Overspilling Forms : Unnoticed Displacements/Tensions and Correlations~The Silent Transformations

 The Fluidity Of Life.

(or how one is already the other)

The notion of silent transformations encountered in the corner of a page. How will these unnoticed displacements, the silent transformations one day be considered.

Francois Jullien

The Silent Transformations

Things Superimposed~Dispositive~Spill

Overspilling Forms~Sympathy~Abject(ion)

https://seagullbooks.org/products/the-silent-transformations

To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption—just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern—specifically Chinese—ways of thinking about time and processes of change.

Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought’s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, offers a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and provides insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.

In The Silent Transformations, Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy.

Makings~Silent transformations~translations from the continuous weather-world.

Translations~Places of Inquiry.

russellmoreton.com

Interactions and correspondences wayfaring through the weather-world of clay and texts.

Continuous Readings~Translations : Weathering and the Passage of Air.

14 Weather-world.

'Can man live elsewhere than in air?' asked the philosopher Luce Irigaray.

The Life of Lines

The Life Of Lines.

Tim Ingold.

Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is interested in developing collaborative and speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.

A site-based practice that further develops into speculative learning, creative propositions for knowledge production through Spatial Practices.

Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material further develops his inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased.

His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.

Assemble forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.

For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His finished fired constructions could become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s).

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham. Spatial Practices MA, Canterbury School of Architecture. Visual Art BA Hons, Winchester School of Art. Ceramics HSND, Epsom School of Art and Design.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton

I Belong to the Sky : Dreams leave their nest, Peter Gabriel.

 

This month’s art is called Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019 by Berndnaut Smilde

The cover art for I Belong to the Sky is called ‘Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019’ by Berndnaut Smilde, with a photo by Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk. Smilde’s work consists of installations, sculptures and photography. His Nimbus works present a transitory moment of presence in a specific location and Smilde is interested in that short-term, temporary aspect of the work. The clouds exist for a few seconds before they fall apart again. 

“I loved this image of the sky,” adds Peter. “The cloud brought inside - that mixture of outside and interior worlds. I think that's what the song is all about. This mix between the interior and the exterior and the transition between them. So, I was very happy that we were allowed to use this image.

Berndnaut has talked about the clouds being able to represent different things, even happy things and that they could also be about dreams and provide a sense of the future. I didn't know that when I saw the image but, obviously, he was thinking visually in very similar ways to how I was working with the lyric and the sound. Part of the pleasure of this whole process of trying to work with visual artists is that they also spend a lot of time and energy thinking through their work to get to the point of the image and when it sometimes intuitively feels like a match, you get more than the sum of the parts.”

An asperity of thoughts/Vibrant Matter : Braking Down/Diffracting/ The Apparatus of Reading/Research

250323

Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl

Building/Uncertainties into the explorations of making. Rem Koolhaas.

.

REVIEW into INTERIORS MA UCA 2013-15 Research into new forms of translation/transmission

MAKING vibrant gaps/assemblages between the texts/images/objects and everyday things LANDSCAPES OF AFFECTIVE AESTHETIC ATTRACTION

MATERIALS THEMSELVES become the TOOLS of PERCEPTION 

Enchantment from the potential of things.

The Fabric of thoughts

The invisible within the visible (energy,magic,causality)

RELATEDNESS, connected to the Place and Function of Things within a Field.

Texts, form their own contexts/reflexivity, breaking down phenomena into meaning, conclusions and critique, they render phenomena and its psychic information redundant.

We think we know how we should feel sociologically, yet in doing so we deny ourselves the direct affectiveness of people and objects that can provide different perceptual relationships.

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE=ECOLOGY Lygia Clark : A Space open to time. Cornelia H. Butler

The World is a Collage

Collage and montage are quintessential techniques in modem and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Hapticity and Time

Notes on a fragile Architecture

The Perception of the Environment Essay in Livelihood, dwelling and skill Tim Ingold

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception Madeline Schwartzman

STILLNESS IN A MOBILE WORLD Bissell, Fuller

ECOLOGICAL approaches/affordances to aesthetic perception ART and AESTHETIC PATTERNS : into an ecology of mind.

Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information that it contains. Camouflage is addressed, perhaps, less to architecture itself than to the subjective processes by which 

human beings experience architecture. Illustrated by the photographic practice of Francesca Woodman, we see her seemingly absorbed by her environment in way that shows a desire to both identify with, and become part of her surroundings.

A desire/transgression met and mediated through a certain sensitivity and openness to the environment, fostering a sense of connectivity between human beings and their environment.

Neil Leach

EXISTENCE, SPACE and ARCHITECTURE Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Developing the idea that architectural space may be understood as a concretization of environmental schemata or images, which form a necessary part of man's general orientation or 'being in the world.'

SUBSTANCES guide the kinds of practical actions that the organism senses from elements of the environment, creating affordances/utilities for the human body.

SURFACES separate substances from medium, the wall and roof of my house afford comfort by separating me from water and too much air.

AFFORDANCES as aesthetic sensations determined both by the environment and qualities we impose through observation, sensation and perception.

Without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible. The rational organization of society has its own Aesthetic Attraction

Symmetrical Patteming/redundancy : provides for the observing mind a maximum of insight with a minimum of intellectual effort.

Colour Light Time

Quintessentially relational phenomena in which location, background, density will provide for different perceptual relations.

Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

WORKING TEXT: 16/May/2020 The R Value in Academia

Reading/Reflexivity/Research with precision and indeterminacy 

Research Material : Studio/Archive 2004-2020

The Language of Specitivity/Places of Inquiry Extradisciplinary Investigations

Social Utilities/Contemporary Art Practices imported from Political Philosophy

The return of limited and ancillary projects where the human being is the fulcrum and the fire of research in replacement of the medium and the instrument.

A whole range of materials and topics that do not fit, that can create an eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields.

Arte Povera, an aesthetic-philosophical movement, artists that chose to live with direct experience and feel the necessity of leaving intact the value of the existence of things. An art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen.

Germano Celant 1940-2020 

Developing discursive reading 

WORKING DOCUMENT/LANDSCAPE LANDSCAPES/Thinking Spaces

Concepts of space-time/Ecologies, embodiments through identity, individuality and environments. Our universe is evolving in time as our views are evolving

RIVERS/Eddies and husbandry

(in/with the phenomena of water, thinking with the fish in mind) 

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

Architecture/Built Environments Ecology/Political Philosophy

Spatial Practice, Culture, Creativity and Environment

Diffractive erotics of the body in her speculative post studio practice 

Asperities of flesh, dirt and the built environment

Neil Leach, Camouflage, F Woodman

 

The Enchantment of Modem 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

Spatial Practice Interior Design

Building a precision/working praxis that is both aesthetic and technical that can give an intimate understanding of the material and its situation.

Subjectivities interwoven through light and media Asperities of fabric and texture : White Collaged Postcards

CREATING AN ANTHROPOLOGY TOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE DEVELOPING MATTER AND DESIRE IN ART BASED ACTIVITIES

WORKING NOTES, 24 October 2018

SETTING UP THE CRITICAL DISTANCE / DISCURSIVE FIELDS OF ANALYSIS MEASURING AFFECT

PERFORMATIVITY ITS EXPERIENTIAL QUALITIES/PSYCHIC IMPACT RESEARCH IN LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN Visiting the Archive : Exploratory Workshop

September 1, 2018. W&BA Harleston

CREATING THE FEEDBACK LOOP

BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN PARTICAPANTS AND ARTISTS RADICAL INTERVENTIONS INTO THE EVERYDAY

Walking and Making with Clay, Brockwood, Speculative Learning Program

' the clay itself seemed to absorb them into a wandering relation with the landscape' A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit.

In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty.

Tracks Across The Landscape

Setting up a critical spatial practice within the walking landscape of the everyday. Edward Thomas, Paths

John Piper, Covehithe, South Bank Show, painting/drawing both on site and in the studio. 

Watts Gallery, analysis and audit of activities from which to develop visitor programs and the experiential circulation of those who visit.

Melancholy and The Landscape, Jacky Bowring.

Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in the Landscape. Investigation into the creative membership and activities of W&BA.

Sculpture Trail, Curatorial Strategies/Market/Audiences

From newsletter to art themed walks, Historic Culture/Landscape and Tourism Plotting points of social interactions, asking Why Here, Why Not There?

What directs events, governs outcomes? Success and failures?

Management and event led, members as audience? MA Arts Management

New Cultural Diversities

10 Days at the Laundry, Winchester 2009.

Group of creatives based in and around Winchester School of Art, use of fallow site in which to respond and to create for 10 days a contemporary arts festival. This original event 'fused' new creative partnerships that went on to produce other groups and exhibitions. The follow-up event 10 Days in the City, was funded, had more prestigious venues, but lacked the cohesion and community of the first site.

Supplementary content, resources, dossier outlining the inquiry of which the work is a part. MOVING THE CULTURE

DISCURSIVE FIELDS FOR NEW TYPOLOGIES/OPERATIONS AND TACTICS CONCRETE POETRIES

LOWER GREEN, NORWICH

' At the surface, the gorgeous materiality of Okon's work is seductive but her intention to breach superficial readings is much more serious. This conjugation of material is also a conjuration, an earnest attempt to attempt to imagine and materialise new possible realities.'

Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology, Andreas Weber.

SITE SPECIFIC EMBODIMENT, working, making, discovering. Post Studio Practices, Daniel Buren. Deep Arts Ecology Investment and Nurturing, 'it always begins with the art, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 

The heavy, awkward investment of actually getting people to 'place' to participate is difficult. New technologies could offer solutions that could in turn promote innovative creative ecologies.

NEW TOPOLOGIES FOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE NETWORKS, MESHES, NODES, CONNECTIONS

Becoming embodied within the making of the work, within an intimate dwelling place. Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe.

Crafted Scenography, 

Exhibition, 

Visual Art, Tacita Dean

Shadowcatchers 

OUTPOST

STUDIO as a discursive site for un-doing and re-making relations/aesthetics between objects/the social/the everyday.

STUDIO ANALYSIS 2018-2020 21 September 2018-19 August 2020

Art School Spaces Outpost Studio Spaces Urban Fallow Institutional Buildings 

Open Plan Office Spaces

Studio 3.16, Central Norwich, nearby parking, Floor area/footprint 5.0mx5.0m, wall spaces 2x2.4mx5.0m, well lit, open plan, large making table 1.2mx2.4m. Electricity, small heater, lighting, running water WC, access 24/7.

Projects/Contexts bought into the studio space

Drawings/Southampton roof rubbing, drawings/art works as sociological shelters/habitats Immaterial Paintings/Cyanotype, layered papers

Raveningham sculpture elements from intervention Cley, sketch books and paintings

Re-presentation of drawings/collages with new research material/contexts

Paintings displayed with large analogue phonographic images and collages Architectural concerns, coloured glass, aesthetic surfaces, paintings with raw materials Installation of research bookcases as diffractive elements/spatial practice within the studio White paintings, used layers of paper texts, meshes and cloth

Ceramic objects on field paintings/grounds

Research material, folders, wrapped ceramics with fabric, yellow ochre on paper

Canvas painting, inclusions, shells/stones, cyanotype/yellow ochre, gesso/white paint, pierced 

STUDIO WORKS

Paper/canvas paintings 1.5mx2.4m Canvas re Raveningham Shelter, 2.4mx2.4m

Spray paint, large floor works left undisturbed during making Future proposals Cley 2021, Artpocket activities, Project Space,

