Correspondences and Mediums /Drawing/Speculative Learning Environments

Outpost 300823

Mediums To Correspond With.

The Situatedness of Sinuous Form/Animacy Dancing.

Living/Learning with intensity/shelters and camps, Architectural Association Field Projects.

Garden Constellation.

Raveningham Transductive Mapping/Diagram.

Cyanotype Spatial Drawing.

Transducers convert the 'ductus' the kinetic quality of the gesture and its flow or movement from one register of bodily kineasthesia to another of material flow. 

Brockwood Teaching Academy. 2011.

Speculative Learning Environments.

Brockwood Park Grounds.

A walk in the landscape whilst moving-making with clay.

Developing a mindfulness that is immanent in the attentiveness to ones surroundings through the playfulness of material and others.

Brockwood Park Library.

Hidden Curriculum.

Assemblage in the library for the re-imagining of architectural thinking and spaces for learning.

Architecture without architects.

Throwing Sticks.

The energies of the work,come from the gathering of materials and the gesture that animates them. For Goldsworthy the strength of the work lies precisely in the energies emanating from materials in their movement, growth and decay, and in the fleeting moments when they come together as one. Throwing as Goldsworthy shows us is not so much the outward effect of an embodied agency as the propulsion of animate being as it pulls, spills out into the world, it is the propulsion of life itself. 

Ingold/Goldsworthy

Relationscapes/Erin Manning

Making.

The Propulsion Of Animate Being.

Tim Ingold.

The Clay-The Potter-The Wheel.

The potter's feeling flows in and out in a correspondence with the clay.

You do not need clay to 'interact' with the wheel, but you do need a wheel to 'correspond' with the clay. In pottery the mindful or attentive bodily movement of the practitioner, on the one hand and the flows and resistances of the material on the other, respond/correspond to one another in counterpoint of affective resonances, sentient awareness, and the  flows/currents of animate life.

The distinction between interaction and correspondence if that, interaction is the dance of agency between definable points and objects, whilst correspondence can be seen as the dance of animacy weaving between all things and their phenomenal flux in the world.

In the dance of animacy bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing morphogenetic field of forces.

The flow of air, the wind, the breath of life are all the very antithesis of embodied agency.

For Ingold the very idea of agency and agents is the corollary of a logic for a closed system of embodiment, a system of closing things up in themselves.  

Making/Intuition In Action.

Beyond mere human embodiment and objects and into a world full of correspondences/animacies that propel things and phenomena into the world. 

World Without Objects, Tim Ingold.

The choreographic diagram/proposition generates less the stability of a complex of form, than the foregrounding of a field of resonance that defines a certain quality of activity. It speaks/seeks to create a drawing/diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the very qualities of movements and their expressibility such that their force of form can be felt.

Erin Manning.

Drawing, seeing made visible, through the pencil as transducer, not a vector of projection or a bridge between the architects imagining mind and the image on the paper.

The mark on paper leads as much as it is led.

Tim Ingold advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.

Individuation's Dance, pushing your consciousness deep into every atom and cell.

Atom and Cell, Nine Horses, David Sylvian.

Correspondences.

The Material of Life.

Drawing into the animacy of things and feelings.

The drawing that tells is a correspondence of kinaesthetic awareness and the line of flight, it is a correspondence that is alternatively sewing the line into the mind and the mind into the line in a suturing action that grows tighter as the drawing proceeds.

The Stage of Drawing, A Walk for Walks Sake, Bryson.

Instead of dictating a thought, the thinking process turns into an act of waiting-listening-collaborating-dialogue in which one gradually learns the skill of co-operating with one's own work. This thinking, this imagining goes on as much in the hands and fingers as in the head, it is strung out in the lines of practice.

Pallasmaa/Ingold.

Thinking Through Drawing.

Barry Phipps.

Drawing is a gathering and a co-operating with one,s own work, a pulling together closer of the lines of inquiry. 

Drawing The Line.

Making/Transduction and Perdurance.

Tim Ingold suggests colour saturates consciousness, line leads it. Thus if the line traces a process of thought then colour is its temperament. Both line and colour are modalities of feeling, but where line is haptic, colour is atmospheric. 

