Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces, Movable and Nomadic : Slab Built Ceramics

Clay+Ceramics.

Folded Readings~Heuristic Spatial Forms from Fired Clay.

Ceramics from clay constructions of indisciplined spaces where experiential markings and imaginative readings between theory and practice develop new material discourses.

Possible Outcomes~Clay Based Ceramic Propositions

Architectures~Making Spaces in Abjection.

Bodies, Spatial Bodies and their Relations.

A place between is spatial. It is a mapping of the topographies between here, there and elsewhere. It is also social, an articulation of the place of dialogue, of the ongoing discussion between one and another. A place between is temporal, it pays attention to time, to the ways in which we locate the then from the now, the now from the yet to come. 

Jane Rendell.

The Experience of Existence.

Fired clay meditations on a materiality, a willingness to survive and endure.

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

Clay~Making : The Analogous Atmosphere of  Experience.

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning.

AI Overview

This artwork is a sculptural assemblage by Russell Moreton, featuring ceramic vessels and forms. 

The work explores themes of reverberation, innerness, and volume through a processual approach to clay. 

Moreton's practice investigates the interconnection of making interior spaces, demarcating and folding material into spatial forms. 

These pieces are described as 'extreme atmospheres' or 'fired clay labyrinths,' utilizing textural surfaces and industrial-like perforations

This image features mixed-media ceramic artworks by artist Russell Moreton.

These sculptures are part of an exploratory research project titled "Clay/With Fire," focusing on architectural themes.

The artist explores the concept of "making" through the interconnectedness of interior spaces, using clay as the primary medium.

The pieces are processual in nature, meaning they evolve from the direct experience of working with the material.

The works incorporate the artist's imprint, exploring the metaphysical and immersive nature of creation.

These images feature exploratory, architectural-themed ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Theme: Architectural structures and spatial practices.

Focus: The imprint of the artist and the material itself.

 

Interdisciplinarity~Spatial Collaboration.

Spaces between Forms for Speculative Creative Outcomes.

Making Spatial Stories : Over time and through space.

Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces, Movable and Nomadic : Slab Built Ceramics

Overspilling with Viscous Light~The Excess of Changefulness~Openings

Forward to The Sympathy of Things, Lars Spuybroek.

We see the excess of changfulness, at once immanent to and over spilling the structural integrity of the form.

Brian Massumi.

Overspilling Forms~Sympathy~Abject(ion)

Light forming compositions, architectures of processual excess.

An untimely beauty that will not stand still in its place.

Interiors, intimate sociological thresholds.

Spatial Bodies : Capacitors Of Light and Dark.

Visual Minor Keys : Gestures of sympathies/colour thoughts in a relational field.

Scaffolds/Tentative Architectures : Drawing Architectural Surrounds

Outpost 291024

Space And Subjectivity.

Collage with glass and documentation from Francesca Woodman.

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

Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.

Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)

Tentative/Processual Architectures. 

Arakawa and Gins.

Lucy Orta.

Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.

One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.

Henri Lefebvre.

Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.

Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.

The In-Between.

There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.

Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.

Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.

Frameworks/Scaffolding.

Affective Matter/Mattering.

Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.

Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Disclaimer.

Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.

Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.

This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).

Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.

Project 3.1

Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.

The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The  Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Species of Spaces.

Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.

Russell Coates.

Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.

Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.

Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.

Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.

The simple issues of attending to the material.

Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.

Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.

Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .

Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

The Process of Abject(ion).

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.

A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.

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

Pure Presence~Clay Stories : Ethics/Aesthetics/Politics, Jane Bennett

Anarchives/Clay Stories : Lines of Flight/Dovecotes for Philosophers.

Discursive Documents : Enchantment/Somatic Affects, Jane Bennett.

Visual Art Materialisms : Spatial Bodies~Human Bodies

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

2013

The Minor Gesture : The Diagram of the Painting/Fielding the Feeling of Force taking Form

Outpost 240723

russellmoreton.com

The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.

Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.

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

The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.

Relationscapes, Erin Manning.

Propositions of Force/Appetition.

The Work's Diagram.

The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.

Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.

Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.

Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.

Creating work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s). 

The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.  

We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.

Erin Manning.

Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment. 

Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging. 

Organism-Person-Environment

A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.

Fielding how we think-feel.

Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.

A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.

Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.

A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.

Erin Manning. 

The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.

For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.

We Land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Actuality is the decision amid potentiality. 

A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.

Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.

For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.

A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.

Apparatuses/Diagrams

Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.

In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.

The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.

The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.

Sculpting in Time.

Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.

For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.

Erin Manning.

Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall

Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.

Cultivation Field Research Collage

Geological era 1800.

The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'

Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.

Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.

Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared. 

Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy

Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman

Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.

From Models to Drawings.

Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments 

Filtered Light.

Atemwende, a breathturn : Adam Gopnik and Edmund de Waal

Craft and Art : Skill and Anxiety.

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

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

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

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

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

Ceramics and Architecture.

Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment

The Porcelain Rooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overflowing Forces~in-acts of Sympathy with the Anarchic share of Existence.

Extreme Atmospheres : Fired Clay Labyrinths.

Interpenetrations~Visual Art Materialisms.

//russellmoreton.academia.edu

Clay~Anarchive Matter(s) : Transitive Forces of a Minor Key.

Research-Creation as Spatial Practice.

Clay Bodies~Baffles : Atmospheres and the Continual Weather World.

On a making that is a speculative pragmatism reaching out into the more-than anarchic share of existence, creating the conditions for living better. Moreton/Whitehead/Manning/Ingold.

Making Processual Architectures.

Clay+Ceramic+Anarchive : Minor Gestures~Interstitial space of emergent expression

An anarchive is a dynamic, creative, and "feed-forward" process that acts as a repository of traces rather than a static, traditional archive. Coined by philosophers Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, it functions as a "living" collection that encourages new, generative creations and potential rather than merely documenting the past.

Key Characteristics of an Anarchive

Active Process: Unlike an archive, which preserves and fixes, the anarchive is in constant flux and continues to evolve, focusing on potential rather than just the past.

"Feed-Forward" Mechanism: It is a "springboard" or "curating score" that triggers future artistic, social, or research-based work, rather than just acting as a reference to a past event.

Traces vs. Documents: Anarchives collect "traces" or fragments of events, which are seen as "carriers of potential" for further, often unpredictable, development.

Subversive Nature: It acts against the rigid, linear, and "destructive tendencies" of traditional archiving.

Collaborative & Experimental: It often involves the co-creation of knowledge, often in the form of multimedia projects, such as the anarchive.net project. 

The term is often used in arts-based research, such as the "Walking Anarchive" project, to describe how researchers can work with memories, experiences, and artistic materials in a non-linear way. 

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #2

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #2, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

17022013

Outpost Studio~Theoretical Spaces : Undone~Overflowing Gatherings of Experience.

Lost Inquiry : Dispersed Spaces~Relations of Space, Time, and Social Bodies.

Outpost 200125

Expanding The Files.

Undone

A theorist is one who has been undone by theory.

Rather than the accumulation of theoretical tools and materials, models of analysis, perspectives and positions, the work of theory is to unravel the very ground on which it stands. To introduce questions and uncertainties in those places where formerly there was some seeming consensus about what one did and how one went about it.

Irit Rogoff : What is a Theorist? 2006

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