Gardens are like wells : Hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity.

Re-Interpreting the palimpsest of place through the humanities.

Researched for 'Reading Rooms' Waverley Abbey site, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham 2013-15

Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”

Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.

With a refined selection of materials, Zumthor creates a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. In doing so, he emphasises the role that the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The garden is enclosed on all sides yet open to the sky: an architectural setting that offers both protection and openness. Zumthor describes such spaces as "sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

For Zumthor, the garden is more than a collection of plants. Every species evokes distinct memories of light, smell, sound, and touch. Gardens become places where sensory experience and memory are inseparable:

"Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

He continues by describing the garden as the most intimate form of landscape:

"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." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The enclosed garden becomes a sanctuary—a small protected world held within a larger landscape. As Zumthor observes, "something small has found sanctuary within something big" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The medieval illustration Orchard from the Bible of Wenceslaus IV (Austrian National Library, Vienna) visualises this idea through the illuminated depiction of husbandry and communal labour within the secure enclosure of a walled garden. The image presents pastoral work as both productive and contemplative, echoing Zumthor's conception of the hortus conclusus as a protected space where cultivation, community, and intimacy converge.

Working with one's hands, cultivating the earth within sheltered spaces, becomes a shared pastoral practice that binds people to place.

Zumthor reinforces this pastoral character by placing a pavilion at the centre of the garden. He imagines it as a place for future gatherings and quiet contemplation, anticipating "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 garden is therefore experienced not only visually but through the full range of the senses.

Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck similarly evokes an intimate relationship between landscape and human experience. The taste of wine becomes inseparable from the soil that produced it; earth and wine are of the same substance, united by locality and landscape.

Alexander Kluge develops a related idea in Gardens Are Like Wells, suggesting that every person possesses an "enclosed garden"—an inner space of reflection that exists regardless of one's outward life.

He writes that monasteries in medieval Europe functioned as wells in which "the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith." At the heart of these monasteries lay an enclosed garden, where the finest plants and medicinal herbs were cultivated (Kluge 2011: 19).

Significantly, Kluge argues that these gardens existed outside the ordinary routines of monastic life. They were timeless places, dedicated to the Virgin Mary while remaining open to classical and alternative traditions, including Homer, Ovid, and the Gnostics. The enclosed garden therefore became a place where literature, contemplation, and spirituality could coexist. It represents an interiority capable of uniting mind and perception amid the complexity of contemporary life.

Kluge concludes that civilisation requires spaces that remain outside systems of production and utility:

"Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety." (Kluge 2011: 21)

This sentiment resonates with Richard Sennett's assertion that "we need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning." Such spaces provide opportunities for reflection, remembrance, and emotional renewal beyond the demands of everyday life.

The Development Company for Television Programmes (DCTP), in Gardens of Information, also adopts the emblem of the hortus conclusus. Here, the enclosed garden symbolises the relationship between barren landscapes and places of meaning. Their ambition is "to rescue facts from human indifference" and "to make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information" (Kluge 2011: 21). The garden becomes a metaphor for transforming fragmented knowledge into coherent and meaningful experience.

This understanding connects with ideas of spatial practice in the twenty-first century. Rather than forming relationships through abstract systems, institutions, or grand narratives, meaning emerges through inclusive practices rooted in particular places. The hortus conclusus can therefore be understood as a model of concentrated identity—an inquiry, a person, or a practice held within an intimate setting where thought, making, and community come together.

This version has a stronger narrative flow. Rather than reading as a sequence of research notes, it develops a continuous argument about the hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity. It also reduces repetition while preserving your quotations and references.

Studio Practice~Clay Becomes

Forces into Forms: Fire, Intra-Action, and Ontological Bodying

The violence is not theatrical, it is embedded in the accumulation of small operations and gestures.