All Buildings are Drawings.

Simon Unwin.

Only in the eyes of the architect is the trowel a bridge between the initial design and the final construction. For the builder it allows him to navigate the treacherous waters that flow beneath.

Tim Ingold.

When one is young and narrow minded, one wants the text and the drawing to concretise a preconceived idea, to give the idea an instant and precise shape.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Raveningham/Trails and Wayfaring/ Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one's feet. J. G. Bennett.

Existing between the subjectivity between things.

You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.

Clouds and Clocks.

The project arises between a dialectic between the poetic and the systematic.

Between Science and Art.

The Embodiment of Minimal Gesture.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. 

Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Everyday Aesthetics : Ordinary Lives

What shall I do next?

Tim Ingold.

Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one's feet.

J. G. Bennett.

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who has looked at the interface between people and the environment. In The Perception of the Environment, he argues that ecological psychology and the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the world becomes  meaningful through active inhabitation, or 'dwelling', rather than cognitive representation. 

Curriculum Making : The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

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

Tim Ingold 

Raveningham/Scripted Places

Garden/Ground/Circulation Diagrams.

Doing Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things/Walking/Listening to the wind 

Boundaries/in the making between the personal and the commonly shared.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Few boundaries are impenetrable

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

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

Tim Ingold 2011

The Autonomy of The Natural Environment.

Sculpture/Playing with the existence of things.

Field Studies : Pathways around the Sun.

Drawing : Assemblage of Lightness and Weight.

Enmeshed Space : Working Drawing with Handwritten Notes.

Lawn Deliberations/Mappings of Human Agency/Space/Time.

Space projected from the body is biased towards the front and right.

The future is ahead and 'up.'

The past is behind and 'below.'

Time as a structure/place to observe things in constant motion/relation.

Drawing Site/Spiral Windings/Diagram/Spherical Markers

Terracotta, lime wash/lamp black/blackboard paint/chalk/ink

Ground Pegs/Labels/Text Markings/Archival Information

Points becoming lines, Tim Ingold.

Reading Matter/Rooms.

The Lake of The Mind.

Stochastic Thinking.

Steven Holl.

Raveningham : Site-specific project place

The Garden of Ongoing Differences.

Diffraction/Energy/Analysis/Attunement 

Site Cyanotypes/Drawings/Intermediaries

Spatial Collages Reconfigured  

Walking/Thinking with Ideas/Observations.

Site Drawings and Observational Mappings.

Cultivation Field.

The circle and square together embody what I think of as human nature.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

If the everyday can be considered an ecology where passions circulate in a perpetual state of intensification and entropic decline, the empirical self (and not just David Hume's version of it) is essentially in a state of flux. This posits the human as an organism constantly adjusting to its passionate environment, with a self that is constantly appearing and disappearing, crystallising and dissolving.

Ben Highmore

Rich Lyrical Motifs.

Brilliant Trees.

Within each lesson lies the price to learn.

David Sylvian. 

Artist's Development.

Planting Research

Vital Nourishment.

Raveningham Garden Project.

Circle/Linear Time/Centred on objects.

Spiral/Deep Time/Awareness between things.

Architectural Ceramics.

Inseminations/Sketchbooks

Cell/Seeds/Dispersal/Cloud

Organism-Person-Environment

Working Ideas/Proposals into Matter/Making

Contents/Description/Instructions/Diagram/Drawing

Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

Art is contemplation and must act upon our consciousness.

Objects/Things are part of the artist's immediate existence.

Contemplative experiences become truly meaningful when they occur in everyday life and when nirvana or the state of superior awareness blurs into samsara or ordered time.

For Tapies, repetition is above all else a perpetual questioning or a perpetual becoming.

A working process that is additive, which incorporates changes and accidents and as such his methods are hardly erasing anything that is already present on the canvas.  

A Summer's Work, Antoni Tapies.

The Garden/Material of/for Forking Paths.

The Diagram/The Program/The Inquiry

Marking Durations.

Ground Mappings.

Solar/Daylight Observed/Shadows Recorded 

A Garden Observatory/Philosophy of Silence/Solitude. 

Raveningham Sculpture Trail. 

Site Visit 160423

Sculptural Spacings and Sensual Engagements.

