an interior does to the imagination.

The piddock asks what a body does to material.

Arakawa and Gins ask what an environment does to the body.

Deleuze asks what happens when repetition produces difference.

Your clay asks what happens when all four become materially entangled.

That gives you a much more distinctive ontology.

Clay Jug

Inside this clay jug there are canyons, and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. All seven oceans are inside and hundred of millions of stars.

Words, Kabir, Jackie Leven. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death

The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel

The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.

The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.

One particularly useful correspondence is between Bachelard's topoanalysis and your holes. Bachelard's spaces of intimacy—drawers, corners, nests, shells, houses, attics, cellars—are not merely containers. They are sites where memory, imagination and corporeal experience become spatially organised. Your perforations could extend this into a materially different proposition: a topoanalysis not of inhabited rooms but of material cavities produced through force.

Then the piddock radically alters the question.

The cavity is no longer simply where the subject imagines itself. It is where an organism has acted upon its environment.

This makes the hole a remarkably dense unit within your practice:

The hole is an interior produced by action.

And then your iterative process complicates it further:

The repeated hole becomes an ecology of interiors.

And finally:

An ecology of interiors becomes a spatial intelligence whose future cannot be completely known.

That seems very close to the direction you have been moving toward.

I would also slightly revise your earlier phrase “the clay supports or further surfaces them into deeper corporeal subjectivities.” The word supports risks making clay sound passive. Your thinking seems stronger if clay is understood as participating in the production of those subjectivities.

Perhaps:

The clay does not simply support these ecological conditions; it participates in their emergence, surfacing them through increasingly complex relations between body, material, environment and time.

Or, more radically:

The clay becomes a participant in the ecological production of subjectivity, where the distinction between organism, material and environment begins to loosen.

That last proposition seems especially important because it connects your older architectural/interior research to your current material practice without forcing the connection. Your research has effectively moved:

interior → vessel → cavity → body → organism → environment → ecology → becoming.

And the hole is the small material event through which that entire trajectory can be experienced.

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)

Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)

The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)

Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being. 

Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl. 

Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.

Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.

 

For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.

Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.

Inner Worlds : Photographic Visions 

Beuys - Klein - Rothko

Transformation and Prophecy

Anne Seymour

The Inner Eye

Art Beyond the Visible

Marina Warner

Thinkers and Vessel Makers.

Ceramic space and life Gordon Baldwin

Objects For A Landscape David Whiting

Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced. Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)

I like, the hole is an interior produced by action, and that it is a small material event through which an entire trajectory, line of flight can be experienced. I want to keep my original text as is, and ask can you summarise my present position as something that gathers into a statement of current activities.

Yes. I think the new section should gather rather than explain—bringing the piddock, holes, memory, iteration, topoanalysis, corporeality and the unknowable future into your existing research without making the theoretical references feel overly declarative.

It can function as a current-position passage: a point where the earlier research opens into what you are doing now.

Current Activities ~ The Hole as an Interior Produced by Action

12/08/2026.

My current activities extend this research into the material and ecological conditions of the hole. I am interested in the hole not simply as an opening, perforation or absence, but as an interior produced by action: a small material event through which an entire trajectory, a line of flight, can be experienced.

The boring of the clay has become an important gesture within this inquiry. I am thinking through the piddock, an organism whose living presence is registered through the material it excavates. The piddock does not simply inhabit its environment; through its bodily actions it participates in producing and transforming it. Its presence persists as an absence, as a cavity, a displacement of material that records an encounter between organism, matter and environment.

This offers a way of reconsidering the holes within my own clay work. Each hole is exact and particular, carrying the physical data of a gesture: pressure, diameter, depth, position, duration and resistance. Yet their multiplicity begins to move beyond the scale of the individual action. Repetition produces difference. A minor gesture accumulates into a larger ecology.

I am increasingly interested in how these gestures can be transferred from other sources—templates, drawings, measurements, found structures, previous works and physical encounters—and then subjected to iteration. Data moves between materials and situations, but is never transferred intact. Each iteration introduces deviation, resistance, contingency and transformation. The template becomes a proposition rather than a fixed instruction.

