Russell Moreton

Bodies of Things

“For me, ceramics has gradually become a way of thinking through material, space and encounter.”

I work with clay through a process of making, looking and responding. Ideas about space, architecture, interiority and material relations run alongside this process, often discovered through the work rather than determined beforehand.

I work mainly with hand-built clay, constructing bodies from slabs and developing them through drawing, cutting, piercing, layering, painting and firing. The work moves between vessel, sculpture and architectural fragment, but these distinctions are never quite fixed. I am interested less in form as a resolved object than in the forces that gather through and around a body—pressure, resistance, movement, gravity, touch, fire and time.

These forces become registered through the material. Surfaces are layered and weathered; openings and perforations allow light and air to pass through; interiors become active spaces of relation. The ceramic body is not considered in isolation, but through its correspondence with other bodies—material, architectural, spatial, atmospheric and human.

Increasingly, ceramics has become a way of thinking through relationships between bodies of things: between surface and interior, enclosure and permeability, material and space. The work develops through these encounters, where making, looking and learning remain closely connected.

I studied Ceramics at Epsom School of Art and Design (1981–84).

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Tensions and Correlations : Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies

Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies

Tension is what happens between bodies.

Correlation is what allows those tensions to become relations.

Ecology of Asperities : Notes on a Particular Spatial Practice

Matter(s) of Space~Surfacing

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

The surface is where the body records its relations.

Scoring → tension becomes visible.

Wrapping → relation becomes operative.

Bandaging → vulnerability becomes perceptible.

Refractory layering → endurance becomes possible.

Together they produce the body.

The ceramic body is also encountered through acts of wrapping, tensioning and bandaging. White brushed refractory materials form protective layers across the surface, recalling earlier propositions around the bandaged body: a body marked by vulnerability, repair, protection and the forces acting upon it.

The refractory layer introduces a particular material correspondence. It protects the ceramic body from the extreme conditions of firing while simultaneously preparing it to undergo transformation. Protection therefore does not remove the body from force; it enables its passage through force.

The surface becomes a place where these forces are gathered.

Scored lines crossing the white areas establish temporary demarcations across the body. They can be understood less as drawn images than as traces of tension: lines through which pressure, resistance, division and movement become perceptible. The scoring interrupts the apparent stability of the coated surface, making visible something of the forces passing across and through the body.

Wrapping extends this condition. Wire, cloth and layered materials bind separate ceramic elements while also producing tension between them. The body is held together, but not resolved. Its parts remain perceptibly separate, caught within a temporary arrangement of pressure, restraint and correspondence.

Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies therefore describes a ceramic condition in which protection and exposure, binding and permeability, vulnerability and endurance remain active together.

The bandage does not simply repair the body.

It records that the body has been subject to force.

The wrapping does not simply hold the body together.

It makes tension perceptible.

The refractory layer does not prevent transformation.

It allows the body to enter the fire.

refractory layer ~ protective skin ~ bandage ~ accumulated surface ~ preparation for fire

force → relation → body

Tensions and Correlations is the conceptual proposition. Wrapped~Tensioned describes the material operation, and Bandaged Bodies brings the work back into corporeal and affective territory.

Capturing Forces~Material Events : Sites of Difference and Multiplicity that precede Identity.

 

Axis Web~Fellowship Proposal 2025.

My practice begins with making as a site of encounter: a way of thinking through materials, bodies and spaces rather than simply producing objects. I work primarily with clay and ceramics, using exploratory, research-driven processes in which material behaviour becomes an active participant in the work. Clay is not treated as a passive substance awaiting form, but as a material with its own tendencies, resistances, temporalities and capacities to transform intention.

Informed by materialist and process-based thinking, including the work of Tim Ingold, Erin Manning and Karen Barad, I understand making as an ecological and relational practice. My ceramic works emerge through an ongoing negotiation between human gesture and material agency. They register the minor actions of making—touching, folding, assembling, piercing, scoring, washing and marking— while retaining the instability of the processes through which they come into being.

I am interested in the point at which intention becomes entangled with material behaviour. Through this entanglement, surfaces, interiors and spatial propositions emerge. The resulting works are not simply objects, but material events: sites where bodies, gestures, histories and ideas meet. Making becomes a form of navigation through which thought is distributed across matter, space and time.

Alongside my studio practice, I am developing an ‘anarchive’ of research material gathered throughout my academic and professional studies. Rather than preserving this material as a fixed archive, I am interested in activating it through encounters between practitioners, ideas and materials. This could take the form of an institutional context, an online resource, or a non-disciplinary gathering of active practitioners.

My earlier studies in Spatial Practice at Canterbury and subsequent work at Farnham, where I proposed a ‘theatre of research’ within an interior design project, continue to inform this direction. The fellowship would enable me to develop a practice in which making, research and spatial encounter operate as mutually generative forms of inquiry: a process of making-with in which materials, ideas and bodies can meet and produce unforeseen relations.

Making Intensified Surfaces~Spatial Propositions

Making Intensified Surfaces : A Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

My practice begins somewhere between the hand and the structure.

