INSIDE THIS CLAY JUG : Vessel makers that recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space

 

Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we 

recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space. (Schaik,2008:80)

‘The phenomenology of space – the matter of how we experience it.’

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.

Clay Jug

Inside this clay jug there are canyons, and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. All seven oceans are inside and hundred of millions of stars.

Words, Kabir, Jackie Leven. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death

The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel

The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.

The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

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)

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

The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)

Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being. 

Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl. 

Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.

Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.

 

For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.

Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.

Inner Worlds : Photographic Visions 

Beuys - Klein - Rothko

Transformation and Prophecy

Anne Seymour

The Inner Eye

Art Beyond the Visible

Marina Warner

Thinkers and Vessel Makers.

Ceramic space and life Gordon Baldwin

Objects For A Landscape David Whiting

Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced. Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)

MATERIAL MATTERS ARCHITECTURE

AND MATERIAL PRACTICE Katie Lloyd Thomas

PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER. GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY Peg Rawes

ARCHITECTURE

IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION 

The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Dalibor Vesely

The Nature of Communicative Space Creativity in the Shadow of Modem Technology

 

The Rehabilitation of Fragment

Towards a Poetics of Architecture The Projective Cast

Architecture and its Three Geometries 

Robin Evans

Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it 

Analysing ARCHITECTURE

Simon Unwin

Geometries of Being Architecture as Making Frames Space and Structure

Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.

‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)

‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’

Kengo Kuma.

On Anti-Object : An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.

‘My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.

‘Like McTiernan or the theorist PaulVirilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)

‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3)

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?

‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)

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 for De Waal 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)

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)

DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

History is the raw material of architecture. Aldo Rossi

The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002

The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.

Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear facade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the facade.

Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.

For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.

Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.

INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.

QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.

INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY

 CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS 

Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.

The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.

New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John

The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the comers, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight. 

The Brick House, London, Caruso St John 

ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.

CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)

Hortus Conclusus

Often translated as meaning “a serious place”. Enclosed all round and open to the sky.

STOA, building and social structure for dialogues

A garden/a mindfulness in an architectural setting.

What happened to the garden that was entrusted to you? Antonio Machado, Jackie Leven.

“Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smalls and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.

A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.(Zumthor 2011: 15)

Illustration of “Orchard”, from Bible of Wenceslaus IV, Vienna, Austrian National Library

Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.

Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community. Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The Vintner’s Luck , Elizabeth Knox.

Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.

The Potter, clay, agency, making, Ingold. 

The Pot, object, nearness, pastoral, Heidegger.

Art Works/Inside The Studio

Inside The Studio

https://www.saatchiart.com/russellmoreton 

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

Fields/Landscapes of Inquiry : A Spatial Practice

 Outpost 010223

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

A Spatial Practice.

Bring things to life, creative entanglements in a world of materials.

Art/Ontology/Education/Philosophy.

Creative practice is a meshwork of what shall I do next?

Tim Ingold.

Things in general, like the mind-leak.

Iteration, following the forces/flows.

Organism-Person-Environment

Gins/Arakawa.

Improvisation is to join with the work or to meld with it, one ventures from home on the thread of a tune.

Lines of Flight

Lines of Becoming

Critically these lines do not connect.

A line of becoming is not defined by the points it connects, or by the points that compose it.

On the contrary it passes between points, it comes up through the middle.

A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two.

It is the in-between, the line of flight running perpendicular to both.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Brockwood Teaching Academy. 

Back To Free School, Kilquhanity.

Curriculum Making, education for improved human-environment relations.

For to live we must dwell in the world, and to dwell we must already relate to its constituents.

Meaning inheres in these relationships.

Raveningham Sculptural Array

Solargraphy/Land Markings.

Performative Intraventions

Hungate 

Water

Site-specific research and artworks.

Water : A Phenomenal Lens

Steven Holl.

We start from the fluid character of the life process, wherein boundaries are sustained only thanks to the flow of materials across them.

Life is all about relations that hold a being in place, an erotic ecology of matter and desire.

Outpost Gallery

Mentorship Programme.

Garry Fabian Miller, The Light Gatherers: Beyond the Middle Place

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours : About philosophy/drawing

 Outpost Studio 261021

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours

Drawings going beyond figure/ground relationships

The manifestation of weight derives from form along with substance.

I no longer wanted to make markings on a piece of paper, I wanted to make the drawing integral to its structure and properties.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.

Serra has questioned whether his 'Deadweight' series borders on the pictorial, because these drawings set two similar shapes against a common ground as if to construct a compound figure. However Serra's use of overlap protects against this possibility and preserves the material independence of the two sheets of paper.

Preface, Being and Becoming. C. Robert Mesle.

The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time. James Taylor

Process-Relational Philosophy. 

An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. 2008

The assumption of a moving viewer, Richard Serra in a Japanese Temple Garden.

