Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

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The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Drawing as Gesture.

Coda : Coded Imprints/Mediality

Contemporary drawing tending towards graphism, illegible writing, that can be seen as a regression from image and coded sign to what could be described as states of the 'pre-sign', of moments of inscription and the emergence of the signifier from the gesture or act of making a mark.

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

A fusion between the artist's mind, the artist,s hand and the beholder's gaze.

Even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation.

Avis Newman.

The raw drawn line at its emergence into the world.

Line can no more escape the present tense of its entry into the world than it can escape into oil paints secret hiding places of erasure and concealment. This fundamental condition can bring it therefore much closer to the viewer's own situation than can the image in paint.

The drawn line in real time with its own momentum, its own trajectory.

A walk for a walk's sake, the mobile agent is a point shifting its position-forward.

Paul Klee.

The present of viewing and the present of the drawn line, hook onto each other, mesh together like interlocking temporal gears. They co-inhabit an irreversible permanently open and exposed field of becoming, whose moment of closure will never arrive.

Though it is impossible to reconstruct with any real accuracy the precise sequence whereby drawn lines on paper finally come together as a completed image. The permanent visibility of each unit of production, of each individual line on its own, means that there is no escaping the sense of the line as emerging from an initial state, blank paper to the state we eventually see.

The drawn line in a sense always exists bin the present tense, in the time of its own unfolding. The ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.

The blankness of the paper exerts a pressure that cannot be reduced or done away with, relentless its blankness forces everything into the open into a field of exposure without shields or screens, with no hiding places, a radically open zone that always operates in real time.

If painting presents being.

The drawn line presents becoming.

Line gives you the image, together with the whole history of its becoming-image.

However definitive, perfect, unalterable the drawn line may be, each of its lines, even the last line that was drawn is permanently open, to the present of a time that is always unfolding. Even that final line, the line that closed the image is in itself open to a present that bars the act of closure.

A Walk for a Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Cy Twombly.

Works on Paper. 1979.

Such gestures do not ask to be interpreted.

Making marks that open-up a space where in which the distinction between human and non-human is undecidable. How are we to respond to gestures that do not ask to be interpreted since they are meaningless, or more precisely they are gestures in meaningless.

If drawing is to be taken as just such a gesture, how are we to respond to it?

It it is not directed to meaning or interpretation, what does it demand of us?

Instead of considering what its meaning is, we could place the emphasis on the fact that a gesture has been made, the fact that something has been left for us. A mark inscribed on a piece of paper, perhaps by someone. We would thus receive the gestural mark as the trace of the other without any need for that mark to be meaningful. We may well do so without reverting to the 'what' and interpreting the gesture as an expression.

We need to say nothing more than the other has left this mark.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

Michael Newman.

The gesture is communication of a communicability.

Means Without Ends.

Giorgio Agamben. 2000

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. What is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself, but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language. It is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term.

For Michael Newman, the drawn mark could be taken as a 'gag' in precisely the way Agamben outlines. Its relation to language lies not in language as a goal, but precisely in its turning back on itself to expose its mediality, which is the condition of language.

Materiality and Mediality

Materiality and Mediality takes as its focus the reciprocal relationship between the facture of objects and the making of meaning. The questions addressed in this focus build upon ongoing research on textility. Material observations of textiles from Gottfried Semper onward have played a special role in the historiography of our field, and the study of textiles demands both new economic, social, and material approaches to the history of art, from canvas painting to tapestry, while also emphasizing global movements of materials, techniques, and makers.

More broadly, the study of materials encompasses both the complex negotiation of human makers with material resistances, and the way materials change physically and in terms of their reception over time. From the extraction and procurement of raw materials to the sensual qualities of finished products, the study of an object’s materiality brings forth histories of labor, trade, technology, and the environment that have been traditionally considered beyond the remit of art history. Concomitantly, media theory is a useful tool to examine how medium shapes the behavior of works of art, which becomes especially pronounced when new media emerge and spread. Both materiality and mediality impact the aesthetic, social, and ritual understanding of works of art. The study of materials and media invite approaches to the history of art that span geographies and chronologies in new and challenging ways. Materiality and Mediality serves as a broad framework to examine visual culture using sets of methodological tools that can shed new light on canonical works of art while simultaneously integrating overlooked objects into larger art historical narratives.

https://www.biblhertz.it/en/dept-weddigen/materiality-mediality

We are thus left with the question of how the mark received as trace of the other relates to the mark as gesture, even if the trace necessarily withdraws from the mark. How does the mark-as-gesture not reduce the trace to its mediation to expression in a medium and thus reduce the other to being a figment of my world, an actor on the stage that I project. The other is reduced to the same if the medium is conceived as a common substance, a kind of thing that joins two entities, communication as exposure breaks with this ontology.