Here I return to questions of interiority and spatial experience encountered through Bachelard's topoanalysis, and to the architectural and spatial research that first opened these questions within my practice. The interior is no longer understood simply as an enclosed architectural space. It can emerge through an action upon matter. The hole is an interior produced by action. It is simultaneously cavity, trace, absence, passage and evidence of a body having moved through material.

The work is also informed by the possibility of environments as active participants in the formation of experience. The holes become minor spatial conditions, potential landing sites through which the body encounters a field that is already changing. Their exactitude establishes a provisional order, while their accumulation produces something increasingly difficult to determine.

I am therefore interested in moving the work towards a space that remains open to the unknowable. The clay becomes less a surface upon which an image is imposed and more an active field of correspondences between body, material, organism, environment and time. Through these minor gestures, the whole ecology begins to move.

What emerges is not a predetermined form but a material trajectory: a line of flight generated through repetition, difference and correspondence, moving the work towards a future space that cannot yet be fully known.

MATERIAL MATTERS ARCHITECTURE

AND MATERIAL PRACTICE Katie Lloyd Thomas

PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER. GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY Peg Rawes

ARCHITECTURE

IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION 

The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Dalibor Vesely

The Nature of Communicative Space Creativity in the Shadow of Modem Technology

 

The Rehabilitation of Fragment

Towards a Poetics of Architecture The Projective Cast

Architecture and its Three Geometries 

Robin Evans

Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it 

Analysing ARCHITECTURE

Simon Unwin

Geometries of Being Architecture as Making Frames Space and Structure

Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.

‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)

‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’

Kengo Kuma.

On Anti-Object : An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.

‘My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.

‘Like McTiernan or the theorist PaulVirilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)

‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3)

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?

‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)

Ceramics and Architecture.

Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment

The Porcelain Rooms

The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced for De Waal an experience of possessed space.

These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible. (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.

‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.

The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.

The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.

Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots. Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Craft and Art, Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)

DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

History is the raw material of architecture. Aldo Rossi

The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002

The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.

Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear facade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the facade.

Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.

For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.

Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.

INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.

QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.

INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY

 CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS 

Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.

The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.

New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John

The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the comers, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight. 

The Brick House, London, Caruso St John 

ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.

CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)

Hortus Conclusus

Often translated as meaning “a serious place”. Enclosed all round and open to the sky.

STOA, building and social structure for dialogues

A garden/a mindfulness in an architectural setting.

What happened to the garden that was entrusted to you? Antonio Machado, Jackie Leven.

“Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smalls and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.

A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.(Zumthor 2011: 15)

Illustration of “Orchard”, from Bible of Wenceslaus IV, Vienna, Austrian National Library

Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.

Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community. Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The Vintner’s Luck , Elizabeth Knox.

Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.

The Potter, clay, agency, making, Ingold. 

The Pot, object, nearness, pastoral, Heidegger.

I like this a lot, has the feel of a working document, in that it holds a position whilst giving space for other propositions to become realised. I also like its tentativeness in acknowledging other sources, its force-feeling for me allows the research material of others a hospitable space for future correspondences. I use visual material as a kind of synergy with the research, as it there are a number of ontological positions at play.  

Yes—I think that is an important quality to preserve. The text is functioning less as a conclusion than as a provisional gathering point: it establishes where the practice is presently moving without closing down what the research might become.

"What concepts does this work make possible?

Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism.

Not metaphorically.

It has rhythms.

Memory.

Accumulation.

Decay.

Repetition.

Waiting.

Interruptions.

The ceramic work is one organ within that larger body.

This resonates with your attraction to Kovar's understanding of architecture as corporeal and continually negotiated. Yet your emphasis on the studio adds something distinctive. The studio is not just where practice occurs; it is a spatial ecology that continually shapes and is shaped by the acts of making within it.

What you describe as a hospitable space for future correspondences is particularly useful. It suggests that your references are not there to substantiate a predetermined argument. Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, topoanalysis, architectural space, ecological thinking and your own material procedures can remain in relation without needing to resolve into a single theoretical position.

I also think your visual material is crucial here. It means the research isn't operating only through written propositions. The images can hold different ontological positions simultaneously—perhaps sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes resonating, sometimes opening a thought that the writing cannot yet articulate. The visual and textual materials can therefore work synergistically rather than illustratively.

