Sunday, 3 May 2026

Diffractive Surfaces/Visitors : Imaginative Cartographies/Spatialities/Fictions/Epistemologies

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices
Outpost Studio : 03082021

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold






Visual Diffractions~Water~Abbey : Orthoclase, or orthoclase feldspar.

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice.

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Google Lens.

The image displays a large black-and-white photograph of what appears to be an abstract or textured surface, potentially a wall or rock formation, mounted on a sheet of paper with various textual annotations and clippings. 
Textual elements in the background include references to the film "VISITORS" directed by Godfrey Reggio, and a quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: "We have art that we may not perish by the truth".
Other text fragments mention architecture and specific locations like Suchumi.
The primary image itself is a high-contrast, grainy depiction of a rough, dark surface with lighter, irregular patches.
The overall composition suggests an artistic or documentary presentation, possibly an exhibition piece or a study of texture and decay.














Discursive Reading (against linearity)/New Modalities of Inquiry

New Generative Boundaries/Situatedness

Wayfinding and Heuristic/Everyday Practices


Reading is also thinking through the body

Viscous Porosity/Flesh of the world

Enfleshed Materialism/Membranes that affect interactions


Words Become Material

Troubleyn Laboratorium/Jan Fabre


In this moment the words become a performative agent writing and acting on the body

Installing ourselves in the event, that emerges in our reading


Reading diffractively means that we try to fold these texts into one anther in a move that flattens out our relationship to the material. In so doing we install ourselves into its/our becoming

Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research/Barad Thinking with intra-action

Alecia Y. Jackson, Lisa A. Mazzei


Paintings/Art Works are boundary making apparatusses

The Diffractive Apparatus/Analysis of Intra-ventions/actively/entanglements

Phenomena and Thresholds from which to create new analytical questions/forms


An entangled state of agencies, that which exceed the traditional notion of how we conceive of agency, subjectivity, and the individual.

Agency is an enactment, not something that someone has. Such entanglements require an analysis that enables us to theorize the social and the natural together.

Barad


Diffraction

Two major authors write about the metaphor of diffraction, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.
They explain how diffraction is a method for reading and writing based upon the physical phenomena. Diffraction is a way of coping with epistemological problems of representation (invisible knowledge maker as a false sense of objectivity, self-vision of reflexivity as totalizing and undermining knowledge claims).

To paraphrase Haraway, from "Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse" diffraction is an attempt to make differences while recording interactions, interference, and reinforcement. It does not have an origin and has a heterogeneous history. In addition, the practice of diffractive reading and writing never sediments the relationship between signifier and signified. Van der Tuin explains, "Diffraction is meant to disrupt linear and fixed causalities, and to work toward ‘‘more promising interference patterns’’ (26). She also explains that this can be practiced by reading texts through one another, and rewriting.This disrupts the temporality of a piece of writing, transverses boundaries such as discipline, and can change meanings in different contexts opening up meaning.

https://newmaterialistscartographies.wikispaces.com/Diffraction


Diffracting Photography/Painting/Collage Works
Heuristic reconfigurations through making/understanding/encounters with material









Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?
— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005


Collage Works, A Hut of Ones Own
Jana Sterbak
Remote Control 1989






















A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.


A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline


Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines,



















Friday, 1 May 2026

Processual Makings of The Everyday : Between Silences on The Sympathy Of Things

Clay~Ceramic~Theoretical~Things~Ties

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation.


Archaeologies of making material sensitive.


A processual object that both poses an agencement~question and carries its gathering.

Sites of building over lived lives.








This item is a sculptural ceramic artwork by artist Russell Moreton, specifically developed from his interest in architectural spaces and material construction.     Artist: Russell Moreton, a visual fine artist based in Harleston, Norfolk. Material: Slab-built clay and ceramic bodies. Theme: Explores themes of 'Making', interior spaces, and metaphysical immersive nature. Style: Involves intense textures and architectural, almost meditative forms.


Sociological Bindings~Matter(s) of Concern

Felt Abstractions~Inspirational Radicalism.

Urban Gothic : An Excess Of Changefulness.


Of the creation of concepts, explored through the plane of immanence in which it can be born and the 'conceptual personae' which can activate it.


On Other Forms Of Thought.

What Is Philosophy?

Deleuze and Guattari.

Can perhaps only be posed late in life with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely.

It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness at midnight when there is no longer anything to ask.

Their book is a profound and careful interrogation of what it might mean to be a 'friend of wisdom'. But it is also a devastating attack on the sterility of what has become. When the only events are exhibitions and the only concepts are products which can be sold.

Philosophy they insist is not contemplation, reflection or communication, but the creation of concepts.


Essays : Critical and Clinical.