Reclamations/Ruins on the photographic surface : Volatile Inscriptions around the Body

The Photographic Image/Volatile Bodies/Architectural Ruins

Helena Eflerova

Interior Spaces, Waverley Abbey.

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. 

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1980:145)

The Language Of Women

Volatile Bodies/Sexed Bodies : Elizabeth Grosz

1  have  attempted  to  read  the  male  discourses  dealt  with  here  as  discourses for  and  about  men,  discourses  which  have  ignored  or  misunderstood  the  radical implications  of  insisting  on  a  recognition  of  sexual  specificity,  discourses  which have  presented  their  claims—radical  as  these  might  be—without  any  understand­ ing of their relevance to or usefulness for women’s self-representations. I have not attempted  to  give  an  alternative  account,  one  which  provides  materials  directly useful  for  women’s  self-representation.  To  do  so  would  involve  knowing  in  ad­vance,  preempting,  the  developments  in  women’s  self-understandings  which  are now  in  the  process  of  being  formulated  regarding  what  the  best  terms  are  for representing  women  as  intellectual,  social,  moral,  and  sexual  agents.  It  would involve  producing  new  discourses  and  knowledges,  new  modes  of  art  and  new forms  of  representational  practice  outside  of  the  patriarchal  frameworks  which have  thus  far  ensured  the  impossibility  of  women’s  autonomous  self-representa­tions,  thus  being  temporally  outside  or  beyond  itself.  No  one  yet  knows  what  the conditions are for developing knowledges, representations, models, programs, which provide women   with  nonpatriarchal  terms  for  representing  themselves  and the world from women’s interests and points of view. This book has been a pre­liminary  exploration  of  some  of  the  (patriarchal)  texts  which  feminists  may  find useful  in  extricating  the  body  from  the  mire  of  biologism  in  which  it  has  been entrenched.  But  the  terms  by  which  feminists  can  move  on  from  there,  can  su­persede  their  patriarchal  forebears,  are  not  dear  to  me.  But  perhaps  the  frame­ work  I  have  been  trying  to  use  in  this  book—a  framework  which  acknowledges both  the  psychical  or  interior  dimensions  of  subjectivity  and  the  surface  corporeal exposures of the subject to social inscription and training; a model which resists, as much  as possible,  both  dualism and  monism; a model which  insists on  (at least) two surfaces which cannot be collapsed into one and which do not always harmoniously  blend  with  and  support each  other; a model where the join,  the interaction of the two surfaces, is always a question of power; a model that may 

be represented  by  the geometrical form of the Mobius strip’s two-dimensional torsion in three-dimensional space—will nevertheless be of some use if feminists wish to avoid the impasses of traditional theorizing about the body.

Patti Smith

Cartwheels

Come my one, look at the world Bird beast butterfly
Girls sing notes of heaven Birds lift them up to the sky

Spring is departing Spring is departing

Her thoughts are darting like a rabbit Like a rabbit 'cross the moon
Shines of light over your hair As boys croon

Pretty in pink It makes me wonder
What could ever bring you down I see tears falling
From those eyes of brown

Hearing a voice, you turn your head You vanish into the mist
Of your thoughts And I
Want to grasp What brings you down
Open up those eyes of brown

The world is changing Your heart is growing

Hearing a voice you turn your head Girls turn by ones, by twos
Notes pour bad and tender Eradicate your blues

The good world The good world
Come my one, look around you Bird, beast, butterfly
Girls sing…

Metonymy : The Body Of Drawing/On Precarious Enclosures/Ceramics/Wanting Shelter.

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Zola Jesus : Arkhon

Metonymy as often treated as a subtype of metaphor by cognitive linguistics has a different working mechanism. Metaphor is based on perceived similarity between things, while metonymy on the relationship within things.

The trace and trait of mark making is a durational gesture on the way to becoming an line/outline/contour.

Mark-Making 'names' something absolutely inhuman, the shadow and the strain and the loss of any criterion to distinguish between the intended and the unintended and between human indications and marks produced by natural processes.

Line, takes marks, traces out of duration into forms set in eternity.

Seeing the relation between the daughter's and the father's image making as that between metonymy based on contiguity, and metaphor based on similarity, each produces in a different way a defective image. The portrait image based on resemblance fails to unite the inner essence of the subject, just as a shadow traces only the contours of the body.