Clay is not simply a material to be formed. It is a body in negotiation: resistant, absorbent, unstable, enduring. Through making, I enter into a process of continual adjustment in which the work is never entirely known in advance. Form emerges through a reciprocal encounter between intention, matter, gesture, tool, surface, gravity, failure, and time.

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

I am interested in ceramic bodies that begin to exceed their own material designation. Slab-built, perforated, scored, drilled, painted, weathered, and reconfigured, they occupy an unstable interval between vessel, sculpture, architectural fragment, diagram, ruin, and spatial apparatus. Their surfaces become intensified fields of activity. The hole is an aperture; the grid is a structure; the line is a proposition; the surface is a record of becoming.

Making is therefore not the execution of an idea but a mode of inquiry.

I understand the studio as an expanded environment: no longer a retreat from the world, but a site of continuous exchange. Ideas enter through materials, bodies, texts, places, conversations, architectures, and acts of attention. The work develops through an iterative process of monitoring, correction, combination, and transformation.

My site-based practice extends this inquiry into environments and situations. I construct provisional spatial compositions in which craft, architecture, theory, drawing, sociality, and embodied experience become entangled. These works are not fixed objects but relational propositions: spaces for inhabiting, encountering, sensing, imagining, and thinking.

I am interested in what happens when the distinction between object and environment begins to collapse.

A ceramic body becomes a spatial body.

A surface becomes a threshold.

A structure becomes an event.

Making becomes a way of producing knowledge through the material, the embodied, and the situated.

The work emerges through an excess of form: something always remains unfinished, unresolved, overspilling the structural integrity of the object. This excess is not a failure of construction but its generative condition.

I work within this instability.

Between craft and architecture.

Between matter and thought.

Between the body that makes and the space that is made.

Between the object and the world it begins to produce.

Towards~Making a holding in place : Tentative Architectures/Ecologies~Wayfaring : Clay/Prebiotic World/Correspondences

Cairns-Smith suggested that the present essential elements of biology-nucleic acids and catalyzing proteins-evolved on a kind of prebiotic scaffolding. Ultimately the scaffolding disappeared, leaving behind the biochemistry that now controls the processes of all living things. The vanishing supporting structure, in the view of Cairns-Smith, could have been clay.

Life Search, Time-Life Books.

05/03/2013

Leylines : Modes of Articulation~Speculative Making

Research~Creation : Art Begins In the Manner~Way of Practice.

Clay Matter(s) as innate knowledge, intuition, speculation.

A Serious Place : Pronouncements of both play and inquiry.

Artist's Book. Collage and drawings, research images from Josef Albers.

The Call of Indigenous Philosophy as story, as performance, as practice.

Modes of Articulation~Speculative Making.

Slow Philosophy/Discursive Attachments : Gathering Inquiry/Materials/Objects/Things

Slow Philosophy/Discursive Attachments : Gathering Materials/Objects/Things

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.

Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.

SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

The Enchantment of Modern Life.

Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett

Be not inhospitable to strangers

lest they be angels in disguise

Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate

David Childers, Heart In My Soul

Collage Works : Architectural Studies. Outpost Studios, Norwich.

Studio Works : Praxis between theory and practice. Outpost 2020.

Outpost Studios Norwich, collage, textual, intermedia, 

spatial practice, resource, project space, art practice, research, book works

Architectural Inquiry : Metaphysical Surfaces

Blue Spaces Of Everyday Enchantments : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal

Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'

Tim Ingold 2011

Materials, Tim Ingold, slow philosophy, studio works, textile, clay, painting, yellow ochre

New works around fired clay, painting, wrapping forms, metal, textiles and stones.

Architectural research for a library within a studio.

clay, textile, wrapping, painting, natural objects, 

photographic surface, asperity, poetics of process, studio

Palimpsest/Surface Sprays : Spaces Between Objects

Site based inquiry for sculpture trail at Raveningham

collage, research, spatiality, art practice, alternative photography, 

drawing, architectural, intervention, visual fine art, craft

studio, metaphysical space, collage, Palimpsest, Cristina Iglesias, Steven Holl, Jackie Leven, Tim Ingold, Julian Stair, drawing, sprays, Jane Bennett, Russell Moreton, Lucio Fontana,

Making Iterations/Procedures Crafted with Care ~The Interweaving of Everyday Experience in Texture~Pattern~Weave

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 

Affective~Ecologies~Immersive Atmospheres.

Matterings~Un-doing theory into the making of the everyday.

The Anthropology of Skill.

Architecting with experience.

On the distinction between Art and Technology.

Yet speech is no ordinary skill. Weaving  together in narrative, the multiple strands of action and perception specific to diverse task and situations, it serves, if you will, as the 'Skill of skills'. And if one were to ask where culture lies, the answer would not be in some shadowy domain of symbolic meaning, hovering aloof from the 'hands on' business of practical life, but in the very texture and pattern of the weave itself.

Tim Ingold. Beyond Art And Technology.

Circulation Diagram~Lines of Flow amongst Clay.

2025 Diary Content.

May 26 - June 1

Readings and their speculations of theory into the realm of everyday practices.