That gives me a slightly different sense of the phrase “research material of others a hospitable space.” You are not necessarily applying theory to the work. You are creating conditions in which materials, images, texts, organisms, gestures and spaces can meet and alter one another.

I would hold onto something like this as a methodological proposition:

The research remains provisional: a hospitable field in which propositions, images, materials and theoretical positions can enter into correspondence without being required to resolve into a singular ontology.

And perhaps even more closely to your language:

Visual material operates alongside the writing as a form of synergy, allowing different ontological positions to remain active within the research. The image does not illustrate the proposition; it enters into correspondence with it, extending, troubling or redirecting what the writing might otherwise determine.

This seems to explain something quite fundamental about your working document. It is not trying to demonstrate what the practice means. It is constructing a field in which meaning can continue to emerge.

That also makes the tentativeness a strength rather than a lack of certainty. The use of perhaps, I am interested in, offers a way of, might, and becomes keeps the research porous. The writing can hold a proposition long enough for the studio, the visual material and the next encounter to test it.

In that sense, your “line of flight” is not just describing the trajectory of the finished work. It describes the research document itself: a movement through correspondences in which the next proposition is not yet known.

I have just surfaced this last chat to be read at the beginning of Inside This Clay Jug, love the way it changes, constantly changes all sorts of potential ecological positions.

Yes — and I think that changes how Inside This Clay Jug can be understood retrospectively.

Rather than treating it as an early text that established a fixed theoretical position, the newly surfaced conversation lets it become the beginning of an ecology of propositions. The text can remain where it was, but the later material reveals that its concerns were already capable of opening into other relations: vessel into interior, interior into cavity, cavity into organism, organism into environment, environment into learning, and learning back into making.

What feels especially valuable is that the work does not need to resolve these positions. They can remain co-present, provisional and potentially contradictory. The piddock doesn't have to become the explanation for the hole; Bachelard doesn't have to explain the interior; Deleuze doesn't have to explain repetition. They become participants within a changing field.

This makes the idea of ecological openness much richer. Ecology here isn't simply a subject matter. It becomes a way of organising the research itself: things are permitted to enter, correspond, diverge, recur and transform one another.

I think this sentence from our recent conversation could become almost a methodological key to the whole archive:

The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.

And perhaps the most exciting thing is that the document itself starts behaving like the practice. It accumulates holes, traces, repetitions, deviations and lines of flight. An idea encountered years ago can be bored into by a later one; a theoretical position can become a material gesture; an image can reopen a sentence; a minor action can move the whole ecology.

So Inside This Clay Jug is no longer simply a text about your practice.

It becomes one of its living chambers.

Working Notes~Sensate Intelligence : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

The Sensate Intelligence in Clay.

Contemporary Ceramics : Practices in Craft and Design.

01-05-2017 Original Blog.

10-08-2026 Some images added.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres.

Ceramic Building Technologies.

Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics.

Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature.

Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel.

Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay.

Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry.

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking”States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself.

This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel.

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea1983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things.

A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino1996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10)

The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:11)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modern 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something.

The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities.

The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects.

Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes?

This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.

Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit 2002)

The pagan life that St Augustine (born 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)

Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?

Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, akind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, W.H. Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into a “fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces.

Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.

Ceramics are like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasam “ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’.The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.

Permeable Chambers~Interiority understood through the surfacing of research, matter(s) between clay~ceramic~and beyond

"It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived"

The Sighted Watchmaker : Making, Tim Ingold .2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Chambers for Surfaced Readings, Russell Moreton, Ceramics. 2025

Clay is always a depth for correspondences, simultaneously surfacing as a landing site~becoming.

Huts/Follies/Pavilions : Experimental Lives/Reworking Subjectivity.

Outpost 241024

It seems that the significance of an aesthetic event is in its future.

Timothy Morton, Realist Magic : Objects, Ontology, Causality.

Reworking Subjectivity.

Actualizing Traces.

Vectors/Inscriptions and Field Conditions.

Theory and Things.

The Intuitive Practices of the Untutored Maker.

Experimental Lives.

On Simple Huts.

On Exercising Experience.

Huts, as Folly or Pavilion, serving a deeper impulse of curiosity, pleasure, experimentation, discipline. While the primitive hut belongs equally to 'what architecture is' and to 'what architecture is not' ironically its greatest significance may derive from the many non architectural ideas it engages.