In Drawing the problem is to 'slow' the consideration of the mark, so that it does not move too quickly toward line-contour-figuration or image. But to allow it to hesitate on the edge.

Images In Mind.

Pliny's Story of the Origin of Drawing.

Deborah Tarn Steiner.

Contemporary Fine Art Practices.

The Lines of Thinking about Drawing.

Michael Newman.

Drawing-as markingtime-memory-matter in the work of Avis Newman.

Working/Thinking with-Imprint-Index-Trace-Mark-Photograph-

Inside The Visible.

Catherine De Zegher. 1996

The image exists after the object.

First we see, then we imagine.

Maurice Blanchot.

To the artist, the creation of objects is a process of sequencing their work processes, rather than the completion of work.

Eva Hesse's practice offered Christina Iglesias a model for a process-based way of working, rooted in a deliberately limited range of materials.

Eva Hesse, Lucy Lippard.

On Making Skins-Shells.

Metonymy.

The sculptural spaces Christina Iglesias constructs are kinds of dream-catchers. They are there to transport our imagination. We again see how the light in the text is filtered and refracted on its journey through different materials, in a way that is very similar to the experience afforded by Iglesias's sculpture, in that sense, she creates spaces that are materialized poetry. 

Ceramics as Performative/Speculative/Experimental and Discursive.

Adventures Of The Fire, into a process of experimentation that is expressed as an incompleteness through forming an incomplete part of a bowl, and in doing this it presents a new form as a gate. Experimentation is always towards the new and as such it presents a basic direction about creation. As a venture, a process of experimentation, that is all about the new, notwithstanding if it is successful or unsuccessful.

When seen separately as individual pieces, these works with their widely varied experimentation on forms and new techniques/technologies are perceived as ordinary ceramics and craftwork. But when they are assembled together according to a different method of display, they collectively become an installation and a formative artwork/network. One module constitutes one artwork and each artwork creates one space, then it is no longer necessary to divide ceramics into genres of traditional ceramics and contemporary ceramics, or ceramics as expression and ceramics for use. 

The Space Of Fire-Charcoal, includes ceramics that impart a feeling of charcoal or have colour that contrasts with charcoal.

The Space Of Earth-Clay, presents contemporary formative works in front of a curving wall of layered fragments of bisque-fired pots, earthenware, stoneware, white porcelain, bancheong and celadon. Stories about the flow of time and plasticity of clay are told here.

On Making and Taking Up Stories.

On Feelings and Correspondences.

Ceramic Space and Life.

We humans occupy space as big as our physical bodies and expansion of space occupied by individuals give rise to the concept of collective space. A space enables its members to communicate with each other and produces unique culture and creates communication within itself. If such meaning of space is expanded, each and every object takes space as its volume.

Space contains objects, and people experience cultural communication within the space.

Every space that is occupied by each work presented at this exhibition feels different depending on the shape-colour-volume-texture and meaning of the work, not to mention the physical dimensions of the space in which the individual work is placed.

An individual work has meaning by itself, regardless of where and how it is juxtaposed in the space and how viewers perceive it. Such existence and meaning give rise to art of a new concept within a space. An installation itself becomes an exhibition, one space exists as one single artwork.

Ceramic Gate, while being one single piece of art, also shows how architecture is directly integrated into ceramics, this installation was designed to be in harmony with the existing gallery building, while also presenting ceramics as a core formative element. This installation was a joint work of participating artists in Ceramic Space and Life, and it is considered as suggesting a model (methodology) for the combination and integration of architecture and ceramics.

Eight spaces to present an architectural concept, displaying works grouped into natural elements of People-Water-Fire-Clay-Metal-Light-Wood.

Each of the eight sections of the exhibition sheds light on the fundamental nature and artistic values of ceramics, by displaying ceramics of different types, traditional and contemporary, and ceramics as expression, and ceramics for use together, and at the same time new meaning is created as each individual work communicates with the space in which it is placed. 

The space, illuminates ceramics into spatial harmonies of Space Art and Ceramic Art, gathered here these 150 works will suggest the future direction of ceramics by showing marks and traces of the past.

Ceramic-Object. 

Hong-won Lee, Curator

On Precarious Enclosures/Wanting Shelter.

No ideas haunt us as much as those of stable matter and fixed place.

An intense attentiveness is born of the perpetual sense of being an outsider and the continual readjustment in viewpoint that it requires.

Cristina Iglesias.

Alone or Aligned?

An Aesthetic Identity.

Lynne Cooke.

1993 was a pivotal year for Cristina Iglesias, for the first time her work was convincingly contextualized in relation to her peers and mentors. That same year she entered into an agreement with Artscape Nordland to create a site-specific sculpture in a remote area of Northern Norway.

