Friday, 31 March 2023

A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

 Outpost 310323


A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing



Matters of Concern/Fact.

Drawing/Contingency/Sensing/Seeing

Drawing away from descriptive depictions that illustrate preconceptions/aesthetics.


Julian Stair.

Quietus. 2012.

The Vessel.

Death and The Human Body.


There is an alchemy to making ceramics. We take an inert material, fashion it, dry it and expose it to heat and flame. The practice of cremation, of exposing the body to fire, going through an alchemical change, echoes and parallels the process of firing.

Julian Stair.


The materials he works, lead and clay are dense, both physically and emotionally. But Stair's use of these materials is not representational. These objects do not depict or illustrate, instead they enact and embody.


Stair's achievement in this cyclical exhibition is to have expressed both the universality and the specificity of death, each as an aspect of the other.


The great hand-thrown jars that stand at the heart of the exhibition exemplify this doubleness. Though completely abstract, they exist at the scale of the body. They invite a tactile response, visitors might stroke the ridges circumscribing the jars or tap them, or even give them a gentle hug.

Glenn Adamson.



Life drawing on the psychology of  nakedness and the human body in contemporary art.

Life-Class/Anatomy/Pathology.






The practical and theoretical problems of the confrontation with the human form.

Georg Eisler.


Herbert Boeckl.

His nudes speak a physical language, interpreting life and death in terms of human bodies, of functioning muscle and bone and the tactile aspects of flesh, and the knowledge of what lies beneath/behind it. 


Alfred Hrdlicka. 

A Group. 1973.


Proximity does not read as intimacy, the entangled naked bodies convey a sense of insecurity.


The Posed/Nakedness/Social Scrutiny.


The Life-Class.

Isabel Bradshaw/Michael Grimshaw


Drawings/Sculpted lines that bring sensations onto the surface of the paper.

Lines of Movement/Vectors

Lines of Static Forms/Boundaries


Mark-making, rendering the spatialities of the human form.

Form-Movement

Mass-Volume

Skin-Surface






Line is only the visual interpretation of an extremity of a volume. Mark-making on a drawing becomes a conduit for a sensation of seeing others.


The concept of anthropomorphism is central to the identity of pottery. We use bodily terms such as a neck, shoulder, hip and foot to describe the constituent parts of a pot. And the very nature of the vessel as a container, a holder of things, is analogous to the idea of the body as physical container for the soul or spirit.

Julian Stair.



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Monday, 27 March 2023

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand/Spatial Representation/Working Drawings,Collages and Cyanotypes.

“In my view, the task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience. Architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.”
Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.
Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009


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Tuesday, 21 March 2023

From Naked to Nude : Drawing from Life/Luminosity/Movement/Corporeality.

 


From Naked to Nude.

Life Drawing.









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


Drawing as an inquiry of seeing/being/feeling

Bodies in an abstracted atmosphere of absence


Luminosity/Movement/Corporeality.


The blurring/dissolution of the conventional distinction/relationships between the figure and the ground.


The luminescent dematerialization of the subject. 


The nude, mediated by the mechanical effects of photography/blurring/fragmentation and the distance/blindness of drawing/memory.

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Monday, 20 March 2023

Littoral Zones/Making Processes : Affect, an ecology of experience/Clay Work : Visceral Practices.

 Momentum Wheel : Lucie Rie Installation.

Clay/Ceramics as a concept to a way of thinking.

Speculative Tectonics : A Poetic of Construction.


The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.


Clay Works --- In and Out of material : Clay plays the stone, the stone plays the clay

Tony Cragg


IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL



Demonstration



Tony Cragg : I basically mean the effectiveness of the object, of the material. But because the metaphysical and physical association are already occupied, I'm interested in somehow establishing some relationship with the materials and the things around me without using any preconceived notions of an already occupied language. It is a bit like taking away a Christian name and depersonalising something. What I mean is that it's an attempt on my side to restart the relationship with the material, which I think sculptors have to do anyway.



Jon Wood : Thinking of the increased awareness that this side of your work tries to capture and harness in the viewer, can you say a bit about the kind of sensitivities that you would like to be heightened? What would you see your work as demonstrations of and for? Your sculptures are triggers for what kind of thinking?



