The Withdrawn Ceramic Body Persists, But It Does Not Close ~ Research in Futurity

The Withdrawn Ceramic Body ~ Research in Futurity.

Towards an Elaborative Spatial Practice.

For Moreton, the withdrawn ceramic body is not where the research ends. It is where the research acquires another capacity for futurity.

Moreton’s spatial practice has developed through an extended gathering of bodies: architectural, material, photographic, textual, remembered, imagined and lived. These bodies have emerged through different situations and periods of working, including interiority, landscape, drawing, walking, architectural research, teaching, image-making, reading and the exploratory use of clay. They do not form a linear research history. Rather, they remain as propositions capable of returning, entering new relations and becoming otherwise.

The practice therefore begins not from a singular question requiring resolution, but from a multiplicity of questions that remain active through making. Earlier speculative spatial practices are not treated as completed stages through which the ceramic practice has subsequently progressed. They remain research bodies. Their propositions continue to have a capacity for encounter.

The ceramic bodies have not arrived to resolve these earlier questions. They have arrived as another access point.

This access point is significant because clay introduces a particular material condition through which multiplicity can gather. The recent work with clay allows architectural propositions, spatial memories, images, readings, bodily experiences, surfaces, apertures and material encounters to enter the same field without requiring them to become equivalent. Clay does not reconcile their differences. It provides a hospitable condition in which their differences can remain active.

This hospitality is important to Moreton’s developing spatial practice. It is not hospitality as an invitation into a predetermined interior. It is a more unstable form of hosting in which the host itself is changed by what it receives. Clay receives pressure, touch, resistance, gesture, force, moisture, gravity and time, but it does not simply register these things passively. It transforms them. The material becomes an active correspondent within the making.

The clay body therefore becomes a meeting place for other bodies.

The architectural body can enter it through proportion, enclosure, aperture, threshold and spatial memory. The photographic body can enter through trace, viewpoint, absence and the persistence of an earlier encounter. The textual body can enter through propositions, questions and speculative language. The remembered body can enter without being represented. Landscape can enter through weather, erosion, surface and movement. Other theoretical and artistic bodies can enter as correspondents rather than authorities.

None of these bodies needs to be reduced to the ceramic.

They remain themselves.

This is where Moreton’s spatial practice begins to move towards a practice of correspondence. The ceramic body does not become a container for research. It becomes a material condition through which different research bodies can encounter one another.

Multiplicity becomes correspondence.

The distinction is important. Multiplicity describes the presence of many bodies; correspondence describes what becomes possible between them. The ceramic does not gather in order to produce unity. It gathers in order to produce relation.

This also changes the understanding of the ceramic object. The fired ceramic is materially withdrawn from the provisionality of clay, but this withdrawal should not be understood as closure. Firing changes the condition of the material. What was soft, responsive and unstable becomes persistent. The provisional relations of making become materially carried forward into another state.

Pressure becomes surface.

Resistance becomes form.

Aperture becomes interior.

Gesture becomes trace.

Fire becomes transformation.

Ceramic becomes persistence.

Yet what persists is not simply the object.

Something of the correspondence persists with it.

The withdrawn ceramic body therefore occupies an unusual position within the spatial practice. It is withdrawn from the immediate event of making, but not withdrawn from relation. It carries the consequences of previous encounters into situations that have not yet happened. Its persistence makes another encounter possible.

This is where futurity enters.

Futurity, within Moreton’s practice, is not the prediction of what the ceramic will become. Nor is it an image of an imagined future. It is the capacity of a materially persistent body to enter another relation.

The ceramic waits.

It waits for architecture, for light, for another body, for proximity, for movement, for an altered viewpoint, for memory, for an encounter that cannot yet be known.

The future therefore exists not as a destination but as an interval of possibility.

This understanding also extends Moreton’s distinction between in~place and in~play. A spatial proposition cannot simply be transferred intact from one situation to another. Its physical components may persist, but its spatial proposition emerges through changing relations between architecture, ceramic, bodies, light, proximity, movement and atmosphere. The work remains spatially active when these relations remain capable of being re-entered.