In Sintitulo untitled ( Laurel Leaves) 1993-94, she explored a way of staging spatial relations rooted in Modernist architectural histories that has since remained the core of her aesthetic.

Barbara Stafford situated Iglesias's work in a cultural history in which places of shelter and refuge serve a fundamental role in that they address psychic as well as functional needs. Referencing both organic and man-made structures from archaic times onward, Stafford argued that Iglesias's works evoke both the age-old escapist dream of being hedged from life and the desire still urgent today for a terrestrial paradise wanting shelter. 

For Stafford, Iglesias's precarious enclosures at once vulnerable and somehow out of place, put an intolerable pressure on the meaning of mental security. Eloquently situating her art in relation to architectural typologies and histories, Stafford establishes the terms in which Iglesias's practice would be parsed henceforth.

The Daughter of Butades.

Drawing traces is the act of differentiation of figure and ground (the reserve).

Butades's daughter and her many marks around the shadow, do not yet form the unified-idealizing contour, nor yet the figure against the ground.

Architectural and Environmental Ceramics.

Perforated Screens.

Gate-Wall-Pavilion-Object

Ceramic Houses

Nader Khalili. 1990

Architectural Ceramics for the Studio Potter.

Peter King. 1999

Christopher Wilmarth : Light and Gravity

 Christopher Wilmarth delighted the world with light-filled sculptures of glass and steel that were deeply poetic in their moods and extraordinarily rich in their modernist heritage. But in 1987, at the peak of his career, a long struggle with depression ended tragically for Wilmarth. The internationally acclaimed artist committed suicide at age 44, and his work largely fell from the public view. Now, Wilmarth's legacy is recaptured in this beautifully written, richly illustrated book by art critic, historian, and poet Steven Henry Madoff. The first in-depth look at Wilmarth's extraordinary life as an artist, the book explores both the light and the darkness that underlie his work. Madoff offers a critical overview of the artist's career, examining the sculptor's response not only to historical masters such as Cezanne, Brancusi, Matisse, and Giacometti, but also to the art world of his times--particularly the dominant influence of Minimalism. Using the newly created Wilmarth archive at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Madoff anchors this moving interpretation with the sculptor's own writings unearthed from journals, student notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and letters. Madoff draws as well from interviews, articles, and poems that Wilmarth published in his lifetime, along with the body of criticism covering Wilmarth's development over the years. Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford contributes a poignant memoir of her years of friendship with the artist, and Fogg associate curator Edward Saywell offers a powerful selection of Wilmarth's writings. The sculptor's romantic outlook, his gorgeously light-infused art, and his dramatic decline into work of harrowing darkness are sensitively examined in a book that reintroduces Christopher Wilmarth's sculptures and graphics to the contemporary art audience.

Between Thresholds/Spatial Stories : The Unbound Articulations/Gestures of Drawing.

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In the activity of thinking in drawing, a drawing is not seen as a historical item, but as an embodiment of contemporary spirit unravelling before our eyes, it is always in the present tense, always a becoming.

The Stage of Drawing, Catherine de Zegher. 2003 

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invested Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

To develop her project of questioning, Avis Newman returns to the initial moment of tracing and considers the genesis of the mark, from the viewpoint of the original spatial play that the hand stages and the importance given to the gestures of the hand as recorded in the traces left on the paper. She considers that the very nature of drawing is its psychic investments that are bound up in the gestures originating from the hand. The hand captures what neither the eye nor language can grasp. The gesture, its movement in space is anterior to what is drawn and articulated in the trace (Gesture, Max Kommerl).

Spatial Concepts/Paths/Places/Lines

Drawing Thresholds that we pass through.

Spatial Stories.

Michel de Certeau.

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.

On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper.'

In short, space is a practiced place.

Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.

The essential structure of our being is of being situated in relationship to a milieu, as being situated by a desire, indissociable from a direction of existence and implanted in the space of a landscape. From this point of view there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences. Our/the perspective is determined by a phenomenology of existing in/of the world. 

Intimus/Interior Design Theory Reader.

Spaces-Between-Thresholds.

How a space of blankness of no thing is 'overcome' and 'changed' into a space of relationships and encounters.

On spaces crossed/paths taken by their particular thresholds.

A poetic spatiality on the telling of possibilities and multiple coexistences, that are solidifying into spatial allusions which remain on hold. For the viewer, observer the invitation is not to unpick this tangle which has no centre, but to take part in the game of multiplication. To set off on a journey alongside and go with its surface flows. Into its spatial enigma, its garden of abstractions and concepts, amide nascent states in nature.