Showing Points/Lines/Vectors of Change/Movement.

Dwelling Demarcations/markers of temporality and disappearance. 

A poetics derived/driven from both the systematic and the small wonders of the everyday.

Circular Breathing/Cyclical Lines. 

The Peripheral Movement/Moment

The Space/Time between things.

The Concept of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

The Array, a phonographic inquiry recording transits of the suns pathways across the sky. 

Wanderings, caught up in the wanderlust of stillness and slowtime.

Paths of movement, paths of observation, paths of existential abstractions following daylight.

The artist's creative act of a self amongst others.

A sculptural deliberation that engages with the experiences of working a site in the landscape.

Curatorial.

Spatial Practice.

Practice/Display/Audience.

Of the mason's who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.

Tim Ingold 'Making'

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Camouflage offers  a mechanism of locating the self against the otherwise homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence. It thereby promotes a sense of attachment and connection to place.

Camouflage may  therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of traditional structures of belonging - the family, church and so on - has begun to break down. This aesthetic sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of belonging, such as religious devotion or romantic attachment.

Aesthetic  production should maintain the capacity  to operate as  a mediation between the self and the environment, but only aesthetic production whose design has been carefully  controlled can achieve this. The difference between productive and unproductive modes of expression is therefore a question of design. In this respect we can recognise the important social role of design in providing a form of connectivity for ‘cognitively  mapping an individual within the environment. 

Design becomes  a crucial consideration for the effective operation of camouflage.

In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their environment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.

The thing contained is not the thing contained.

Manifesto for explorations of 'IN'

Steven Holl.

The Ceramics Reader : Brickyard Ceramics~Complexity grounded in basic things/movements

A sanctuary for promise.

Clay+Ceramic : Complexity grounded in basic things.

A source of energy, intense and exuberant in the early days, more subtle in later decades, but always leaving its mark on so many artists' work.

The Archie Bray Foundation : A Legacy Reframed.

Patricia Failing.

But the Bray energy field left its mark on ceramics history did not emanate from the early production pottery alone. The Foundation provided unique opportunities in the early 1950s, and not all were associated with celebrity visitors. LaMar Harrington remarked on one of the most significant contributions the Bray made to Peter Voulkos's artistic development:

It was the sheer abundance of material. He could be as prolific as he could be and throw the biggest pots he could throw in part because he had carloads of clay-enough clay to absorb his tremendous energy. I don't think he would have become the artist he did without that opportunity. I also think the look of the brickyard-the slag heaps and misfired bricks-had some effect on the style of his later work. As for Rudy Autio, the slab constructions he made for architectural commissions at the Bray gave him some of the insights that came together in those large figurative pieces of the 1960s.

The Ceramics Reader.

Fired Clay : Markings and Volumes.

russellmoreton.com

 

Art Workings~Visual Art Practice: Ceramics intertwined with an extensive visual art ...

Art Workings~Visual Art Practice: Ceramics intertwined with an extensive visual art ...: Making : Anthropological Objects ~ Fabrications on Humaning . Tim Ingold . Ceramics ~ Fired Clay 

The Politics of Architecture : Theorizing through speculative spatial practices.

"He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear - evidently his sleep had  benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yeilding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. Above his arm- and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow - was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this bed was placed in a case of greenish-coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum  and minimum thermometer was recognizable."

H. G. Wells : The Sleeper Awakes. 1899/1910

Spatiality : The Spatial Turn, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects : Apparatuses, Things and People in the Making of the City and the World. Alberto Altes Arlandis, Oren Lieberman. 2013

Preface (1921) ” The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare of Capitalism triumphant, a nightmare that was dreamt a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil may be in store for mankind, but to this immense, grim organization of servitude, our race will never come” H.G. Wells. Easton Glebe, Dunmow,1921.

The Inner Room~Clay/Jug and the Primacy of Being : The Potter and The Philosopher, Coper/Heidegger.

15 March 2015

UCA Farnham.

Working Notes. Visuals and Text

Extracts from Waverley Project/Research Folder, MA Interior Design.

Clay and the Primacy of Being

The Potter and The Philosopher

Innerness and Defined Space

Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.