The ceramic body consequently becomes a form of spatial persistence without becoming a fixed spatial meaning.

The same ceramic body can become another spatial body.

The same architectural body can produce another spatial proposition.

The same research body can enter another material condition.

This is why earlier exploratory research can remain relevant without being retrospectively converted into a predetermined origin story. The Waverley project, interiority research, architectural investigations, drawing, photography, landscape, teaching and reading do not need to be explained as steps towards ceramics. They remain active bodies whose propositions can now be furthered through clay.

The ceramic does not rewrite them.

It gives them another access point.

This access point also makes possible a different understanding of the archive. Rather than preserving research as a chronology of completed ideas, Moreton’s archive becomes a field of potential correspondence. Earlier texts, images and projects can encounter later ceramic bodies, while later making can return to earlier propositions without needing to reproduce them.

The archive becomes anarchive.

What was once speculative can become material.

What was once architectural can become corporeal.

What was once an image can become a spatial interval.

What was once a question can become an aperture.

What was once unfinished can remain unfinished, but acquire another body through which to continue.

This is not a movement from immaterial thought towards material resolution. It is a continuing movement between bodies.

Here, making becomes a form of spatial thinking. Clay does not illustrate an idea already formed elsewhere. The material encounter produces further thought. Resistance changes the proposition. The hand changes the surface. The surface changes the perception of the body. The body changes the spatial proposition. Fire changes the material condition. The fired body then enters another spatial situation.

The process is therefore recursive rather than sequential:

gathering ~ making ~ correspondence ~ withdrawal ~ encounter ~ futurity ~ gathering again

Within this movement, the ceramic body becomes neither object nor conclusion. It becomes a withdrawn spatial~practising body: materially persistent, relationally open and capable of carrying multiple research bodies into future encounters.

The body withdraws.

The correspondence continues.

The research remains~in~play.

And perhaps this is the deeper proposition of Moreton’s spatial practice: that making does not necessarily produce knowledge by resolving what is unknown. It can produce the conditions through which the unknown remains capable of becoming something else.

The withdrawn ceramic body is therefore not where the research ends.

It is where the research acquires another capacity for futurity.

The ceramic persists, but it does not close.

The earlier bodies remain different.

The spatial propositions remain open.

And what has been gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates. 

The Waverley Project~Remaining~In~Play : Working Notes/Collages : Exploratory Project MA Interior Design

SPACE~SITE~INTERVENTION Through Performative Archaeological Methods.

A space has been created, allowing for a different construction of what may be significant in these circumstances, relative to objects found in association with each other. (Robert Williams, Disjecta Reliquiae The Tate Thames Dig)

Associations and coincidences that become meaningful (or are unearthed) within the context of the activity.

Erika Suderburg. On Installation and Site Specificity

The Waverley Project 2014, UCA  Farnham, Interior Design MA. 

Reading Apparatus 270926

The ceramic bodies have not arrived to resolve these earlier questions. They have arrived as another access point.

This earlier investigation into Waverley begins with a site, but quickly becomes something less fixed: a gathering of ruins, landscape, architecture, memory, images, books, pathways, interiors and imagined encounters.

The site becomes a palimpsest.

The ruin becomes an interior.

The interior becomes a proposition.

What was being gathered here was not yet ceramic, but the conditions through which a ceramic body might later begin to think.

Walking, archaeology, drawing, collage, architecture and reading become ways of entering the site without resolving it. The Reading Room appears as an ephemeral interior within the ruin; images and fragments begin to construct other possible spaces; the landscape becomes something to be read through movement and encounter.

Perhaps these working notes remain unfinished precisely because they were never meant to arrive at a finished architecture.

They remain~in~play.

And somewhere within that unfinished field, the ceramic bodies have yet to arrive.

spatial practice, spatial site~practice, architecture, interiority, landscape, ruins, palimpsest, walking, making, drawing, collage, image~body, reading, site-specificity, phenomenology, atmosphere, memory, gathering, architecture~image, Reading Room, Hortus Conclusus, Waverley Project, speculative learning, spatial correspondence,

THE WAVERLEY PROJECT, methodologies in the making.