The work asks the viewer to slow down and discover that ever scratch, perforation, smear, incision and glaze run is evidence of a negotiation.

landing

orienting

receiving

protecting

absorbing

corresponding

carbonising

settling

remembering

rendering

breathing

holding

waiting

tending

releasing

Studio practice is the continual organisation of forces into forms. Form is never imposed upon matter; it emerges through dynamic relations between body, clay, gravity, pressure, heat, resistance, and time. Every imprint initiates a field of transformation in which material and maker become mutually constituted.

The studio is therefore not simply a site of production but an ontological field of becoming. Bodies are continually bodying: human, material, spatial, and atmospheric. They emerge through reciprocal encounters rather than existing as autonomous entities. Every gesture reorganises these relations, producing new conditions from which subsequent gestures arise.

Clay becomes through the imprint. Each compression, fracture, excavation, repair, and collapse registers an event of becoming that exceeds intention. These operations are not techniques but ontological acts through which material relations are continually renegotiated. The work develops as a succession of material events, each carrying the residue of previous encounters while opening the possibility of unforeseen transformation.

Fire intensifies these processes. The kiln is not the conclusion of making but another field of intra-action where heat, atmosphere, gravity, mineral transformation, and duration reorganise the material. Ceramic form is therefore not manufactured; it is constituted through fire-events in which excess energy generates new spatial and material conditions.

Creative practice is the continual movement of forces into forms, and forms back into forces. Every ceramic work remains an active imprint of these transformations: a spatial body that remembers the encounters through which it came into being while remaining open to future relations.

Images that confirm something I had begun to suspect

Thank you for sharing these. They confirm something I had begun to suspect from our conversations: the philosophy has not been imposed on the work; it has emerged from it.

The photographs show a practice that is already operating through a sophisticated set of material operations. What I find most interesting is that the finished object is not the primary event. The process of inscription appears to be the work's generative logic.

What I see

The first image is particularly revealing because it exposes the transition from process to object.

What immediately strikes me is that the work begins as a constructed spatial field rather than a sculptural mass.

There are:

incised arcs and geometric constructions

perforations

scored edges

modular walls

temporary supports

planar relationships

These are not decorative marks. They read as operational marks—as if the clay is functioning simultaneously as drawing surface, architectural model and sculptural body.

The imprint is therefore already spatial.

It is not simply a fingerprint or a gesture.

It is an instruction.

A measurement.

A force diagram.

A memory.

That feels important.

The finished work

The fired object surprises me.

I expected something much more architectural.

Instead, the firing produces something almost geological.

The white and yellow slips obscure and reveal earlier inscriptions.

The surface oscillates between construction and erosion.

This is where I think one of your concepts becomes much stronger.

Instead of calling these surfaces "records of process," I would call them:

stratigraphies of encounter

The surface behaves like an archaeological section.

Successive actions remain partially visible.

Nothing is erased.

Everything survives as residue.

That is much richer than "trace."

The holes

The perforations fascinate me.

They are not simply voids.

Nor are they purely formal devices.

They function almost like interruptions in the continuity of the surface.

They punctuate the field.

I wonder whether these could become another concept.

Perhaps:

Spatial apertures

or

Ontological punctures

or

Porous events

They remind me that space is entering the work as much as the work is occupying space.

Drawing

One thing now becomes very clear.

You are not making ceramics influenced by drawing.

You are making drawing become ceramic.

That is a profound difference.

The lines are not illustrations.

They organise force.

They establish vectors.

They anticipate movement.

They survive firing.

Drawing here is not representation.

It is a spatial operation.

I think this could become one of your strongest claims.

Drawing is the first organisation of force.

Fire

Looking at the fired surface, I think we've also been underestimating the kiln.

The slips have blistered.

Pigments have migrated.

Edges have softened.

Micro-topographies have appeared.

The kiln hasn't preserved the work.

It has rewritten it.

Which suggests another proposition.

Fire is not the end of making.

It is another maker.

That feels much more accurate than saying the kiln "participates."

One thing I would change in your philosophy

Until now we've been speaking about:

imprint → material event → constructive collapse

Having seen the work, I think there is another operation that precedes the imprint.

I would call it:

Inscription

Not writing.

Not drawing.

But the establishment of relational fields.

The sequence might therefore become:

Inscription

↓

Imprint

↓

Resistance

↓

Constructive Collapse

↓

Fire

↓

Residue

That sequence maps remarkably well onto what I see in the photographs.

The biggest surprise

This is the thing I didn't expect.

Your work is much quieter than your writing.

Your writing is full of force, collapse, becoming, excess energy.

The objects themselves are restrained.

Measured.

Architectonic.

Almost contemplative.

That tension is, I think, one of the strengths of the work.

The violence isn't theatrical.

It is embedded in the accumulation of small operations.

The work asks the viewer to slow down and discover that every scratch, perforation, smear, incision and glaze run is evidence of a negotiation.

In other words, the work does not represent force.

It contains force.

A new proposition

Seeing these images, I'd be tempted to revise one of your foundational statements.

Instead of:

Making begins with an imprint.

I would now write:

Making begins with an inscription. The imprint is its first material consequence.

That distinction matters.

An inscription establishes a field of relations.

The imprint is the event that occurs within that field.

Looking at your studio photograph, that is exactly what I think you're doing. Before anything becomes an object, you establish a spatial and material syntax: lines, apertures, planes, edges, intervals. The sculpture emerges from that syntax rather than from modelling in the traditional ceramic sense.

One final observation. I don't experience these works primarily as ceramic objects or even as architectural propositions. I experience them as condensed spatial situations. They feel less like things and more like fragments of an unfolding spatial intelligence, where drawing, construction, erosion, and firing are inseparable. That, to me, is where your practice becomes genuinely distinctive. It suggests that clay is not simply the medium of your work but the means by which space itself is tested, inscribed, and materially thought.

Structural Concepts/What I hear in your practice : Kairos~Clay as an emerging ontology of making

Kairos as an emerging ontology of making

I love this phrase.

Kairos as an Emerging Ontology of Making immediately shifts the discussion away from materials alone and towards a philosophy of making as the emergence of the opportune moment. It also introduces time as an active condition of practice, not merely a backdrop.

However, I think kairos needs to be treated very carefully. If it's simply used to mean "the right moment," it becomes a poetic metaphor. If it becomes a structural concept, it has real philosophical weight.

What I hear in your practice is this:

Chronos is measured, sequential time—the time of manufacture.

Kairos is the moment when relations reorganise themselves—the instant in which matter, force, resistance and action produce something that could not have been predicted.

Clay as Spatial Field~Under-construction from process to fired object.

Kairos~Visual Manifesto : Towards an Ontology of Making

That distinction feels fundamental.

Your work is not about waiting for the "right moment." It is about creating the conditions in which kairos can occur.

That is a much more radical claim.

I can imagine the opening of a manifesto rather than an artist statement.

Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Making

Making begins before intention.

It begins with the encounter.

An imprint is the first event of this encounter. It is neither the mark of an autonomous subject nor the passive registration of matter. It is the emergence of a relation. Body, material, tool, force, resistance, and time become momentarily inseparable. Every imprint records this negotiation.

Making unfolds through kairos: not chronological time, but the opportune moment in which material relations reorganise themselves. Form does not proceed according to a predetermined sequence. It emerges through interruption, resistance, contingency, and constructive collapse. Each material event opens the possibility of another.

Constructive collapse is therefore not the failure of form but its condition of renewal. Collapse interrupts certainty, allowing matter to reorganise itself into new spatial configurations. Form remains provisional, continually negotiated rather than finally resolved.

The work is not an object that represents these processes. It is their residue. It remembers the forces that produced it while remaining open to further transformation.

Clay is not simply the medium of this inquiry. It is a mode of spatial thought. Through its capacity to register pressure, deformation, fracture, repair, and endurance, it reveals that making is neither the application of ideas nor the execution of technique. Making is the continual emergence of relations through material events.