Richard Serra believes that the physical grasp of a space must occur through time in the form of movement or effort, so he temporally extends his own working of a surface.

Tempered, measured movement such as the application of layers of paintstick, narrows the conceptual gap between the space and time we imagine to experience bodily.

Serra's program  (a temporal art of substance), to link bodily consciousness to material substance, to integrate vision and touch as well as space and time.

Movement/Sensation marks both space and time, it does so psychologically as well as physically.

The Interaction Of Color

Albers theorized the relation of space and time to weight.

The two basic quantities or substances question, how much and how often, distinguishes two kinds of quantities, one of size, extension in area, and one of recurrence, an extension in number. These measurements establish weight in space and weight in time.

Serra's accumulated, living movement, his layering of paintstick, collects weight in space and weight in time.

The human body (corpus humanum) is composed of many individuals (of different nature), each one of which is highly composite.

The individuals of which the human body is composed are some fluid, some soft and some hard.

The individuals composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself is affected in many ways by external bodies.

The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.

When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.

The human body can move external bodies in many ways, and dispose them in many ways.

The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.

Bento de Spinoza : Ethics, Part II, Postulates I-VI, Proposition XIV

Bento,s Sketchbook : John Berger. 2011

Manuel Neri

Bodies of intensity, imprinted with a ghostly figural outline.

Sculptures and drawings showing ambivalence,hostile, intimate, relationships.

The contradictory shocks between form and substance are absorbed by the emotional resilience of the dialectic of pleasure and doubt. Neri proves this in the course of his own work, through his successive approaches to different materials, which make him oscillate between allusive figuration and the most direct realism.

Pierre Restany. 1988

How do things translate into lived experience?

Whatever the answer, it will be known only in relation to the particularity of a personal physical encounter with the work, never as a principle of order or composition.

Drawing Thick, Richard Serra.

Agencies/ways of doing, phenomena and research emerge with specific relationalities to things at hand.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, creating ongoing differences, states of being/becoming.

Diffraction as a tool for analysis, attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Opening up ways for greater sensitivity towards how we are part of the worlds continuous becoming.

Organism-Person-Environment : The Architectural Body.

Arakawa and Gins 

The theoretical object/body in doing/sensate built architecture

Living Spaces : Spatial Agencies/Creative Philosophies into a world of continual process and becoming, where each person relates to every other and to all of nature.

Architectural Thinking/The Interrelated Universe : Process and Reality

Mattering : Mind-Movement-Material

Spatial Interventions in Architecture

Filtered Light and the interactions of objects

Entanglements of Materials and Substances

Asperities, opacities, reflections, textiles,

Lines Of Flight : Drawing on Mattering

Steven Holl, House,St Ignatius, Scale

Place Making/Drawing/Materials/Construction

Beach Ruins : Belgium

Rutile/Yellow Ochre washes, transparent glass/glaze, texture/textile and pierced clay/concrete.

Ceramic Slab Constructions : Facades/Massing for pacemaker utilities/living spaces

Material as drawing, drawing as construction, architectural models constructed into the assemblage of the making drawing.

Painted Clay Constructions : Gesso, Cyanotype, Cotton, Wire, Glass.

Process-Relational Philosophy : Alfred North Whitehead

Vibrant Matter : Jane Bennett

Blackness is a property, not a quality, that is to say, something fundamental, not an incidental embellishment.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.

Re-visiting the proposal : Making at Raveningham/Building on the lightest of things

Dwelling. Up, across and along relations in the landscape.

Giving Sensation Place.

An Education Of Attention.

Creative Curriculum Making.

Developing a creative inquiry and its presentation through generative art based methodologies.

Re-imagining learning through site based education, art practices and philosophy.

Installing a creative practice as a 'place driven site' for subjective experience, gathering things and personal inquiry from which to present 'findings' into the social environment.

For Tim Ingold, life is the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.

And dwelling means that the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground arise within the current of their involved activity in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings.

Tim Ingold, Lines. 2007

Proposal Raveningham 2023

The Simple Presence of Things.

Peter Zumthor.

Raveningham Sculpture Trail 2023

Russell Moreton.

Making and working in drawings, diagrams and constructions that are habitable environments.

Speculative Cosmic Garden and Sculptural Array for Solargraphy.

Interested in revisiting an earlier project that I created at Kilquhanity (A Pathway Between Sunrise and Sunset), in which I mapped out transits and movements of the sun onto the landscape through demarcated pathways and intersections. I propose then to add to these ground markings an apparatus or array to hold small can cameras pointing skyward to record the movement of the sun over the duration of the Sculpture Trail.  