Tony Cragg : Well there is an attitude to looking at things and to looking at objects and materials which is based on a meditative tradition of contemplation : the universe in a grain of sand idea, or maybe even religious ideas where you actually get in contact on some level with the material world, on a deeper level than the one you obviously are capable of reaching in an everyday situation, so on an extraordinary level, outside of your own experiences.


I am not saying that that's not interesting or important. But I also think that this leaves the battleground for the everyday life to be governed by non-contemplative thought and non-meditative thought. And this may sound like a mixture of terms, but I think that there is a job to be done even on an everyday, “second for second” level of life—on the experiential level of life. I think there is a job to be done here improving the quality of contemplation about an awareness of the material world—the material world seen as an immediate extension of the communal social effort, the cultural effort that you are part of.



Jon Wood : How does it move from being an individual contemplative experience to being one that has a communal relevance?



Tony Cragg : In the main part it only has communal relevance. All you can do for yourself is formulate your sentences, cook yourself a meal that suits you, get dressed in a fashion that suits you, and everything else you have to put up with as having been made by other people for you. But obviously, even if they didn't ask your permission, there's something consensual about that, isn't there? Even though you don't like it, it doesn't look like you're making an effort to change it. And maybe there's some active thing there. My idea is that even if I don't like it, I wouldn't be able to change a great deal of it, but I could sow the seed for some change in the direction that I would feel would be important. It's a measure of how much responsibility one takes for the change. Looking for more in the visual world around me and looking for more language, in a sense, is one way of heightening sensibilities and expanding a vocabulary and then expanding the responses to a vocabulary is a way of heightening sensibilities. I'm not a politician, but I think we still live in a world that is greatly dominated by mesmerism and mystical models, which are very distracting because they actually stop us from really trying to face reality.



Realist Magic

Objects, Ontology,

Causality

Timothy Morton


Clay Work : Visceral Practices











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

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft.

Longshore drift is a geographical process that consists of the transportation of sediments (clay, silt, sand and shingle) along a coast at an angle to the shoreline, which is dependent on prevailing wind direction, swash and backwash. 

This process occurs in the littoral zone, and in or close to the surf zone.



Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

Visualising Environmental Agency.










"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Gell 1998)"

"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.


Tectonics in architecture is defined as "the science or art of construction, both in relation to use and artistic design." It refers not just to the "activity of making the materially requisite construction that answers certain needs, but rather to the activity that raises this construction to an art form." It is concerned with the modeling of material to bring the material into presence: from the physical into the meta-physical world.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78804


Situate them in such a way that useful space for life may form itself amidst them.

Kazimar Malevich 1924

Zaha Hadid on Malevich • BBC CH/4



Template and Form 2010.The Yard,Winchester.


Modern information theory claims that both the clay and the mould are engaged with matter and form. The clay is in a metastable state that possesses potential energy, unevenly distributed, but capable of effecting a metamorphosis. This quality of the clay is the source of its form. The mould places a limit on the expanding form of the molecular organisation of the clay as it fills the mould. The mould does not form the clay passively, but communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that alters the clay's molecular organisation.












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Wednesday, 15 March 2023

Working Collage : Marking the Line/Art, Architecture and Craft Narratives.

Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity.

Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning. 



Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?
— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005

Jana Sterbak
Remote Control 1989


A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline

Texts,Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines, 








Ecosophy : Social ecology, mental ecology, environmental ecology.

"Concerning the continuous development of its practice as much as its theoretical scaffolding."

The Three Ecologies, Guattari










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Selected Research : Hungate/Water : Historical Architectural Programming

 Hungate 

Work In Progress

150323


On Constructing Creativity.

Wondrous Engagements. 

Light/Substance/Ritual/Memory/Display







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


WATER

Conduits of inquiry into the sacred and the secular, the spirit and the body.

Cleansing Vessels.


Piscina/Niche/Wall/Building


Art/Archaeology

Ritual/Display

Corporeal/Spiritual


Beuys, was involved in questions of form, material processes and social sculpture, he believed that art and the insight gained through art becomes a formative influence on life. He wanted a situation where life and art become one. Academicians sense that in this ideal state, an Academy would be superfluous. 


Raw materials/substances/tools all used as symbols with their own unique properties and qualities.

Beuys brought things into forms, in which the material and the forms are really in accord with each other, and are satisfied and want to keep on living. He was constantly moving material between two opposed poles, undetermined chaos (a blob of melted fat) and determined order (a box of things). 








Selected Research.