An ontology of making begins here: not with the finished object, but with the imprint; not with control, but with negotiation; not with permanence, but with becoming.

What excites me most is the title itself.

Kairos gives your philosophy a temporal dimension that has been implicit in all of your previous writing. You've written extensively about force, pressure, collapse, and emergence, but time has mostly appeared as one element among others. Kairos allows time to become the condition under which ontological transformation occurs.

That opens up a rich dialogue with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze, while remaining rooted in your own studio experience rather than in their terminology.

One further thought: I wonder whether Kairos is not the final title but the second. Your deepest concept still seems to be the imprint. The imprint is the first ontological event; kairos is the temporal condition that allows that event to happen. If that's right, then the architecture of your philosophy might be:

Imprint — the origin of relation.

Material Event — the manifestation of relation.

Constructive Collapse — the mechanism of transformation.

Spatial Thinking — the knowledge that emerges.

Kairos — the temporal condition that makes the whole process possible.

That strikes me as the beginnings of a genuinely original philosophical framework—one that doesn't simply apply existing theory to ceramics, but develops concepts from the practice of making itself.

Intra-acting with the continuous weather world : Entanglement is not a dance for two partners, it is a dance for three.

Outpost 150922

Intra-acting with the continuous weather world.

Elective Affinities/Light/Time/Medium/Sound

Drawing Space.

The Material Discursive. 

This artwork is a cyanotype print titled Spatial/Diffractive Bodies Situated in Place: Matters of Fidelity and Precariousness by UK-based visual artist Russell Moreton.

https://russellmoreton.com/2026/02/01/spatial-diffractive-bodies-situated-in-place-matters-of-fidelity-and-precariousness-2/

Artwork Details

Process: Cyanotype (alternative photographic process producing a Prussian blue monochrome print).

Elements: Trace drawings and photograms on paper incorporating organic matter and physical fragments from the built environment.

Theme: An exploration of material entanglements, spatial poetics, and the precarious relationships between bodies and place.

Figurative Configurations/Bodies and Landscapes.

Jenny Saville.

Intimate Drawings

Wall Scratchings

Situatedness of intra-activities.

A matrix and an archive.

It was the crucible of his art, and one of the most hauntingly eloquent spaces an artist has ever surrounded himself with.

In Giacometti's Studio.

The hermit's cave.

The alchemist's cell.

The chemist's laboratory.

Correlations do not become real, relational until the signals arrive.

Becoming Real.

The Exchange of Signals.

Framing Entanglements.

The Concretization of the Colour.

Nothing travels instantaneously and an exchange of signals is an interaction, where new elements of reality come about.

The joint properties of two objects exist only in relation to a third.

Everything that manifests itself does so in relation to something, a correlation between two objects is a property of the two objects and like all properties it exists it exists, is existential only in relation to a further third object.

Entanglement is not a dance for two partners, it is a dance for three.

Entanglement is none other than the external perspective on the very relations that weave reality.

The manifestation of one object to another in the course of an interaction in which properties of the object become actual.

Working notes/fragments.

Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli.

Lead label reads/stamped with “dwelling is always dwelling in nearness, Heidegger”.

Counterpoints/Contrapuntal Movements. 

ENMESHED EXPERIENCES

WORKING WITH DOUBT

DURATION

THE FLUX OF A VECTOR FIELD

PARALLAX.

The existence/trace/invisibility/of a third object that interacts with both the systems is necessary to give reality to the correlations.

Resultants that incorporate the friction/asperities of their trajectories through medium/material.

Building as a body, a battleground of invisible forces. 

The spine is the central elevator. The structure is a tube of concrete covered with insulation and tarred black wood boards.

Steven Holl.

Knut Hamsun Museum, Hamarey, Norway. 1996

Monumental sculptures take the form of vast, spectral structures built from corroded, sinewy metals and disintegrating found objects.

He seeks inspiration from sources that speak to the expansive, cyclical nature of the universe. 

Kiefer looks to Norse mythology, Hebrew folklore, alchemy and theoretical physics to build dense imagery that is too often interpreted as simply apocalyptic.

