STUDIO
PRACTICE, THEORY AND ANALYSIS.
MA
SCHOOL OF CRAFTS AND DESIGN.
Working Notes : Brockwood Granary 2014
Theory and Analysis Documents, UCA Farnham
Working Contexts/Title
: Spatial/Making analogies/relationscapes
“Innerness” in Ceramics/Architecture and
Philosophy/Painting
BUILDing something
“existentially unknowable” but with a critical context.
The CONTENTS of the
INTERIOR, defining encounters between objects, feelings and
taxonomies, bibliographic research material and explorations.
Making Things, to
locate subjectivities and ground relations around the fluid and the
relational.
Interfaces around the
nature of place, its document and its textual narrative creating
spatial subjectivities, tools as ways of thinking.
An Assemblage as
INTERIOR, contingent to its situation of partial un-builtness.
Space as both text and
its scaffold.
Interior as an “Open
Text” the spatial development of research from various approaches.
Hans Coper, essay re
“Object Analysis” for CSC Exhibition has opened up a number of
new avenues of research.
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 28March 2014)
“The Pot, ancient as
it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made
from the inside out.”
Adam Gopnik 2014
“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
“Innerness” from
Atemwende by Edmund de Waal, text by Adam Gopnik.
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 things: volume, inner
space, an interior, the space carved out of air that connects the
morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco.
The Potters wheel, one
of the most ancient forms of technology, pastoral and low-tech. The
notion of making and its practice of craft could be seen in
Heideggian terms as a sort of dwelling, a thinking through materials
as a building adapting to the process and situation of the
practitioner.
A vessel defines
emptiness as presence.
Innerness and Defined Space/Air
The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger)
Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking,
This essay is an
attempt to get to understand my interests centred around the interior
spaces of things. This sense of the interior is itself held in place
by the notion of some kind of vessel. It is this vessel with its form
and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely. This
interior sensing space with its particular characteristics is an
extension of our own existential space, it can promote memories,
sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our postmodern
lives. Do these vessels re-enact the particulars of traditions, of
other maybe unknown makers; are they in fact expressions on the basic
needs of civilisation whether they be pots or architecture. There is
the notion that in some way we reconcile and balance opposites, the
outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space
depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness.
In her essay The
Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry(Daintry2007:9) cites The Tao Te
Cing “We turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where
there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends” It
follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to become
permeable because it embodies ‘something and nothing and is an
effortless three dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.’
(Daintry2007:8) It is interesting to note that the potter hollows out
the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a
clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry2007:8) This defined air is 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 spandels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay
and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik2014:6)
This sentiment and its
sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are
conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the
permeability of spaces. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested
in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work “On the
Nature of Things” records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to
dissolve the solidity of the world’.(Daintry2007:8) This lightness
and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s
only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal2004:34)
A pre-dynastic Egyptian
pot, roughly egg-sheped, the size of my hand made thousands of years
ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A
humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious,
sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to
contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to
contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper,
1969.
Does Hans Coper’s
text reflect on an archaic pre Christian paganism? Does the human
sense of innerness that this vessel dwells with been and was created
from remain present? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have
shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel
is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks
generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry2007:8) Hans Coper’s
Egyptian pot certainly as he observes is still contributing its
minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness
but into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that
is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states,
rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the
interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement. There is a
material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another
mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay
concur its humanity.
‘The special
historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground.
Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to
earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the
physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted
and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human
endeavour.’ (Adamson,2009:36)
Gaston Bachelard writes
in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and
nothingness’. He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’
and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside
concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane
or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather
the duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts
and abstractions , ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid
and interchangeable.’ (Daintry2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard
argues that the mind and its imagination actually blur and in some
way inverts the experience of in or out? He comments ’everything,
even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate
size’.In this way he explains further ‘Being does not see itself.
It does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is
never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a
centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and
nothingness.’(Bachelard1994)
Bachelard seems to be
in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino
in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical
concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but
the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as
solid bodies.’(Calvino1996) There is a lightness and an exactitude
in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form
and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to
inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal
territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry2007:12)
The transformative
power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through
its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of
the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or
rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it
‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were
over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an
architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior
illuminated through the imagination?