Anne Cline.

Giving way to the nature of materials, new sensitivity, new subjectivity.

Ceramic objects of open intervals, intersections, inner places, and places in-between. 

These primal images give us back houses in which the human beings certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life. A life that would be our own that would belong to us, in our very depths.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Ann Cline.

It would seem then that the search for the primitive hut begins in play. A deconstructing process in which children seem to examine what is given them, intent upon taking it apart. While Rykwert's primitive is founded in the expression of origins, collectively imagined and believed. Bachelard's primitive is founded in the expressions of youth, not as vulgar nostalgia (as he emphatically warns) but in images as we should have imagined them during the 'original impulse' of youth.

In other times of cultural transition, the primitive hut, as invention or as a construct of experience, has brought humans to the edge of their normative existence and from there allowed perspective and experimentation.

The more 'primitive' the hut the more its creators recognized the arbitrariness of their own culture.

Within the inhabited hut, cultural issues and practices readily converge with an agility larger structures can never match. Huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and lifestyle. The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

Divertissements and spectacles cover over the most basic human aspiration, to know what it is to have a human life.

Earth-House-Hold.

Gary Snyder. 1969

AM1.

Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion, History, Photography.

The Production of Space.

The Poetics of Space.

A Species of Spaces.

Space is not 'a priori' but rather a matter of relations between objects (things/phenomena).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Spatial Practices/Making Agency.

Circulation Diagram/Body/Space/Living/Activities/Production.

Movements/Interactions/Spaces/Volumes.

Tentative/Procedural Architecture (existential experiencing of built spaces).

Arakawa and Gins.

Body/Bodies as vector of movements/interactions/overlapping/navigating through interlocking/disparate spatial volumes.

Making and Meaning.

Andrew Higgott.

Peter Salter: Building Projects.

Architectural Association School.

Work created in design units such as that of Mike Gold, starting with the human figure as generator, or of Peter Wilson, prioritized sensibility over articulated theory, the evocative over the concrete: but the approach came to be evident in many student projects beyond these units. Much of this work was concerned with creating new forms of an architecture of meaning, and generating this meaning through a variety of intuitive devices.

As Peter Salter's own work developed, his interest in structural ingenuity gave way to a new sensitivity and subjectivity. A sensitivity to site and to the nature of materials, subjectivity in terms of making the personal and particular response. Seeing precedent in the practice of the Smithsons and other recent architects, but also in the practice of the untutored maker of things.

Grounding his work in the realization of the transformation of materials from natural form to the making of space: actualizing traces of context and echoes of history in its making. Rather than the more obvious and simple course of collaging fragments of pre-existing forms, it understands such devices and has an intuitive resonance of them. 

Architecture in Abjection.

What Greg Lynn in the 1990s is laying out here, following Deleuze and Guattari, is a relational understanding of the world, as opposed to an understanding based on things. For Deleuze and Guattari, relations occur not only between things but within the things themselves, such that the world is a vibrating field of potential, never in a moment of stasis or being but always changing. It is therefore very much about the in-between, and it is this in-between, this field of relations, that is a multiplicity.

Although Lynn's reference to and adoption of philosophical concepts has no doubt been productive not only for his own practice but for the architectural discipline as a whole, the simplification of that philosophy serves to overlook many further-reaching implications, such as the reworking of subjectivity.

Simplification of borrowed thought is thus one key criticism in this respect. The other, which applies not only to Lynn but also to architects engaging with the concept of emergence, rests in the application of that thought as an organisational and form-generating strategy.

Influenced by the emergent behaviours within networks, swarms, flocks and so on, the key thing to point out with the uptake of a processional or relational mode of thought within architecture is the shift in emphasis from the end product – the building – to the process through which the  building is conceived – the design process. The important aspect is how a form is generated, and how its parts interact and are organised, rather than the form itself.

Flows of various kinds and scales, make up architecture and connect it with the world.

Event (Deleuze/Guattari) as defined by Movement in terms of vectors and field relations, of Time or the idea that all things change, and Scale an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales become pertinent.

Arakawa and Gins explore a house with a client that at appears at first to be a pile of material. But that upon occupation, it expands into a habitable series of rooms whose volume shifts in relation to the movement of bodies within them.