This research and its design proposal are centred on the arts and the humanities and their ongoing function in our contemporary society. The emphasis of this inquiry is located by the spatial practices of architecture, fine art and performance. My project is a field event and symposium that would be able to host intellectual dialogues, lectures (TED) workshops, performative events and exhibitions. I am particularly interested the relational production of social spaces and the aesthetics of builtspaces, both historical and ephemeral. The proposed use of Waverley Abbey near Famham as a possible site and retreat for this venture is valid as it links a possible interdisciplinary territory of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Tim Ingold (Making) Colin Renfrew (Figuring it Out) and others have for many years been researching and mapping this new spatiality.

What remains of Waverley Abbey and its sense of place are critical to the holistic and contemporary underpinning of this experiential event. Founded in 1128 it was the first Cistercian Abbey to be built in England. It is recorded that Cistercian life was initially based on manual labour and self-sufficiency, this was further supplemented by other activities like agriculture and brewing that enabled the abbey to support itself. Later over the centuries education and academia began to dominate the concerns of the abbey. The abbey was suppressed with its dissolution in 1536, although records show its activities were already at this time substantially diminished. The ruins and their site then enter into the imaginary realm through classic literature in the novel Waverley by Scott. Further on a pictorial reference from an engraving shows the ruins now incorporated as a fashionable landscape feature within the newly built Waverley Abbey House.

On a contemporary note Waverley Abbey has featured in a number of films ranging in genres from period costume dramas through to fantasy, together with post apocalyptic visions of dystopia. A recent film shoot required the construction of a sixty-foot tower made from internal scaffolding with a skin that recreated the adjacent ruinous fabric of this historic site.

Encountering the site is currently only manageable by foot; this short walk in the surrounding landscape sets up the sense of place and prepares our own subjectivities to its reception. It is in this expectation, this thinking in the landscape that the pastoral and educational aspects of the site become apparent. Currently access is only available through one directed pathway; a multiplicity of other access points and even other structures (bridges, earthworks and thickets) could begin to open up the spatial palimpsest already located at Waverley. What remains of the architectural fabric with its diminished interiors still grants a hospitality and refuge for both the body and the imagination. This activity opens up the experiential space of encountering ourselves through the enjoyment/entanglements of layered social space.

Waverley Abbey is a public monument in the custodian care of English Heritage. It can only be accessed by walking about a quarter of a mile from the limited parking spaces.

Waverley Site

Hortus Conclusus Sensing Spaces

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus 2011.

Directors’ Foreword: Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Zumthor’s architectural design practices consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. Looking at more than the physical fabric and form of the building, he often draws inspiration from memories of childhood experience. His projects aim to reference all aspects of sensory perception, addressing the relationship between the human body and the ways it may interact within the built environment. Many of Zumthor’s projects have been specifically noted for their thoughtful and evocative play on scale, colour, material and light in harmony with the buildings function and surroundings. (Peyton-Jones 2011: 9)

Using spatial practices as an inquiry into issues of “site” through architecture, art and performance.

What are the possible phenomenological assets of the site?

What remains of the interior spaces of the architecture and how much of the ruin has been submerged into the parkland setting?

How might these be explored and subsequently re-presented into the public realm?

A SITE BASED Symposium on ‘Making’ as experienced through the palimpsest of place.

Featuring the ‘Reading Room’ an ephemeral interior space, which gathers-up the experiential values of ‘Ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images.

Library of Contents/Taxonomies Knots of Reference/Lines

Humanity, An Emotional History:

The Poetics of Space:

Architecture and Allegory:

The Psychoanalysis of Fire:

Existential Space in Cinema:

Natural History:

Sculpting in Time:

Land Drawings, Installations and Excavations:

The Physical Self:

Archaeology:

Making:

Politics of Rehearsal:

Palimpsest usage by Historians as a description, of the way people experience time. That is as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts. The production of augmented realities brought about by the melding of layers of material place with virtual representations.

Accumulated iterations of a design or site, evidence of the former use remains.