Interior Spaces.

Infra~Bodies of Immediacy 

Becoming Volatile, matter(s) entering into movement, creating in~with bodies.

The permanency of ceramic objects both reflect and indexically link clay with its very nature of uncertainty and change through the very extreme and  volatile processes of firing. 

Clay is about the primacy of the corporeal human body as it attempts to express~abject itself through bodily metaphors or nesting, dwelling, nurturing and enduring.  

The Inner Life of Pots~Ceramics

Tunings~Innerness~Thresholds~Change

Sounding Voids/Muted Light

Brian Clarke

Concordia

Film, analysis, organisation of human access, wonderous, the best of myself.

Elements of flight, collage, and sensate fictions.

Hannsjorg Voth

Working with intensity(building structures)

Architectural Reflexive Spaces

Inhabitation's into the continuous weather world.

Landscapes~Making~Building~Ecologies

Innovative Objects~For Critical~Philosophical Thinking~Living.

Cognitive nature~potentiality of matter(s) of making worlds. 

Tectonics materials, matter(s) of wood, light, clay and water.

Outposts, observatories, places of inquiry, dwelling, self builds.

Independent researcher, artist in residence, works manager, project development. 

Constituting Consistencies.

Bodily/Corporeal Metaphors, Analogies and Poetics. 

Calvino, exactitude, lightness, quickness, visibility, multiplicity.

Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties~forces and emergent spatial thresholds

Outpost Correspondence 270224

Studio 3.16 Russell Moreton

The Minor Gesture : Manning/Artaud / Newman

Within the body of knowledge there is a mind in the flesh, quick as lightning.

Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties.

* The haptic engagement.

* The stage of drawing.

* Gesture and act.

Drawing exists in a state of potentiality. It is the instability of the framed image or object that resists definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself as at its suggestion—its possibility within a formation that has yet to occur. The drawing remains suspended in becoming, producing an uncertainty, and with it an anxiety, about what stage of language it inhabits.

To look with the eye and touch of an artist is to observe with sustained scrutiny while remaining aware of the social conditions from which forms emerge. The connection between the drawings in the exhibition lies in the value given to gesture as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace upon the paper.

— Catherine de Zegher, on Avis Newman

Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.

Within the realm of visual representation, drawing functions as an act of tracing absence.

The mark both opens and closes. It is an inscriptive game that is simultaneously motional and emotional, allowing an active participation in, and temporary mastery over, separation anxiety, while also marking the child's movement towards independence.

The earliest drawings are guided less by the visual exploration of space than by an exploration of movement and spatial relations.

Drawing begins in bodily response. Through acts of inscription it attempts to bring forth a visible language. Gestural traces reveal a continuous process of situating being within becoming.

Drawn from the body of knowledge onto the surface of experience.

For me, drawing continually manifests the endless repetition of remaking. As sensation, it occupies the space of anxiety—perhaps even a childhood anxiety.

## Moving Bodies / Spatial Thresholds

Architecture is entered physically, but also imaginatively. We inhabit not only space but its poetics.

### St Jerome in His Study (1474–75)

Antonello da Messina examines earthly limits through the image of St Jerome seated within a carefully constructed study, seemingly dissected to expose its interior. The room becomes both a place for thought and an architecture of the mind: a space containing books, writing, and the material conditions necessary for intellectual cultivation.

The painting suggests that space may be crossed by a mind capable of moving beyond physical boundaries. This capacity to transcend limits is shared by architecture itself.

In the work of Carlo Scarpa, particularly at Brion Cemetery, physical thresholds become poetic thresholds. Crossing from one space to another also becomes a passage between life and death, humanity and nature, memory and landscape. Alongside the tangible forms of architecture exists an invisible architecture of transition.

Brion Cemetery — Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione, 2017.

## Enric Mestre

### Architectures for Silence and Meditation

Building models become blueprints for larger constructions.

Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed, and the enclosed.

Enric Mestre's work draws equally upon the principles of classical form and the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He possesses an exceptional sensitivity to mass, planar relationships, and spatial proportion, translating the language of architecture into intimate sculptural objects.

His sculptures are enriched by the subtle and controlled colouration of their clay surfaces. The patinas possess a quiet complexity, relating more closely to the fabric of buildings than to conventional sculpture. Rough textures and smooth planes temper the austerity of the forms, while restrained colours distinguish individual surfaces and volumes.

Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist architecture. It carries the same austerity and asceticism while evoking a profound sense of memorial and elegy. These are deeply contemplative objects that move beyond formal exercises in harmony, proportion, chromatics, and composition.

Their quietness contains an unmistakable sense of *memento mori*. David Whiting describes many of Mestre's sculptures as possessing a sepulchral quality: repositories of memory, perhaps, or silent sentinels of an unspecified commemoration. They invite the imagination to wander through unsettling landscapes of urban fragments and industrial architectures.

Their cenotaph-like solemnity produces isolation and stillness, leaving the viewer to construct their own narratives.

— David Whiting

## Invisible Cities

*Italo Calvino*

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire—or its reverse, a fear."

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears. Even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules