Diffractive Title/Things : The thing contained is not the thing contained.

 Outpost 240423

The thing contained is not the thing contained.

Manifesto for explorations of 'IN'

Steven Holl.

You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.

Rich Lyrical Motifs.

Brilliant Trees.

Within each lesson lies the price to learn.

David Sylvian. 

Alternative Photography/Filtered Radiance

Documents from research archive

Seeing Dark Things

Roy Sorensen. 2008

Tracing Light : Petworth House, West Sussex 2000

David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

Light And The Genius Loci

For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in 'a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun inthe system of perception'.

Mutations Of Light

Petworth Window, 6 July 1999

Light's Windows And Rooms

Passing towards the Invisible.

The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent  theme in William Henry Fox Talbot's early speculations.

CATCHING THE LIGHT

The entangled history of light and mind

Arthur Zajonc

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900

Sight Unseen

Picturing The Universe

Corey Keller

Invisible objects, penciled by nature's own hand.

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the 'world itself'.

The Social

Photographic Eye

Jennifer Tucker

Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.

An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand. 

Invisible Worlds

Visible Media

Tom Gunning

William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6x22.5 cm.

Techniques Of The Observer

On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century

Jonathan Crary

The Camera Obscura and its Subject

Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' world. 

UNDER THE SUN

By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.

An Epiphany Of Light

David Alan Mellor

Christopher Bucklow , Guests

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Matter is provisional and that includes me. If the physics is correct then we are neither alive or dead as we commonly understand it, but in different states of potentiality.

Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one's feet.

J. G. Bennett.

Walking/Thinking with Ideas/Observations.

Site Drawings and Observational Mappings.

Cultivation Field.

Artist's Development.

Planting Research

Vital Nourishment.

Raveningham Garden Project.

Circle/Linear Time/Centred on objects.

Spiral/Deep Time/Awareness between things.

Architectural Ceramics.

Inseminations/Sketchbooks

Working Ideas/Proposals into Matter/Making

Contents/Description/Instructions/Diagram/Drawing

Curatorial.

Spatial Practice.

Practice/Display/Audience.

 

Hungate.

Julian 600.

Cell/Seeds/Dispersal/Cloud

Organism-Person-Environment

Anglian Potters

5 Years of membership/exhibition/making.

Commissioning of 12 cu ft Gas Kiln.

Kiln Craft Glass Kiln.

Momentum Wheel, refurbish/rebuild.

Drawing Confrontations of Flesh and Bone.

From Models to Drawings.

Figuring It Out.

Anatomy/Art/Photography : Living/Deceased/Represented.

The Body on Display.

From Naked to Nude.

The Impossible Nude.

The Psychology of Nakedness.

Confronting the human form both practically and theoretically.

Vital Nourishment.

Aesthetics in Western Art and Chinese Culture.

Georg Eisler.

Francois Jullien.

Curriculum Making : The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

 

What shall I do next?

Tim Ingold

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces

Spatial Practices.

UCA Canterbury.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge-making process.

Liminality/Glass/Display/Presentation.

How things work in art museums.

Creative processes of presentation, a spatiality for narratives that can navigate the spaces between objects

What shall I do next?

Tim Ingold

Reading Matter/Rooms.

The Lake of The Mind.

Stochastic Thinking.

Steven Holl.

Raveningham : Site-specific project place

The Garden of Ongoing Differences.

Diffraction/Energy/Analysis/Attunement 

Public intimacies, personal dialogues in social spaces.

'Blocking In' of a private studio space of creative inquiry into the public realm as a permeable intervention.

Curriculum Making.

The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

An Ontology of Dwelling.

The dwelling ontology we want to describe rejects any possibility of living in the world through mental schemas of the world, and insists that the material-relational world is the only world in which we live, the only source of our capacities to communicate and learn, the only world in which our activities take effect, and the only world in which meaning inheres.

Greg Mannion, Hamish Ross.

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who has looked at the interface between people and the environment. In The Perception of the Environment, he argues that ecological psychology and the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the world becomes  meaningful through active inhabitation, or 'dwelling', rather than cognitive representation. 

Exploratory Ceramic/Spatial Practice

Slab Built Ceramics.

Ferini Gallery 2023.

' Splitting ' constructions after Gordon Matta-Clarke.

Terracotta and Oxides/Glaze.

Intermediaries/Making

Capacitances.

Vessels for relationships between movements.

Space/Surface/Volume 

Spatial Agency/Enactments of Organism-Person-Environment.

Gins and Arakawa.

Physical Models

Speculative Drawings/Diagrams/Maps and Charts are all a symbolic depiction emphasizing mapping relationships.

Assemblages

Liminality/Superposition/Luminous

Coloured and Filtered Light.

Architectural Glazes/Surfaces/Textures.

Materials/Substances/Natural Qualities.

Lead/Iron/Cotton/Canvas/Clay

Painting and Drawing Substances/Chemicals/Raw Materials.

Sprays/Objects/Screens/Templates/Resists/Piercings.

Body-Craft

Corpus/Body/Surface/Skin/Thickness/Wall/Volume/Void.

Dialogues between the body/material and process.

Vessels for materiality.

Edges/Forms of Human Mortality.

Trace/Disappearance/Drawing/Limits/Boundaries.

Drawing Into The Human Form/The Architectural Body

 Drawing Into The Human Form.

Its conceptual frameworks, aesthetics and contexts.

Inclusions/Enclosures/Involuntary Mappings and Erasures.

Figuring it out, sensuality through making the drawing heard.

Drawing from a blindness, a memory of seeing.

Derrida.

Drawing into the perspectives and  sociological relationships of the Architectural Body, organism/person/environment.

Gins and Arakawa.

Explanations/Gestures of Looking and Mark Making.

Scale/Proximity/Seeing Distance/Situatedness/Environment/Art Work.

Haptic Seeing/moving over the surface of the sociological subject.

Frottage, life drawings with involuntary textures and marks derived from their particular locality and working methods, concrete floors, wooden floorboards, graphite sticks, charcoal, pencil and wax crayons.

The body and its nakedness becomes the instrument of our emotions and our sensuality.

The Psychology of Nakedness.

Naked to Nude, Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.

The Creative Act : Energy/Abstractions from a dialectic between the poetic and the systematic.

 Harleston 180423

Drawings/Concepts/Constructions are forms/movements of thought.

Being mindful that materials can lead the way.

Tony Cragg.

Diffractive Documents

Matters of Interest/Concern

Pots are fashioned from clay, but its the hollow that makes the pot work.

Tao Lao-Tzu

The Brain Needs Abstractions.

The World is full of beautiful abstractions. 

Nick Cave.

The creative act, the opposite of entropy, puts energy back into our world.

Hungate, Norwich.

Water/Corporeal/Spiritual.

Clay/Vessel/Ritual/Body/Spirit.

Gaston Bachelard, on intimate watery spaces.

The reverie of light and space of an inspiring room. 

The Conduit of Water.

Architecture of The Senses.

The glossy surface of plaster against stone, or the flicker of sunlight on water are all abstract in essence.

The idea that the mind needs abstraction to throw open the range of its thought capacity is fundamental to art and architecture.

Killer Road.

A Tribute to Nico.

Soundwalk Collective with Jesse and Patti Smith.

The Wind, Cd1

P J Harvey.

I can't understand why people are frightened on new ideas.

I'm frightened of the old ones.

John Cage.  

Splitting.

Gordon Matta-Clark.

Site is the un-doing of place.

Generative and provisional, site-specific investigations for sensing place.  

Clay Drawings/Constructions/Apparatuses.

Undercroft/Observatory/Library.

The Garden/Material of Forking Paths.

Raveningham Sculpture Trail.

Site Visit 160423

Sculptural Spacings and Sensual Engagements.

Showing Points/Lines/Vectors of Change/Movement.

Dwelling Demarcations/markers of temporality and disappearance. 

A poetics derived/driven from both the systematic and the small wonders of the everyday.

Circular Breathing/Cyclical Lines. 

The Peripheral Movement/Moment

The Space/Time between things.

The Concept of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

The Array, a phonographic inquiry recording transits of the suns pathways across the sky. 