Using the phenomena of light as both a conceptual and practical framework requires a mixture of pinhole cameras, contact photograms and shadow sticks that will demarcate lines and arcs, that will in turn create overlapping territories onto the landscape. The array construction will act in counterpoint to the landmarks, a fixed arrangement looking perpetually skyward. 

Russell Moreton

Spatial practitioner employing a  speculative site based practice linking visual fine art, education, architecture and philosophy.

Ecology of Life/Energies between things

 Outpost 180523

Wandering Lines.

Material : The Ways/Movements of Practice.

An ecology of life, in short must be of threads and traces, not of nodes and connectors, and its subject of inquiry must consist not of the relations between organisms and their external environments, but of the relations along their severally enmeshed ways of life.

Tim Ingold.

Learning in the making.

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

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

We need to live the consequences of non-stop curiosity inside a mortal situated, relentlessly relational worlding.

Donna Harraway.

Practices that do engage in the complexities and contingencies of corporeal experiences, ie partners-with-things.

Space-Enfolding-Breath.

Inhabiting the Wall, 1992-93.

Monica Wyatt.

Monica Wyatt asks what it means to occupy architecture, not just ordinary interior spaces but also those that are inaccessible, such as a wall and its poche. Acting as a physical limit, a wall is a boundary that cannot be traversed without an opening, but the reality of a wall's thickness and the peculiar desire to be in a wall inform Wyatt's curiosity about occupying this space.

When educating architects and interior designers, the question is often resolved by expanding the wall's thickness to contain programmed space, or left behind as a space deemed unoccupied. Wyatt does not give in to either direction. Rather, she looks to the wall, entering it to find answers to these questions.

Wyatt uses poetric interpretations of poche and interior space to produce these unconventional mappings. The result is a map and a body wrapped with wallpaper, where body and wall share the same material. Wyatt finds an entry point into the wall, through a map of the body that also reinserts the body back into the wall.

Lois Weinthal, 2011.

To define a wall : What is a wall?

The questions are phenomenological and psychological, attempting to account not only for the physical presence of the wall itself but for how it is there for her.

Like Wyatt's own body, walls have fronts and backs, interiors and exteriors. They can separate and bind, and they also possess the point of view of an other from which one is viewed. For Wyatt the wall is ambiguous: even though it presents itself as a physical limit to her body, it provokes the desire to move beyond its bounds. Her confessed desire to 'get into the wall,' to escape from the physical limits of the surroundings so that she may see herself from the other side. 

Wyatt desires to be simultaneously in both places, impossible if one accepts the materialist proposition that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. She desires, however to make this possible, to conceive of a situation in which space and material become intertwined, as if consciousness and body were intertwined with in the space of a fold.

In the end Wyatt entered the wall through a logic that allows for multiple faces of consciousness. It is possible to occupy a wall only if we accept that we are present for others as well as for ourselves. By projecting ourselves into another's point of view, we construct a space within which being is defined and constituted. 

Dan Hoffman, 1994. 

The architecture and public spaces of the built environment enclose and contain. Yet the structures that confine, channel and contain are not immutable. They are ceaselessly eroded by tactical manoeuvring of inhabitants whose 'wandering lines' (de Certeau) undercut the strategic designs of societies master builders causing them gradually to wear out and disintegrate.

  

For inhabitants, however the environment comprises not the surroundings of a bounded place, but a zone in which their several pathways are thoroughly entangled. In this zone of entanglement, this meshwork of interwoven lines. There are no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through.

Up, Across and Along, Tim Ingold.

Architectural Body.

Organism-Person-Environment

Arakawa and Gins. 

Ambivalences : Hostile/Intimate Relationships.

Reclining Figures and Wall Reliefs.

There is also something of the ambivalent sensualist stirred by a mixture of passion and hostility that both caresses and abrades the surface it touches.

In the hand of Manuel Neri, Marcia Morse.1983. 

Francesca Woodman.

then at one point I did not need

Camouflage.

Neil Leach. 

St Peter Hungate.

Conceptual/Corporeal Frameworks

Visual Art Facility/Making/Curation.

As the work interacts with the body of the observer the experience mirrors these bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communicated from the body of the architect directly to the body of the inhabitant.

Understanding architectural scale implies the unconscious  measuring of an object or a building with one's body, and projecting one's bodily scheme on the space in question. We feel pleasure and protection when the body discovers its resonance in space.

The sense of gravity is the essence of all architectonic structures and great architecture makes us conscious of gravity and earth. Architecture strengthens verticality of our experience of the world. At the same time architecture makes us aware of the depth of earth, it makes us dream of levitation and flight.

In memorable experiences of architecture, space, matter and time fuse into one single dimension, into the basic substance of being, that penetrates the consciousness. We identify ourselves with this space, this place, this moment and these dimensions as they become ingredients of our very existence. Architecture is the art of mediation and reconciliation.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Like mothers of men, the buildings are good listeners. Long sounds, distinct or seemingly in bundles, appease the orifices of palaces that lean back gradually from canal or pavement. A long sound with its echo brings consummation to the stone.