Ceramic Assemblage : White Spaces/The Patina of Objects.

The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),

Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

Brian Clarke, Stained Glass, Sainsbury Centre.

The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.

The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.

Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951

Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”¹

Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.

Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.

This almost vocational unfinished architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”²

Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.

Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”³

As recorded in his most architectural writings.

The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971

Being and Time 1927/1962

Art and Space 1971/1973

“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”⁴

Building locates human existence,

Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”⁵

This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.

Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”⁶

Heidegger on Thinking,

The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.

Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.⁷

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.

Influences on the “fourfold”

Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.

Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.

Friedrich Holderlin/poet.

George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.

Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.

Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?

Waverley Project 2014.

Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.

In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki

Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.

Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the

effect of light, or through attention to details.⁸

Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.

“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)⁹

This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.

Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.

On building a house. Ingold.

“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”¹⁰

Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)

Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”¹¹

It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”

For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.¹²

Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.

The pot like the building participates in daily life.

This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.

In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.

Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.

“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”¹³

Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)¹⁴

Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.

Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.

Clay and the Primacy of Being.

Studio Spaces.

The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.

For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.¹⁵

Notes:

1 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects.

2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7

5 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 9

6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10

7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30

8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65

9 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1⁰ Tim Ingold. Making. 59

1¹ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1² Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1³ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 43

1⁴ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 45

1⁵ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 71


Wallace Stevens :  Anecdote of the Jar/Vessel takes dominion/Edmund de Waal

Related 

Jackie Leven ; Clay Jug (The Mystery of Love is greater than The Mystery of Death)

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

Outpost 180724

The Essential Mobility of Concepts. 

Correspondences faithful to the dynamism of imagination.

At the level of substances and their affective qualities/values.

Elemental Images.

Poetics of Air-Water-Fire-Space

A fecundity of instants, a mutative pattern rather than an additive or deductive one.

Reverie shatters frozen meanings and restores old words to their ambivalence and freedom. It reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication. There is only one requirement, that it seek (written) expression, whether through original creation or through an already existing encounter poem).

I should like to develop a philosophy that would have no point of departure.

Gaston Bachelard.

In those last days, she worked down here almost constantly, perhaps wondering when she would be able to sculpt again. When she gave them to us, she said she didn't see any point in just leaving them in the studio.

I carefully clipped his nails, starting from the little finger of his left hand. The nails were soft and transparent, and came away with the least effort, fluttering to the floor like flower petals. We listed to the quiet clicking of the clippers, their echoes sealing this moment in the depth of the night. When I finished, the sky-blue gloves were waiting on the table.

And that is how the Inui family vanished.

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa.

The Outside Studio.

Roger Ackling.

Drawing as notation of an event.

To fix the sun's rays.

To unify experience.

To mark place and time.

To seal them off from loss and forgetfulness.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

Colette Gaudin.

Images are incapable of repose, they must be studied simultaneously as isomorphic and unique.

The Poetics of Space.

Contradictions are the principle of aesthetic life.

Poetic language expresses the continuous tension within a substance, and as such it is by virtue of the dialectic of opposite qualities that poetic matter fascinates us.

Imagination not only sees a substantive within an adjective, it also finds a verb concealed under each word.

A value is not something already achieved, it is a becoming, an aspiration, moreover every value evokes its opposite and is in constant struggle with it. Bachelard finds in poetry an application of the philosophy of values that insist on their precariousness.

Bachelard allows his classifications to overlap, or superimpose one dialectic on another, he illustrates his unwillingness to establish a definitive system, less a structure, he is more interested  in the constant discovery of surprising poetic relationships which enrich the world.

For Bachelard, contradictions within matter are the true principles of individualization. Contradictions become alive when they require the participation of the entire subject, images that engage all our senses.

Contradictions are more than mere tolerance of judgement for unusual associations, they express the need to displace facts by value.

Bachelard rejects the role of the scholar who shares the fruit of his learning in the form of established truths, and invites us to experience with him, the essential mobility of concepts. 

CLAY/WITH FIRE : Thinking Architecture/Exploratory Research/Vocabulary

Spatial Bodies in Architectural and Contemporary Art.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Thinking Poetics : Architecture and Ceramics.

Urns : Immersive Cells of Containment~Dissolution.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry. He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

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