Wanderings, caught up in the wanderlust of stillness and slowtime.

Paths of movement, paths of observation, paths of existential abstractions following daylight.

The artist's creative act of a self amongst others.

A sculptural deliberation that engages with the experiences of working a site in the landscape.

Body/Clay/Movement.

Breath. 

Bodily Exhumations with Plastic Matter.

Terracotta, Nature.

Fontana/Penone.

Drawing Into The Human Form.

Its conceptual frameworks, aesthetics and contexts.

Inclusions/Enclosures/Involuntary Mappings and Erasures.

Figuring it out, sensuality through making the drawing heard.

Drawing from a blindness, a memory of seeing.

Derrida.

Drawing into the perspectives and  sociological relationships of the Architectural Body, organism/person/environment.

Gins and Arakawa.

Explanations/Gestures of Looking and Mark Making.

Scale/Proximity/Seeing Distance/Situatedness/Environment/Art Work.

Haptic Seeing/moving over the surface of the sociological subject.

Frottage, life drawings with involuntary textures and marks derived from their particular locality and working methods, concrete floors, wooden floorboards, graphite sticks, charcoal, pencil and wax crayons.

The body and its nakedness becomes the instrument of our emotions and our sensuality.

The Psychology of Nakedness.

Naked to Nude, Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.

Invites the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.

Julian Stair.

Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, Mezzanine Gallery. UEA.

Marking Durations.

Ground Mappings.

Solar/Daylight Observed/Shadows Recorded 

Clay/Ceramic Multiples/Terracotta/Glazed/Unglazed.

The Diagram/The Program/The Inquiry

A Garden Observatory/Philosophy of Silence/Solitude. 

Upright Human Body.

Space/Time/Situation/Agency.

To build, dwell and explore the space of drawing through intuitive and abstract making.

Like drawings, assemblages drawn and made showing the paths taken.

Living Architectures/Narratives/Dwelling within the Ruinous. 

Tarkovsky.

Bachelard.

Landing Sites/Holding Places.

Between The Body/Sensing Spaces/Voids.

Perceptions, body, organism, environment,

Mezzanines, lofts, basements, balconies, walkways, scaffolds, access platforms.

Clouds and Clocks.

The project arises between a dialectic between the poetic and the systematic.

Between Science and Art.

Stochastic thinking suggests an interconnected ecosystem of architecture together with all of the arts to achieve new levels of correlation.

Light Laboratory.

Camera Obscura/The Pottery Room.

Free School/Out of The Archive, Kilquhanity.

I could gather a leaf, place it in the head of the enlarger and allow it to make an image of itself by passing light through it, akin to Fox Talbot's original pencil of nature experiments. I didn't use a camera after that. I was free to originate my own visual language. I could walk unhindered, let the light into me, as if my own skin and brain were silvered. I could not create light. I only needed  to expose myself to it, by putting myself in its path.

For six years this symbiosis between photography and photosynthesis felt like one of the most perfectly resolved working methods imaginable.

Dark Room.

Garry Fabian Miller.

The internal mechanisms with which we see and experience visual and physical phenomena depend on a bottom-up approach. Building up from elements of abstraction, the opposite top-down approach of given figuration stifles necessary imagination.

Curiosity, imagination and enthusiasm all hold a power in the mind to ignite the creative act.

The Lake of The Mind.

Steven Holl.

Work : Filtered Light/Colour

 

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

Brian Clarke

The Art of Light/Paul Greenhalgh, 2018. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Properties of Matter and Imagination 

FUSION OF PHYSICAL/METAPHYSICAL

WORK : An Inquiry with Material Practice

The poetics of glass as a super-cooled liquid. Molten Fluidity.

An organic flux frozen for an instant.

Chaos and order, flow and turbulence, pooling and shifting translucence.

Chemistry becomes alchemy, the banality of the raw materials - sand, metal and minerals - turn into a magical universe of the imagination. Perhaps this is the key to Brian Clarke's stained glass; it embodies the fusion of two things that normally don't mingle; the physical and metaphysical.

