Saturday 17 July 2021

Space into Places : As Found, a concern for that which exists/A hut of one's own

CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE
Working Notes 2 July 2014-07-02

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.
A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

Ann Cline : A Hut of One's Own

Huts are always fascinating but the huts of sophisticated cultures are especially so: from the huts of ancient recluse poets to those of ornamental hermits, from the casitas of the Bronx to the huts of seventeenth-century tea masters, from the shacks of the homeless to the follies of postmodern architectures. All these huts deconstruct the optimistic sophistication of their age. Then they rearrange it. ...
Nowadays [one] who wishes to experience the poetry of life ... should have a hut of one's own.... Here, isolated from the wasteland and its new-world saviors, a person might gain perspective on life and the forces that threaten to smother it. ...
Only in a hut of one's own can a person follow his or her own desires — a rigorous discipline, and one that the poet Gary Snyder calls the hardest of all, presupposing as it does self-knowledge while balancing free action and cultural taboo, knowing whether desire is instructive or the imprint of culture or if personal, whether such desires are the product of thought, of contemplation, or the unconsciousness.
Even if this hut is only one's normal abode inhabited in a different way, here in a hut of one's own, a person may find one's very own self, the source of humanity's song.


Architectural Canvas : Working with diversity and specificity
Numinous Odyssey
Raveningham Sculpture Trail 2020

















‘What I am most interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’
‘The richness and strength of that(their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’
Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’
Peter Smithson, 2001

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is (site) specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction (Opposition/Kengo Kuma and Herzog and De Meuron and Multiplicity/Calvino and Zumthor) and a concern for that which exists.’
Schregenberger, 2005







The spatial practices of exhibition and education.
The humanities and architecture, Heidegger/Bachelard/Ingold/Herzog and De Meuron/Zumthor.

The politics of things/sociology and everyday life/dwelling and making.

Natural History learning/thinking through things/situations and vocations.

Contents/Contexts/Collection and Presentation.
Taxonomies and Subjectivity/Spatial Narratives of Layered Space (Spatiality)
Mark Dion, Archaeology, Thames Dig.(Allegories of a pseudo-archaeology)
Herzog and De Meuron, Archaeology of the Mind/Natural History.
Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self/Architecture and Allegory.


Visual/Spatial Vocabularies and Narratives (Livelihoods and Social Interactions)

Spatial Methodologies.

Worlds and Thresholds.
The Fanciful and The Scientific.
The Playful and The Reverent.
The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.
Between Evanescence and Substance.
Between Illusion and Specificity.
Between Slickness and Tactility.







Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

The Projects Evolution.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of a vital serenity, a poetics of dwelling and its angle of repose hovering somewhere between the transcendental and the real.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building.

Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.


Working Analysis.

CSC Object Analysis : Hans Coper/Innerness in the Ceramic Vessel and Architecture.
Making (act/sacred bond of both an individual and a civilization) from the inside out, from the interior, from the first movement or impulse, from the everyday condition/situation the as found nature of things. The innerness of the vessel of a room remains the property of our shared humanity, of our social being/becoming.

Why did this opportunity produce a wealth of transformative insights (conduits and territories) that are now active agents working across all facets of my practice?

Why does the teaching and the ultimate examination or rather the grading of the project destroy the delicate praxis that is trying to be engendered?

What, and why does the hidden agenda (any university course can only offer a limited introduction to a level of study) or hierarchical academic position corrupt the learning from not being a mutual experience, into a policing of interrogative and prescriptive learning outcomes?


Properties:

Pastoral Setting.
Built within and amongst a monastery.
Facility and retreat for cross disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).
Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.
Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces.
Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.


Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.


West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity, Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Winchester College, Winchester. Exhibition with talk on creative practice, display of large body drawings, cyanotypes, astronomical charts and architectural notebooks. Workshop conducted in the making and experimentation of using the cyanotype process (historical, light based, printing process 1843).

Link Gallery Winchester University, Winchester. Art and Archaeology around the Keatsian notion ‘Negative Capability’ photograms of anthropomorphic leper graves with excavated oyster shells found at the site (Morn Hill, Winchester).


Hyde Abbey Gatehouse and St Bart’s Church Winchester. Leylines exhibition of artist book photographs, drawings, maps and collages. Installation of archaeologist drawing frame with annotated lead labels, plumb bob, orientated to align with the speculative leyline phenomena.   

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