A kind of forensic science used to describe objects/things placed over one another to establish the sequence of events of an accident or crime scene.

The Concept of Palimpsest, a way of describing how generations alter the landscape.

Heidegger. Jung. Archetypes. Pottery

Architecture

Building Practices

The Everyday : The Jug.

The Dwelling Place : The Bridge Mediators for spatial experiences.

Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.

Colour

Texture Surface Enclosures Voids

Sample Materials

Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details. Erasure  in  drawing  and  architectural  planning  (space  voids)  as  a  methodology  to superimpose multiplicities.

Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma. Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.

Learning  Spaces  as  a  performative  spatial  practice  through  a  process of tuning and minimising (Minimising, NO stage in the forest, Kego Kuma).

NAVIGATION AND CRITICALITY THE READING ROOM

ORGANISATION IN THE FIELD OF RUINS COMPONENTS, AGENTS AND ARCHIVES.

Categories of Architecture as Categories of Perception. Architecture and Nature.

Architecture as a reflecting/gathering of the phenomena of human nature/Nature.

The exhibition and research relationships around the nature of things.

The architecture provides a point of intersection between mass and its sublimation in imagery and thought, between immateriality and its reification. It allows apparent opposites to be seamlessly united - or parted again, at the whim of the weather god. (Building with Images, Herzog and De Meuron’s Library at Eberswalde)

Robin Evans. Translations from Drawing to Building

Figures, Doors and Passages

Essays and Other Texts (AA Documents 2)

The Social Condenser in Operation.

Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space-a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.

Figures, Doors and Passages, Robin Evans. 1978 (Titled Image) Robin Evans (1944-1993) Historian of Architecture.

His writings covered a wide range of concerns such as society’s role in the evolution and development of building types, together with interests on architectural representation, aspects of geometry and modes of projection. Evans always drew on first-hand experience from direct observation to arrive at his insights. These insights ‘open up the way for alternative constructions of everyday reality-a reality, an architecture, which bears the traces, albeit invisible, of its own provisional circumstances.’(Mostafavi,Mohsen, Paradoxes of the Ordinary. 1997)

Peter Greenaway. Architecture and Allegory 

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space

The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Herzog and De Meuron. Natural History

Eberswalde Library (is both a concrete cube and a

pictorial skin)

Western Culture ‘Is a culture of blending and mixing substances until they are unrecognisable producing products fated to harden into a useless degenerative state in a dump or depot.’

Alchemy of Building using Images (Eberswalde Library).

Herzog and De Meuron have a sensitivity to irreversible, entropic processes. 

Since the 1980s Herzog and De Meuron have been actively working with an art praxis that has positively saturated some of the outer skins of their buildings with images. Herzog himself acknowledge that it is impossible for him to be able to art and architecture at the same time, and he comments that ‘there is no longer any need to express himself other than in architectural terms. ’

Beauty and Atmosphere/ Science and Art in Motion.

Dialogues of built works between sites of collection/classification and construction. Building on the threshold of tensions (human fabrications/craft and social interactions) between the material and the metaphysical, between evanescence and substance and illusion and specificity.

Much of Herzog and De Meuron’s practice has focused on museums and libraries, or represented other transformative ventures around winemaking and medicine.

Tony Fretton. The Architecture of the Unconscious Collective

Abstraction and Familiarity Buildings and Their Territories

The Lisson Gallery, London. 1991

This was a building that had more in common with the sculpture of Donald Judd and Dan Graham than with any known architectural tendency. Like that work , it is presented less as an object demanding scrutiny in its own right and rather as an instrument (Observatory, Kengo Kuma) that directs the viewers attention to their relationship with the wider world, (bdonline.co.uk, Tony Fretton’s Fuglsang Art Museum 2008/Ellis Woodman)

Library as a ‘type’ of spatial classification (architectonics) through visual vocabularies and working practices.