Botanical 

Cosmological 

Biographical

The screens are an intense site of innovation and artistic consolidation. Some of the screens are principally about the organic flow of forms derived from nature; some of them deal with ideas that push into universal concepts and have a symbolist, otherworldly ambiance; and some yet their driving force incidents, memories and emotions that shaped the artist's life.

The Modern World (the artist's attitudes to) 

Life

Violence 

Mortality

Many of the screens are highly specific to an incident or influence, the titles give us a clue to the complex symbology at work and the intertwining of the artist's personal response with wider perceptions about place.

Contrapuntal/Counterpoint music introduces multiple melodies that are equally important. Polyphony describes the use of overlapping melodies.

For Clarke the concept of a screen as a vehicle of artistic expression is not a new concept, rather it clearly resonates back through his life, becoming part of his artistic consciousness virtually from the start of his work in glass.

Literal and Phenomenal Transparency Layering of Planes/Layering of Spaces

Rowe and Slutzky 1982

What exactly is a screen and what does it mean in the context of modernity?

A screen is simultaneously a physical object and a complex conceptual metaphor. 

We use screens to divide and to mask things off from each other, and as boundaries/barriers to hide behind. 

At the same time, the screen provides ways of looking at things/displaying; we screen films and we screen people. 

We look through them, and they can act as a catalyst that changes our vision of whatever is on the other side. 

In its usage in art, a screen is automatically a series of images - a diptych, triptych or polyptych - a sequence of free standing panels that allows the artist to develop a narrative and aesthetic theme.

Screens divide up space and make it function differently.

Alabaster windows before glass, contemporary windows by both Soulages/Sigmar Polke 

Iglesias, 

The Glass House

The screen as emblematic of modernity.

Conceptually, the sensibility at work in many early Modem buildings was one of space divided by screen walls and windows. In this sense, the giant windows at either end of Norman Foster's seminal Sainsbury Centre building for example are light-screens.

The nature of Brian Clarke's architectural practice, in which his core practice is painting.

It is through painting that I understand how to view architecture. It is through painting that I can appreciate the rhythm of the poem. 

It is through painting that I can appreciate and draw pleasure from the structure of a well-composed sentence. And it is through painting that the complexity of music makes itself understood to me. It is through painting, in fact, that I am.

Brian Clarke, 1989.

I do not identify mostly with painting, but I identify mostly with all other things because of painting. Brian Clarke, 2018.

Clarke is gripped by the technology and engineering of how a building is made, but also by the psychological function and its emotional impact, he refers to himself as an architectural artist.

The medium of glass in its modern form will only be seen when people have been sufficiently exposed to it.

During the 20th century - the age of specialization - theorists and historians were obsessed with separating out the arts disciplines, positioning them in specific groups or classes, and then subjecting them to philosophical discourse as to why they belonged there. 

In short, the Anglo-Saxon world in particular artificially created the categories of art, design and craft, and then intellectually policed them. Stained glass was inevitably positioned as a craft, with all the confused cultural and economic consequences of this class allocation.

Clarke with the complexity of his practice and interests has led to embrace the concept of gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art). 

A concept first championed by Richard Wagner, who perceived opera as a means of combining all of the arts, including music, and literature, in order to completely surround the spectator. In the visual arts, it is essentially about generating a complete art environment, in which all elements are orchestrated into an aesthetic whole.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, designers of the De Stijl movement.

Sylvian & Fripp - Every colour you are (live '93)

Jackie Leven - Exit Wound

Openings and Conclusions/Frameworks with Enclosures : Site Specificity/Installation

On the horizon, then, at the furthest edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species-the collective (generic) work of the species-on the model of what used to be called "art" ; indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an "object" isolated by and for the individual.

Henri Lefebvre, Openings and Conclusions.
On Installation and Site Specificity (introduction) Erika Suderburg

Collage on paper,written fragments and images from Peter Greenaway, Josef Albers and Robin Evans.

Photo montage of The Physical Self (Greenaway) and Waverley Abbey UK.
Visual research as part of The Waverley Project/Obscura and Reading Room.

TheThinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture.
Juhani Pallasmaa

Frameworks with Enclosures

Of the mason's who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.