WORKING NOTES

OUTPOST 12/09/2019

A Philosophy of Solitude

Hand Bookbinding

Lead/Waxed Paper

Art puts US on Display

Strange Tools

Art and Human Nature

The Politics of Things

The properties of Light

Fred Sandback/Luis Barragin

On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them Melancholy and the Landscape Process-Relational Philosophy

Jannis Kounellis

Christopher Wilmarth

The Ground of The Image

Sally Mann, The Flesh and The Spirit 

The Eyes Of the Skin

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

Wayfaring Notes: Material Flows Between Form and Emptiness : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

Tim Ingold engages with Deleuze and Guattari by adopting their concepts of "assemblage" (agencement) and "lines of becoming" to emphasize a relational, process-oriented ontology. He translates their abstract philosophical ideas into a "meshwork" of walking, weaving, and storytelling, focusing on how life is lived along lines rather than between fixed points. 

Academia.edu

Key aspects of Ingold’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari include:

Meshwork vs. Network: Ingold contrasts the "network" (connected points) with the "meshwork" (interlaced lines of growth and movement), highlighting how beings and materials constantly emerge and change through interaction.

Lines of Becoming: He interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s "becoming-animal/plant/molecular" as a process of world-making, where individuals are not static beings but are constantly in flux, "becoming with" their environments.

Wayfaring: Ingold uses the concept of "wayfaring" to represent life as a continuous movement or trajectory, aligning with the philosophical notion of navigating lines rather than occupying pre-defined positions.

Critique of Hylomorphism: He draws on their ideas to reject the traditional view that form is imposed upon passive matter (hylomorphism), arguing instead for an understanding of form-generation that emerges from the material flow. 

Ingold’s work often merges these perspectives with other thinkers like Gibson, focusing on how organisms and materials are entangled within their environments, creating a "topologically fluid" space. 

Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.

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, a kind 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 Pallasmaa“ 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.

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

Ceramics and Architecture : Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

Outpost 100223

Spatial Bodies~Environments :  Matter(s) of Interference

Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

Circulating Objects : Lines/Holloways.

Making~Journeys.

The items shown in the image are ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

These pieces are part of his exploratory, architectural-themed work. 

They are characterized by a processual nature that focuses on the imprint of the artist and the material itself. 

The sculptures often feature a raw, distressed finish, incorporating white paint and visible construction marks. 

Moreton's practice in these ceramics investigates themes of silence, architectural space, and the interconnectedness of interior spaces. 

The image displays a workspace cluttered with various documents, papers, and art-related materials, suggesting an environment dedicated to research, archival work, or artistic preparation.

Workspace Setting: The desk is heavily organized with stacks of papers, binders, and printed documents, which is characteristic of an academic, curatorial, or creative office space.

Artistic Materials: A large, black-and-white print or photographic work is prominently displayed on a board in the background, surrounded by smaller reference materials pinned to the wall.

Documentation: The presence of extensive paperwork and what appears to be exhibition or research documentation suggests the space is used for managing art projects, publications, or historical research.

Professional Environment: The overall composition implies a professional or semi-professional setting, likely related to art history, gallery management, or creative practice, where the physical handling of documents and visual references is central to daily work.

The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.

Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.

Theoretical objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.

The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.

Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.

Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.

The objects in the image are slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Technique: Hand-built using slab construction.

Style: The works are processual in nature, featuring raw, distressed finishes and architectural themes.

Inspiration: The artist's work often explores the interconnectedness of interior spaces, architectural settings, and the imprint of the maker.

Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.

Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.

Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity

If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.

Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.

The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.

Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.

Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies

The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.

Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.

Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013

Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.

Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.

Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.

Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.

Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance.

Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.

Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation.

London.

Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.

The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.

Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

 

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.

Time : Duration and Perception.

Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.

One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.

Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.

Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.

The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..

Steven Holl.

Hungate, Norwich. 

Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023

Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.

Clay Making. 

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.