Derrida. GLAS

This ‘Anti-Book’ (see also Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma) stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature as it creates playful interrogations/situations around the methodology of reading. Derrida cites and grafts from the works of Hegel and Jean Genet. The physical qualities of the book are arranged in such a way as to make it read like a collage open for subjective and subversive interpretations. Its boundaries and borders, paragraphs and spacings are constantly becoming merged as a fugitive entity. In fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries (The Postmodern) that seek to divide it up inside itself (Deconstruct). Its fragments (What Remains from its reading) offer multiple beginnings and endings (or maybe Openings and Conclusions, see Lefebvre).

Kate Whiteford. Land Drawings, Installations, Excavations (Fictional Archaeologies)

Colin Renfrew. Remote Sensing (Subtle Transpositions between media)

The whole landscape is a palimpsest of human activities: lines (See also Ingold) which experience has etched on the ageing face of the past. Landscape history. Where does history stop and art begin?

Peter Zumthor. Multiplicity and Memory

Thinking Architecture Atmospheres

Heidegger for Architects

Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of The Skin

Identity, Intimacy, Domicile, the phenomenology of home. The Thinking Hand

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

Lived Experience~A Situated Ecology

Lived Experience

A Situated Ecology.

Tentative and Open Spatial Bodies, Ceramics. 2026

Correspondences of Bodies — the gathering

Wayfaring — the movement

Archive → Anarchive — the transformation~

This practice has not developed through a linear progression of ideas, but through a shifting ecology of encounters.

Ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching, spatial research and collaborative making have remained in correspondence across different periods of the work. Some propositions have receded; others have returned years later in altered material conditions. Earlier works continue to participate in the present, not as resolved historical stages but as active traces within an ongoing search.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its formation has taken place through materials, places, bodies, architectures, organisms, images, texts, tools and other people. Each enters differently, producing correspondences that can alter the direction of the work. Knowledge is not simply gathered and applied, but emerges through these encounters.

The studio becomes a site of this activity: a place where research can remain provisional, where material processes can think alongside theoretical propositions, and where visual and spatial material can hold different ontological positions without requiring them to settle into a single explanation.

Clay has become an increasingly important participant in this ecology. Through making, the material receives traces of pressure, resistance, repetition, weathering, drilling and repair. Surfaces become histories of encounters; cavities become interiors produced by action; minor gestures accumulate into larger spatial conditions.

What appears in the present is therefore never entirely new.

It is a surfacing.

Earlier concerns with the body, absence and trace correspond with current questions of perforation, ecological agency and material interiority. Architectural research returns through the vessel and the cavity. Interiority becomes porous. Repetition becomes difference. A minor gesture can move an entire ecology.

I understand this as a spatial practice of learning to make.

The practice remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research is a gathering of correspondences rather than a search for a final position: a situated ecology in which materials, histories, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures can continue to enter, disturb and transform one another.

The work does not simply record where the practice has been.

It creates conditions for where it might go next.

Correspondences of Bodies

Wayfaring from Archive to Anarchive.

The archive is not proving the present practice.

It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

Readings, images, drawings, places, architectures, materials and remembered encounters gather as bodies of inquiry. They do not form a history so much as a spatial field—bodies becoming perceptible through their proximity to one another.

Clay enters this gathering differently.

It touches what has been read, remembered and imagined, becoming another body through which these propositions can move. Hand, matter, force, resistance, surface, interior, aperture and atmosphere begin to gather. Fire changes their proposition again, carrying them into ceramic bodies that persist, withdraw and encounter other bodies.

The archive begins to loosen.

Old propositions find new surfaces.

Images find other interiors.

Readings enter matter.

Matter returns the reading differently.

Archive~clay~body~fire~ceramic~space~atmosphere~wayfaring~correspondence.

What emerges is not a method or a sequence, but a spatial body of inquiry: a wayfaring among bodies already in movement.

The anarchive is this movement.

A gathering that does not contain, but opens.

A correspondence that does not conclude, but continues.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It reverberates.

Spatial~Agencements : What is gathered is never simply contained~it reverberates~

Spatial~Agencements

A Research Ecology of Making.

A practice begins somewhere between things.

A reading encounters an image.

An image recalls a place.

A place produces a movement.

A movement gathers a material.