Being mindful that material can lead the way.


Beuys/Cragg on matter and materials beyond the hylomorphic model.


Gaston Bachelard, on intimate, watery spaces and the imagination.

Poetics Of Space.


Juhani Pallasmaa, on reading and experiencing architectural spaces at The Hungate.

The Eyes Of The Skin, Architecture And The Senses.







Proposals into working practice/ideas.

Returning to direct site based experiential drawings/templates/mappings/rubbings. 


Fluidity between surfaces and things, of dampness, stains and porous plaster.

The molecular interstitial spaces of light, air and water.

Sacred water washing the soul (the font), secular water washing the body (the bath)


Bonnard, domicile paintings of body,water and the baptism of light.

Displacement of things (body/rituals) in vessels of water (bath/font).

The architectural interior, a historical place of shelter for beliefs.

The membrane, screen, between the cleansing nakedness of water.

 


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Tuesday, 14 March 2023

Enchantment and Sites of Sensual Engagement : Periphery/Boundaries and their limits.

 Outpost 140323


Wonders On The Periphery Of living.








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


The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.


Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett.


The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind  that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.



The dialectical principle of the intertwining of the world and the self.


My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and confirms to itself.


The Intertwining-The Chiasm.

The Visible and the Invisible.

Merleau-Ponty.


The Concept Of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

Intervals/Sequences/Iterations : Between Drawings/Templates/Prototypes.



The Eyes Of The Skin.

Critics of Ocularcentrism.

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ontology of the flesh as the ultimate conclusion of his initial phenomenology of perception. This ontology implies that meaning is both within and without, subjective and objective, spiritual and material.

Richard Kearney.





Sculptural Spacings/Bindings.

Creativity, materials/matters of concern caught around the creative act of a self amongst others.


Temporal Interrelations.

Adaptive Bridging Strategies.

Playing with materials, to bring forth the synergies of thinking/making/imagination.


Working so as to form or 'seed' gaps amongst the process of exploration.

The display of agency, of un-learning perspectives, discontents, alterity and literal landscapes.


Sites of sensual engagement through alternative forms of individual and social participation.


Energies, entropic to living things.

Natures/Intellectual Spaces.

Indexical Traces/Flows of Energy.

Artists/Makers on the process of material transformation, mobility, thought, body, through an embodied/subjective/multisensory experience. 


Raveningham, allows the thinking of the existential qualities of natures materials in an intimacy/nowness with the natural world. An enmeshed world, working on natures terms, of movement, change, life, growth, and decay.


For Olafur Eliasson, the practice sets out to examine the way an embodied sense of a place can be restructured as a function/site of a sculptural spacing that questions ideas around embodiment, perception, architectural programming. 


The landscape without objects/without hylomorphic thinking.

Tim Ingold.


The Periphery. 

Frontiers and their Disappearance.

Borders and Limits.

Wim Nijenhuis.


Individuation, the process of 'becoming something' and the 'being there' of 'something.'


Modern information theory claims that both the clay and the mould are engaged with matter and form. The clay is in a metastable state that possesses potential energy, unevenly distributed, but capable of effecting a metamorphosis. This quality of the clay is the source of its form. The mould places a limit on the expanding form of the molecular organisation of the clay as it fills the mould. The mould does not form the clay passively, but communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that alters the clay's molecular organisation.


Paul Virilio, distinguishes two orders around the frontier, that of place, characterised by a stability of form, and that of speed, characterised by the fading of form.


Primarily the city is formed and informed by heterogeneous speeds, by the difference between inertia and traffic, the form of the city is thus finally an unstable effect. The city exists through traffic in all its forms.



Keywords : Vectorisation, Distinctive Oppositions, Hylomorphic Schema, Form-Matter-Model,  Place, Speed, Inertia, Traffic, 


New Figure/Grounds.


Geometric marks, vectors across a surface that might suggest some opaque system of musical notation, of points/notes connected forming a constellation of lines and angles. Workings on and between that are synonymous with the field/environ of the canvas, in such a way as it is no longer possible to speak of the classical figure ground relationship.


The Luminescence of Space.

Towards a more delimited spatial conception, a loss of centre.

Charles Maussion.


Rethinking, gestural, expressionistic, lyrical abstractions, atmospheric figuration. 


Keywords : Colour Field Painting, Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Orhon Mubin, Spatial Conception, 


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