Natasha Daintry asks
are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that
before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world?
(Daintry2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in
particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can
socially inform us.
I am interested in
exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and
formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices
of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the
making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of
attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of
locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality.
Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt
experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the
corporeal.’ (Daintry2007:13)
Pottery Making, Inner
Spaces, Installation Art and the Postmodern.
‘When potters throw a
certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with
every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an
archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of
making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’
(Adamson,2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can
bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.
Hans Coper’s
assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown
components, “throwing” as a process that he remarks on as saying
“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive
instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence
now”.(Birks1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were
containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their
energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel.
This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood,
dwelling and skill. Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters
spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice of a
craft. His unique ways of working in clay are conceptualised by the
very practice and history of ceramics. These composite forms of his
own invention underpin his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics form a
series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could
propose subtle amendments and adaptations that became permanent and
that could endure the world without him.
Hans Coper’s pots are
objects that spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner
spaces that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel. The almost
mechanical surface treatment of the pots surface caused by abrading
the glazed layer seems to give their interior space a reverence for
the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.
Hans Coper’s
candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral mark epochal points of
reflection and reconciliation with humanity through their darkened
and defined interior geometries that surface into the environment.
These forms appear caught or carefully placed between a modernist
need for atonement of the recent past and the deeper sensibilities
found in the archaic traces of lost civilisations.
His pottery making
epitomises his perception of the world around him. His pottery takes
up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into
our existential social realm.
Hans Coper’s pots
were an ethical avant-garde produced through the very backbone of his
practice. He produced artefacts that sat on his studio shelves,
artefacts that did not actually require need of biography, plinth or
cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their
makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their
time, yet they are archaic and were crafted by things close to hand.
These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself
left art in the world of the Postmodern, which is itself addictive,
conditioned and fetishized.
Suzi Gablik in The
Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art
(has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly
addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others,
such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of
life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or
transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become)
manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less
waste and greed. (Gablik,1991:2)
Do Coper’s pots now
find themselves navigating in a fetishized monopoly of Post
Modernism; can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that
affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of
man?’(Kuspit,1994:5)
In sharp contrast to
the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots,
Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own
hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface
of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his
‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and
display of ceramics.’(Graves,2008:8)
His large scale
installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often
in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an
historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up
to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. This site specific
installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The
installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the
space of the monumental central dome.
Signs and Wonders is
about seeing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the
sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself
appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe
as it/we gather our surroundings.
‘De Waal has placed
his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held
and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’
(Adamson,2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are
in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of
influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European
porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus
and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed
has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a
sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be
for a private audience.’ (Graves,2009:8)
This work is not about
tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in
producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’
of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.
Through working with
specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their
very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through
staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural
features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)
His work and the
interior spaces associated with it are in some way endemic of his and
our postmodern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing
has itself become just a function, an endless repetition. Grapham
Gussin that this can take you nowhere Endless repetition, Graham
Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, akind of Utopia-meaning
literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like
a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose
development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or
external end’. (Daintry2007:13)
Although the body has
been existential through the throwing process and is clearly
represented in Edmund de Waals work it still none the less appears
was if it were now atrophied through his preoccupation with
presentation and academic preservation.
Solnit explores Susan
Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness
in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and
knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit
comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object,
appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A
medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes,
and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body
has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be
embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating
and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because
other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many
people.’(Solnit 2002)
Will we be able to
extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard
to the Egyptian vessel?
In sensing a pots
interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit
correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it
through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This
anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual
and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.
Some pots are tuned and
balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces
(noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).
The light of reflection
and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light;
from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a
cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.
The Hut is a vessel in
the making for reflective dwelling.
The Pot with its
interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.
In The Making :
Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference.
Quietus : Interiors of
Silence and Space.
Innerness : A
(sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment.
Sensing Spaces :
Through displacements and hidden volumes.
Defined Interiors : By
material, agency and social and private architectures.
Interiors of Pots :
Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the
inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude.
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