A material resists the hand.

The resistance changes the making.

Nothing quite remains where it began.

Spatial Agencements describes this movement through a practice that gathers bodies without finally containing them. Clay, ceramic, drawing, architecture, landscape, photography, memory, reading and walking enter into provisional correspondence. Some relations become visible; others remain latent, waiting for another encounter.

The wayfarer gathers.

But gathering is not accumulation. It is a temporary bringing-into-relation.

A fragment may become a drawing.

A drawing may become a spatial proposition.

A spatial proposition may enter clay.

Clay may become ceramic.

The ceramic may enter another room, another atmosphere, another body.

The practice moves through these transformations without requiring them to resolve into a single narrative.

Here, the archive becomes mobile.

Old images, forgotten texts, abandoned propositions and previous material encounters can be returned to and disturbed by the present. What was once documentation can become material again. What appeared peripheral can become central. What seemed finished can reopen.

Archive → anarchive.

The studio consequently becomes less a place where things are produced than a situation in which bodies encounter one another.

Clay is one such body.

It receives, resists, absorbs, fractures, records and transforms. Fire changes the conditions again. What was provisional becomes persistent, but persistence does not mean closure. The ceramic withdraws from the immediacy of making while remaining available to light, atmosphere, architecture, movement and other bodies.

The work becomes a spatial body.

Not because it represents space.

Because it participates in relations that produce space.

Keywords.

spatial agencements, research ecology, wayfaring, gathering, correspondence, spatial bodies, bodying, material reciprocity, speculative learning, situated ecology, making, clay~ceramic, archive~anarchive, walking, landscape, interiority, permeability, threshold, futurity, In~~Touching,

Russell Moreton's current practice operates as a spatial ecology of making in which ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, landscape, interiority, teaching, reading and remembered experience remain in active correspondence.

Rather than developing through a linear progression of ideas, the practice moves through encounters. Materials, images, texts, places, bodies and previous works are gathered, displaced and returned to in altered circumstances. Earlier propositions do not become resolved stages within a history of development; they remain available as active bodies within the present.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its spatiality does not reside simply in the production of objects with architectural or sculptural characteristics. Space emerges through the relations that form between bodies: between material and gesture, surface and interior, object and atmosphere, architecture and movement, reading and making.

The studio becomes an expanded environment in which these relations can be tested.

Making is not understood as the execution of a pre-existing idea. It is a mode of inquiry through which thought becomes distributed across material, body and situation. Clay participates in this process through its resistance, plasticity, weight, fragility and capacity for transformation. Pressure becomes trace; cutting becomes aperture; excavation becomes interior; repetition becomes difference. The ceramic body emerges through these material events rather than simply receiving a predetermined form. This emphasis on making as an active mode of knowing is already central to Moreton's recent formulation of the studio as a site of continuous exchange. 

Gathering

A recurring figure within the practice is the wayfarer.

The wayfarer gathers.

Readings, images, fragments, materials, spatial memories, drawings, architectural propositions and encounters are collected not as information to be accumulated, but as bodies that might enter into correspondence.

The gathering remains provisional.

Something is carried.

Something is placed beside something else.

A relation appears.

The bodies may then disperse, only to return through another material or situation.

Gather ~ carry ~ encounter ~ release ~ return ~ gather again.

This movement is central to the practice's relationship with the archive.

The archive is not treated as a stable repository of completed knowledge. Through collage, drawing, rereading and making, archival material becomes mobile. The old text encounters the new ceramic; the image encounters another body; a forgotten proposition becomes perceptible through a changed material condition.

The archive begins to become an anarchive.

Not because its contents are discarded, but because they begin to move again.

The archive is not proving the present practice. It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

This is why the practice can be understood as a research ecology rather than a research method. It does not establish a fixed procedure through which knowledge is extracted. It creates conditions in which different bodies of material can encounter, trouble and transform one another.

Wayfaring

Wayfaring provides a corresponding spatial logic.

The practice moves through environments rather than simply representing them. Walking, looking, gathering and making become ways of attending to the relations already present within a place.