Adrian Stokes.

Initial works made and manifested through entanglements of practice/making/place.

Slab, box, extrusions/industrial/handbuilt, flue linings, corten architectural  models.

Water/Anchorages between the sacred and the secular.

Cell-Court-Domain

Body-Water-Air

Piscina in the south wall.

Squint into the nave and tower.

Clay-Water-Fire

Five clay slab fabrications exploring intimate spaces, notion of inhabitation/anchorite within social/sacred space.

Art/Spiritual Space.

Ambivalences/Uncertainties/Paradoxes

Something Endures between The Made/Un Made.

Raw Clay Construction, lead tray, water.

The Hungate : Ambient Atmosphere/Precarious Situation/Fragile Structure and Social Relationship.

Water (secular) both corrodes/penetrates the structure, and water (sacred) caresses/comforts the soul.

White slip/emulsion paint/ yellow ochre.

Nocturnal sounds/long sounds as reminders of human solitude and mortality

Parallax.

Steven Holl.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

When working, both the artist and craftsman are directly engaged with their bodies and their existential experiences rather than focused on a external and objectified problem. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our bodies. We are inside and outside of the object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion. A remarkable factor in the experience of enveloping spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp, focused vision. 

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Figuring It Out.

The Parallel Visions Of Artists And Archaeologists.

Colin Renfrew.

Life-Class/Drawing.

The Impossible Nude.

Figural Floor Drawings.

Drawing/Wayfaring : Traces and trails over and amongst the landscape of the body.

The surface takes on a strongly sculptural sense of being moulded, modelled, abraded and yet caressed.

A Nomadic Narrative/One Place After Another.

 A nomadic narrative, a path articulated by the passage of the artist which is phenomenological, social, institutional and discursive.

Site specificity of competing definitions, overlapping with one another and operating simultaneously within both cultural practices and the artist's own single project.

A provisional conclusion might be that in advanced art practices of the past thirty rears, the operative definition of the site has been  transformed from a physical location, grounded, fixed, actual, to a discursive vector, ungrounded, fluid, virtual.

One Place After Another.

Notes On Site Specificity 

Miwon Kwon. 1997

The Trace and its Connector/Ceramics, drawing and walking/wayfaring with things.

 Outpost 040523

Anecdote of the Jar

 I placed a jar in Tennessee,

 And round it was, upon a hill.

 It made the slovenly wilderness

 Surround that hill.

 The wilderness rose up to it,

 And sprawled around, no longer wild.

 The jar was round upon the ground

 And tall and of a port in air.

 It took dominion everywhere.

 The jar was gray and bare.

 It did not give of bird or bush,

 Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

Making Visible.

Walking The Drawing.

The co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction, by selective excavation and creative demolition.

Castelvecchio an attitude to history. Carlo Scarpa.

There is no stage at which humankind does not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space.

Lefebrve.

Kairos : The movement and its moment

Being Alive.

Up, Across and Along.

The trace and the connector.

Tim Ingold.

Jannis Kounellis.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through which without colliding would produce the establishment of places and localities made special for one reason or another.  

Hand Built, Slab Ceramics.

Oxide washes, incised lines and piercings undertaken to the raw clay forms.

Architectural Facades/Camera Obscura. 

Darkroom's Erasure.

One day , we will understand that darkrooms were one of the last pools of darkness, where a pure form of thought was made visible. In the darkness at its heart, photography enabled us to see ourselves and the world more clearly, it was a place of truth and visions.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

“The Pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”

Adam Gopnik 2014

Richard Batterham

In 1981 he provided a rare statement: “The main work is not to make pots, but to allow them to come, to allow them to grow, to allow them to be alive, and to communicate warmth and life in that uncannily direct and undemanding way that true and naked work can, vulnerable as it is. To make this possible, I feel that it is necessary to use our skills and materials with humility and respect. This requires a certain quietness of living.”

A Vessel Defines Emptiness As Presence : Craft, Studio Practice /Theory and Analysis on Hans Coper, Edmund De Waal, Martin Heidegger

STUDIO PRACTICE, THEORY AND ANALYSIS.

MA SCHOOL OF CRAFTS AND DESIGN.

Working Notes : Brockwood Granary 2014

Theory and Analysis Documents, UCA Farnham

“A predynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand : made thousands of years ago it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somewhat absurd object, yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self-expression, but seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy.”

Hans Coper, 1969

Jean Vacher acknowledges Hans Coper’s links with Modernism and that his pots possess an “innerness” that might be profoundly biographical in nature stemming from “the profound displacements that occurred to him and his family as a result of the upheavals in Europe.” (Personal e-mail correspondence CSC 28 March 2014)