Tim Ingold 'Making'

 

Another/Alternative Photography : Apparatuses/Pattern Making/Redundancy/Collage

 Outpost 060423

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

Searching For Redundancy/Making Patterns Making.

Time/Duration/Perception.

What Is An Apparatus?

Giorgio Agamben

Bringing things back to life, to switch our perspective from the endless shuttling back and forth from image to object and from object to image, that is such a pronounced feature of academic writing in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which images and objects reciprocally take shape.

Tim Ingold.

Immaterial Architecture/Creation/Contemplation/Artist/Architect.

Diffraction, understood as a material-discursive phenomenon that makes the effects of different differences evident.

Karen Barad.

Troubleyn Laboratorium, Jan Fabre.

The Empty Space, Peter Brook.

Verb List Compilation/Actions to relate to oneself, Richard Serra.

Ceramics.

Slab built architectural forms and crucible raku bowls.

Raku bowls thrown and turned in a coarse clay with wide flat rims inspired by crucible forms for melting materials.

Architectural slab built pieces investigate ceramics as a dwelling place or a model for a building construction.

Undercroft Exhibition Norwich.

Anglian Potters.

Notion of a moment of impeding transposition.

Transformation of derelict buildings into newly evocative spatial experiences.

Building Cuts/Physical Alteration to a space is a revelation of a particular response.

The Body To The Building.

Social Activism/Mindful Lawlessness. 

Gordon Matta-Clark.

Performativity, subject and object do not pre-exist as such, but merge through intra-actions.

Karen Barad.

Architectural Body/The Organism That Persons.

Madeline Gins and Arakawa.

You cannot see me  from where I look at myself.

Francesca Woodman.

Thinking Bodies/Becoming Woman.

Images that created a sense of confinement, a temporal identity for herself, a place for a personal resonance/self inquiry.

The body as architecture itself as the support that constitutes the spatial agency of photography.

Negative Capability.

The Link Gallery, Winchester.2013.

Morn Hill Winchester.

Site of the corporation or the master, brethren and sisters of the blessed Mary Magdalene hospital near Winchester erected in 1148 and demolished in 1772.

Founded on the eastern hill in remote antiquity for lepers.

The Hospital of St. Mary Magdalene.

Raymond Elliott. 1994.

Becoming Decay.

Clemintina and Francesca.

Domestic Liminality, a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective conscious state of being on the threshold of or between two different existential planes.

Places where we make new domestic worlds, where we reconstitute family.

Carol Mavor.

Figurative Drawings and Sculptural Reliefs.

Matters of Form/Construction.

Manuel Neri.

Norton Star Atlas

Map 1 

Epoch 2000.0

Stellar Magnitudes

Double or Multiple Stars

Variable Stars

Novae.

Alternative Darkroom Photography

Corporeal/Astronomical

Body/Cosmos/Imagination

Scale/Proximity/Vastness

Open Studio/Cyanotypes and Collages : Harleston Revisited/Norfolk and Norwich 2018

Civilizing Rituals
Inside Public Art Museums
Carol Duncan

Julian Stair
Quietus reviewed
Archaeology of an exhibition

Spirituality in Contemporary Art
The Idea of the Numinous
Jungu Yoon

The Aesthetics of Silence
Susan Sontag

A Field Guide To Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit

Essays On The Blurring Of Art And Life
Allan Kaprow

Ways of Curating
Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

On Show : Contemporary ceramics in the Goodison gift in the context of a historic museum collection.

A rare opportunity to hear different perspectives on how the art of display can animate objects and deepen insight into historical collections.

The study day will draw on two current displays exclusive to the Fitzwilliam Museum: the Goodison gift of contemporary ceramics and the exhibition Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery. Speakers include four internationally-acclaimed UK ceramicists whose work features in both displays: Julian Stair, Carol McNicoll, Philip Eglin and Jennifer Lee. The study day concludes with a conversation between Amanda and Sir Nicholas Goodison, followed by the opportunity to share reflections on the subject.

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art and Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward.
Art in mind : How contemporary images shape thought
Ernst van Alphen

Walking and Mapping
Artists as Cartographers
Karen O'Rourke

A Bigger Splash
Painting after Performance
Catherine Wood