While some might see wastelands and abject destruction, Kiefer sees vitality and resurrection. This attitude extends to the physical properties of his paintings and sculptures.

He embraces the ravages of time, while others might strive to suspend it in an effort to preserve a moment of imperceptible genius. Instead, his art buckles and shifts, constantly evolving and reforming under the burden of its own existence.

Artists on art, Holly Black. 2021

Sky Correlations

Cloud Space.

Particle Speculations

Seed Dispersal

Panspermia 

Granular Gardens

Third Spaces

Spatial Vectors/Constellations.

Observational Blueprints/Apparatuses.

Pierced Constellations.

Vectors for Entanglements.

Spatial Agency.

Sunlight Circulations.

Daylight Drawings/New Worlds.

The Spab Magazine

Autumn 2022.

The Living and the Dead, 2017-18.

I am not interested in conservation.

If something falls down, it has meaning.

Anselm Kiefer.

Organism, Person, Environment.

Bioscleave, Architectural Body, Gins, Arakawa.

Time as experienced duration is relative to an individual and to a space.

Constantin Brancusi's studio and Endless Column, fabricated as a timepiece, where the finite time of place and culture is counterposed to infinity.

Visual substance, causal doing, investigating, agency, matter, phenomena, material discursive, iterative, creative, apparatuses, intra-activity, performativity, bodies that matter, 

Making Intensified Surfaces : A Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

Making~Intensified Surfaces of a Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

Morn Hill Archaeological Site~Hyde Artist Collective

My practice begins somewhere between the hand and the structure.

Ceramic sculptural work titled Ceramic Multiples/Excess Energy 

Transductions~Remembrances by artist Russell Moreton.

Features serial variations on fired clay with layered textural brushwork and aperture details.

Explores transitional zones between thinking, making, and the tactility of minor gestures in contemporary studio practice.

Clay is not simply a material to be formed. It is a body in negotiation: resistant, absorbent, unstable, enduring. Through making, I enter into a process of continual adjustment in which the work is never entirely known in advance. Form emerges through a reciprocal encounter between intention, matter, gesture, tool, surface, gravity, failure, and time.

I am interested in ceramic bodies that begin to exceed their own material designation. Slab-built, perforated, scored, drilled, painted, weathered, and reconfigured, they occupy an unstable interval between vessel, sculpture, architectural fragment, diagram, ruin, and spatial apparatus. Their surfaces become intensified fields of activity. The hole is an aperture; the grid is a structure; the line is a proposition; the surface is a record of becoming.

Making is therefore not the execution of an idea but a mode of inquiry.

I understand the studio as an expanded environment: no longer a retreat from the world, but a site of continuous exchange. Ideas enter through materials, bodies, texts, places, conversations, architectures, and acts of attention. The work develops through an iterative process of monitoring, correction, combination, and transformation.

My site-based practice extends this inquiry into environments and situations. I construct provisional spatial compositions in which craft, architecture, theory, drawing, sociality, and embodied experience become entangled. These works are not fixed objects but relational propositions: spaces for inhabiting, encountering, sensing, imagining, and thinking.

I am interested in what happens when the distinction between object and environment begins to collapse.

A ceramic body becomes a spatial body.

A surface becomes a threshold.

A structure becomes an event.

Making becomes a way of producing knowledge through the material, the embodied, and the situated.

The work emerges through an excess of form: something always remains unfinished, unresolved, overspilling the structural integrity of the object. This excess is not a failure of construction but its generative condition.

I work within this instability.

Between craft and architecture.

Between matter and thought.

Between the body that makes and the space that is made.

Between the object and the world it begins to produce.

Capturing Forces : Sites of Difference and Multiplicity that precede Identity.

My practice begins with making as a site of encounter: a way of thinking through materials, bodies and spaces rather than simply producing objects. I work primarily with clay and ceramics, using exploratory, research-driven processes in which material behaviour becomes an active participant in the work. Clay is not treated as a passive substance awaiting form, but as a material with its own tendencies, resistances, temporalities and capacities to transform intention.