Deleuze is concerned with the delirium, the process of life that lies behind this invention as well as the loss that occurs. The silence that follows when this delirium becomes a clinical state. 


Material~Felt Abstractions : Delirium and Dissolution.

Spatial Bodies : Between Silences on The Sympathy Of Things.

A Growing Thicket of Thing~Ties

White Odyssey~Archaeologies of making material sensitive.


https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/














Monday, 27 April 2026

Silent Interiors : Anthropocene Aesthetics : Ceramics and Environmental Engagement.

Ceramics and  Architecture : Making Things, Perception/Thought/Action

Urbanism : Fossil Futures~Anthropocene

Ceramics Following Resonances : Interiors in fired clay.


Ruins · Jozef van Wissem · Zola Jesus

When Shall This Bright Day Begin

℗ 2016 Jozef van Wissem and Zola Jesus

Released on: 2016-02-05


Mixer: Jozef van Wissem

Producer: Jozef van Wissem

Composer: Jozef van Wissem

Music  Publisher: Wissem Music

Lyricist: Zola Jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-Kx7ehxCQ&t=21s

















Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

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.


Theorial 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.


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.





Outpost 100223

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.


What is a material? : Readings of Movement and Attention : Slow Philosophy/Clay/Ecology of Material Thinking

Land Forms/Architectures from marking movement.

Clay, Greenware. Studio Space.


Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/












A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy


Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010


The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve 


Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically 


Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010


Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010


New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay


The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object 


Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad


Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012


From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective


Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010


Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies


Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them


Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008


Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers


Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate



Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability


The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution


Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice


Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy


Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline


The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)


The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 


So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002


Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006


The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions


A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  


New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative


Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's


New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006


Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it


The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries


Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011


Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997


Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection


Expressing itself expressing 


Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions


Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact


The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement


Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 


A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside


Few boundaries are impenetrable

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


Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside


The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017


Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice


'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey


Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005


With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 


Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence


Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994


The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler


The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world


Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a 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



Saturday, 25 April 2026

Ecologies of Experience~What is the nature of the drawn line? : Thinking/Becoming through Drawing.

Outpost 070524

Studio representations from the Life Class, negotiations around the physical body through drawing. 










The difficult question?

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?

The first condition that precedes them all, the blankness of a surface, and the motions, now commencing of a point tracing, marking lines across its spaces into further spaces.

Of all the Arts, drawing has the potential to reduce to its smallest the smallest, the gap between meaning and non meaning, between repeatability and singularity.

What exactly is a mark, and how does it, might it distinguish itself from say a trace?

Drawing because of its status as becoming (blot becoming mark-mark becoming line-line becoming contour-contour becoming image-image becoming sign) the direction of this movement being always reversible, posits a continuum of sense, from one sense of 'sense' to the other, yet it seems impossible to observe, or to catch hold of. 

The precise moment or experience of that 'flip-over' from pre-sign differentiated, but not yet diacritically caught in an opposition to signification, image, and meaning. It happens in a blink, when the eye is closed insofar as something is given to us that we cannot experience, it is something like death, or a trauma, or a transport from one place to another without our knowing how we got there.

What would be the distinctive mode or modes of the manifestation of drawing.

The problem is to 'slow' the consideration of the mark, so that it does not move too quickly towards line-contour-figure or image. To allow it to hesitate on the edge, to show what it hides.

The blind-spot marks that point in the field of vision that we cannot see. If to look at something means to impose a distance and to objectify it, the blind-spot would be the 'place' in the visible from which we cannot detach ourselves and which we cannot objectify, it marks our attachment or our adhesion to the world.


Drawing, shows what it hides.


Jackie Pigeaud argues that the sense and the practice of the contour is doubled. 

The contour is the joining of the traits to make the line and the contour is doubled by being finished by a second contour that does away with the imperfections of the first. In this sense of the creative act, the artist shows what he hides and furthermore he hides the transitions and joints that make this showing possible, a collapse of the distinction between mark and line as they become contour, image, representations.


Michael Newman.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Acts.


Thinking Through Drawing.

Lines of Enquiry. 2006

Drawing as thinking as opposed to drawing as aesthetics.

It is the seemingly paradoxical nature underlying all drawing, simultaneously a form of recording and invention, situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view, perspective or analysis. Each drawing is first of all a 'working sketch', the individual work forms part of a much wider and longer project and is an instance within that exploration.

Drawing/Project.

Both words drawing and project are both spatially and temporally orientated, project implies a throwing forward, a casting into the future towards some yet to be realised destination, drawing variously as an extruding, a gathering and a pulling closer. 


Drawing allows you to both evolve, describe, communicate all at the same time, it holds together many disparate factors, potentials, all of which may influence an outcome.