Drawing Towards an Ecology of Materiality/Embodiment/Emotion/Affect

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Relation-In-The-Making.

Spaces between objects, Giorgio Morandi.

Emergent Evolutions.

These micro-perceptions are perceptions without objects, hallucinatory tendencies in the sense that they express nothing but the emphasis on the quality of becoming. They do not give us a body fully formed or an object-in-place, rather they fold perception into a becoming-body-of-movement, creating the emphasis of quasi formation that is relation-in-the-making.

An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling.

We perceive/perception is the force for the worlds infinite unfolding, with objects catching the edges of their contours, participating in the relation they call forth.

Erin Manning.

The smooth paint of the background turns out to be made of many translucent layers, intended to cover over outlines that Giacometti rejected, always in favour of a smaller and smaller head.

John Berger.

Diffractive Thinking/Reading abstractions in the middle of things and both ways at the same time.

Karen Barad.

MAKING

Anthropology

Archaeology

Art and Architecture.

Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making. For Ingold instead of treating art and architecture as compendia of objects for anthropological or archaeological analysis, he advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.

Hungate Site Visit.

Water/Light/Architecture.

Ceramic Vessels/Lead Tray/Water/Mirror.

Cyanotype Solution, unexposed, unwashed.

White gesso on biscuit ware.

White lead glaze.

Ceramics and Architecture.

Ceramics for a reflective solitude, an architecture of silence.

Figural Jars/Abstracted Human Clay Vessels/Cinerary Pots.

Sainsbury Centre.

Julian Stair.

Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Mezzanine Gallery.

Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Materiality, Embodiment, Nonhumans, Hylomorphism, Things.

One of the peculiarities of material culture studies over recent decades has been its virtual divorce from the traditions of ecological anthropology. This is odd, given that both fields are broadly concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Students of material culture are interested in people's relations with things. Ecological anthropologists study how human beings relate to their biotic and abiotic environments. For the former, persons and things are bound in relational networks; for the latter, human beings and other organisms are bound in webs of life. Yet practitioners of these two fields are speaking past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. 

Tim Ingold.

Archaeology, Volume 41, 2012.

The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect.

Sarah Tarlow.

When David Sylvester asked Giacometti about the thinness of the sculptures he had made without a model, Giacometti said 'they get narrow despite myself'.But then added, 'from life, they do this less'. Models put up a resistance to the thinning gaze, as if they were resisting Giacometti's willingness to let them go.

Drawings That Shrink.

Drawings that are extremely tense, a sign that the object/model is resisting.

Relations on the figure and the rejected lines and their borders on the drawing.

And so Yanaihara tilted and shrank, and sank down towards the bottom of the frame. As he shrank down, he also shrank away, back in space, away in time and perhaps in imagination, away from firm memory and towards insecure recollection. At some point Giacometti abandoned the drawing and began another.

Giacometti was fastidious about the placement of the easel, the canvas, and Yanaihara's chair, and he put little red blocks of clay under the stretcher to keep the canvas at a precise angle. None of that helped him anchor the figure: still it kept shrinking. The principle of its shrinking is clear in the dozen preparatory drawings, because many of the rejected lines remain visible. What mattered was the relation between the head and the borders of the drawing. That's why the drawings have drawn borders with lines scattered like matchsticks inside them.

On Drawing/Seeing to abolish the principle of disappearance, but it never can, and instead it turns appearance and disappearance into a game.

The crucial sadness of drawing  is it is unsurpassably close to the object, but always separated from it. Drawing bends my thoughts towards the nearly indescribable distance between the model and the motions of my hand, or should I say between the movements of my eyes as they pass over the model, and the sweep of my hand as it moves across the paper. Or the feel of the model, as I imagine it, and the texture of the paper as it slides under my hand.

The game of drawing is intricate enough with its slant rhymes between the feel of the model in my mind and the feel of the paper. It is made more difficult because drawn lines have the power to remake my own imagination. Every line I draw reforms the figure on the paper, and at the same time it redraws the image in my mind. And what is more, the drawn line redraws the model, because it changes my capacity to perceive. 

As I draw, the model becomes defective. The image in my mind is marred by the marks I put on paper. And so because a drawing cannot quite be touched, because it shifts when I try to fix it on paper, because it does not simply transcribe something in the world, because it can never bring back what I once loved – because of all that, drawing is an intense expression of the defect of distance.

John Berger.