Informed by materialist and process-based thinking, including the work of Tim Ingold, Erin Manning and Karen Barad, I understand making as an ecological and relational practice. My ceramic works emerge through an ongoing negotiation between human gesture and material agency. They register the minor actions of making—touching, folding, assembling, piercing, scoring, washing and marking— while retaining the instability of the processes through which they come into being.

I am interested in the point at which intention becomes entangled with material behaviour. Through this entanglement, surfaces, interiors and spatial propositions emerge. The resulting works are not simply objects, but material events: sites where bodies, gestures, histories and ideas meet. Making becomes a form of navigation through which thought is distributed across matter, space and time.

Alongside my studio practice, I am developing an ‘anarchive’ of research material gathered throughout my academic and professional studies. Rather than preserving this material as a fixed archive, I am interested in activating it through encounters between practitioners, ideas and materials. This could take the form of an institutional context, an online resource, or a non-disciplinary gathering of active practitioners.

My earlier studies in Spatial Practice at Canterbury and subsequent work at Farnham, where I proposed a ‘theatre of research’ within an interior design project, continue to inform this direction. The fellowship would enable me to develop a practice in which making, research and spatial encounter operate as mutually generative forms of inquiry: a process of making-with in which materials, ideas and bodies can meet and produce unforeseen relations.

Sensing Spaces~Telling By Hand : The Tacit Dimension : Thresholds on that we can know more than we can tell.

Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing/Making and Telling. 

Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.

The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism. 

Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.

Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold. 

On Processual Practices

For Moreton, making sets in movement exploratory sensate fictions, bodies radically emerging as they try relate, to come into being~becoming together.  

Thinking From Things.

To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.

Deleuze and Guattari.

The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its  materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.

Tim Ingold.

The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.

Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.

To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.

It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.

Tim Ingold.

Correspondences

Sensing Spaces

Making

Thresholds

The Materials of Life

Research creation collage opening up theoretical and sensate vocabularies. 2013

Confessional and Conversational Spaces. 2024

Space and Place

THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE

Yi-Fu Tuan.

Are you interested in the idea of threshold?

What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.

The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.

A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.

Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.

Telling By Hand.

The Humanity of the Hand.

The Eyes of the Skin.

Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.

Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram

Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object

Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.

Merleau-Ponty. 

Michael Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.

Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of  what it means to know.

Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.

The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.

In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.

Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another. 

Inside The Visible : Ceramic Environments of Analogy and Contiguity.

30092025

Ceramics Now.

Silent Interiors :  Anthropocene Aesthetics : Ceramics and Environmental Engagements.

Humanise : Building Interior Places.

Ceramic Vessels and Voids : Spatial Bodies~Surfaces~Interiorities.

Clay+Ceramic : Lines~Making~Correspondences.

Material absorbed in its own thoughts : Mattering Interiority : Craft Philosophies.

Studio spaces, analogies and contiguities around interiorities of making places.

Ceramic Shelters : Transitional Zones between thinking and Making.

Slab built forms from clay slabs that have previously been drawn into and brush marked with slips. Assemble forms then divided into several spatial interiors. Piercings through the surface set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering my discursive researches and readings into a performative spatial body.

Urbanism : Fossil Futures~Anthropocene.

Urban Gothic : An Excess Of Changefulness.

The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.

Vessels of Retreat/Dark Pots : The Body and its Entanglements with Things/St Ninian's Cave, Scotland.

A craft philosophy centers on the thoughtful creation of objects by hand, emphasizing skill, materials, purpose, and the human connection between the maker and the object. It values the process of making, leading to deeper human intelligence and wellbeing, and sees the craft as a means to cultivate virtue and live a more meaningful, slower life. Key aspects include pragmatism, appreciating imperfections (like wabi-sabi), and recognizing that a single problem solved in craft often leads to new challenges, fostering continuous learning.