The wayfarer does not simply move across a landscape.

The landscape participates in the movement.

This extends into the studio. Materials, tools, surfaces, texts and images become part of a field through which the practice navigates. The resulting work is less a destination than a temporary constellation: a gathering of forces that remains open to further movement.

The spatial body is therefore not a body that contains movement.

It is a body that becomes through movement.

Correspondent bodies

Theoretical and artistic references enter this ecology not simply as sources of authority but as correspondent bodies.

Tim Ingold's thinking around correspondence and wayfaring, Karen Barad's account of intra-action and diffraction, Erin Manning's attention to movement and the anarchive, Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of interiority, and the architectural propositions of Arakawa and Gins and Zuzana Kovar all become possible bodies with which the practice can think.

They are not applied to the work as explanatory frameworks.

They enter the work.

They alter its vocabulary.

The material encounters them in turn.

A reading can become pressure.

A theoretical proposition can become an aperture.

An architectural question can become a chamber.

A spatial memory can become surface.

The relation is reciprocal.

The ceramic body

Within this ecology, clay has become an increasingly significant participant.

The clay body gathers what has passed through the practice, but it does not simply contain it. It troubles what has been gathered through its own material resistance.

This is where the practice moves towards the idea of the Permeable Chamber.

The ceramic body is neither simply vessel nor sculpture, container nor architectural fragment. Its apertures, surfaces, cavities and thresholds produce relations between interior and exterior, enclosure and permeability, withdrawal and correspondence.

The body becomes through what passes through it.

Fire changes this proposition again.

What was provisional in clay becomes materially persistent in ceramic. The fired body withdraws from the immediate responsiveness of making, but the relations of making continue through its surfaces, apertures, weight, atmosphere and spatial presence.

The ceramic is withdrawn from making, but not withdrawn from correspondence.

It enters another temporality.

Light touches it.

Air passes around it.

Shadow inhabits it.

Architecture situates it.

Another body encounters it.

The ceramic becomes a spatial body not because spatial characteristics have been added to it, but because it continues to participate in spatial relations.

Interiority as movement

Interiority consequently becomes less a place than a movement between bodies.

It may occur within a cavity, across a surface, between an aperture and light, within the atmospheric field of an installation, or within the encounter between a viewer and a withdrawn ceramic body.

The interior is not necessarily what is contained.

It can be what emerges between.

This allows Moreton's earlier concerns with architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching and spatial research to remain active within the present practice without being reduced to historical influences. The current ceramic work becomes another site through which those concerns can be materially re-entered.

The practice is therefore less concerned with defining what a ceramic object is than with asking what relations a ceramic body can make possible.

In~~Touching

This movement brings the practice towards In~~Touching.

Touch is understood here not simply as physical contact but as a distributed condition of correspondence. Bodies can touch across distance, through light, atmosphere, memory, surface, material resistance and spatial relation.

To touch is to be altered.

To become in touch is to become responsive to what another body is doing.

The practice consequently attends to the world's patternings and murmurings: forces, traces, residues, atmospheres and movements that pass between bodies without necessarily becoming fully visible.

The ceramic body carries these murmurings forward.

But they are never its possession.

They continue elsewhere.

A spatial ecology of making

Moreton's present spatial practice can therefore be understood as a research ecology of making: a field in which gathering, wayfaring, correspondence, material encounter and transformation remain continually entangled.

Its movement might be traced as:

gathering → wayfaring → correspondence → troubling → making → firing → withdrawal → reverberation → gathering again

This is not a method.

It is a condition of practice.

The work remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research does not seek a final position but creates temporary conditions in which different bodies can encounter one another and become otherwise.

The spatial emerges through this movement.

The ceramic body becomes spatial through correspondence.

The archive becomes anarchive through movement.

Making becomes a way of learning.

And the practice continues to wayfare.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates. 

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

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

Abstract

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

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

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Introduction: The Anarchival Threshold of Clay

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

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

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Methodological Framework: Processual Mapping and the Anarchive Loop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Conclusion: The Open Threshold

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

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

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

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Bibliography

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

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