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.