Thresholds : Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa. 2017

Ina Macaione.

If painting presents being, the drawn line presents becoming.

Norman Bryson.

Threshold as a emergent liminal space between emotional, physical domains, merging and separating through spatial movements/vectors/viewpoints and paths of desire.

The Small Space of a Constructed Limit.

The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space, a volume contained in an infinite space that creates a spatial sensation that becomes physically felt as one enters the space contained by that which is unmeasurable and infinite.

On Reading Gestures/In Real Time from the Drawn Line.

Drawing Conversations.

The Blank Evolving Page/The Unbounded Self.

Working from undifferentiated spaces into spaces that have become in some way have become claimed and  formulated.

Drawing/Visual Investments/Acting through gesture and evidence of beingness.

Through the acts of drawing the image comes into being, it comes about through the accumulation of repetitive acts of marking/inscription that are not anchored and not preconceived.

Avis Newman has developed a project of questioning of what drawing is?

All writing is drawing.

For Newman, looking at drawings, one may see not the thing itself, but its possibility, its suggestion and the uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.

Gesture as the other side of language, a muteness inherent in humankind's very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language. Gesture for Agamben is not an absolutely non-linguistic element but rather something closely tied to language. It is first of all a forceful presence in language itself, one that is older and more originary than conceptual expression. 

Potentialities. 1999

Giorgio Agamben.

The Spatial Development of the Manuscript. 1994

Serge Tisseron.

Exhibition Spaces.

In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

Wrapped Body : Ceramic/Textile/Wire and Wax on Gesso.

A complex set of 'Propositions' emerging through her/our reflection on the found material.

A curatorial practice in which the work of Art itself, and not a theory in need of illustration, generates the searching criteria for an exhibition, a creating/curating a methodology that parallels the creative process of an artist.

An exhibition that acknowledges the significance of fragmented moments of consciousness of spaces of uncertainty. The creator is the one who agrees to venture forth with no certainty and follow this thread, unwinding ahead of him like Ariadne's thread and falling behind him like a spider's web.

The Stage of Drawing. 2003

Catherine de Zegher.

Avis Newman has long approached drawing as what she calls, an act of consciousness, an affirmation that I am conscious, I exist marked in a trace left by the gesture on the page. Her conception of drawing as a generative space of thought is a the very core of her practice and her selection for this exhibition.

A page that though blank is never truly empty.

What is the nature of the drawn line?/Michael Newman : Thinking/Becoming through Drawing.

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The difficult question?

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?

The first condition that precedes them all, the blankness of a surface, and the motions, now commencing of a point tracing, marking lines across its spaces into further spaces.

Of all the Arts, drawing has the potential to reduce to its smallest the smallest, the gap between meaning and non meaning, between repeatability and singularity.

What exactly is a mark, and how does it, might it distinguish itself from say a trace?

Drawing because of its status as becoming (blot becoming mark-mark becoming line-line becoming contour-contour becoming image-image becoming sign) the direction of this movement being always reversible, posits a continuum of sense, from one sense of 'sense' to the other, yet it seems impossible to observe, or to catch hold of. 

The precise moment or experience of that 'flip-over' from pre-sign differentiated, but not yet diacritically caught in an opposition to signification, image, and meaning. It happens in a blink, when the eye is closed insofar as something is given to us that we cannot experience, it is something like death, or a trauma, or a transport from one place to another without our knowing how we got there.

What would be the distinctive mode or modes of the manifestation of drawing.

The problem is to 'slow' the consideration of the mark, so that it does not move too quickly towards line-contour-figure or image. To allow it to hesitate on the edge, to show what it hides.

The blind-spot marks that point in the field of vision that we cannot see. If to look at something means to impose a distance and to objectify it, the blind-spot would be the 'place' in the visible from which we cannot detach ourselves and which we cannot objectify, it marks our attachment or our adhesion to the world.

Drawing, shows what it hides.

Jackie Pigeaud argues that the sense and the practice of the contour is doubled. 

The contour is the joining of the traits to make the line and the contour is doubled by being finished by a second contour that does away with the imperfections of the first. In this sense of the creative act, the artist shows what he hides and furthermore he hides the transitions and joints that make this showing possible, a collapse of the distinction between mark and line as they become contour, image, representations.

Michael Newman.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

The Stage of Drawing, Gesture and Acts.

Thinking Through Drawing.

Lines of Enquiry. 2006

Drawing as thinking as opposed to drawing as aesthetics.

It is the seemingly paradoxical nature underlying all drawing, simultaneously a form of recording and invention, situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view, perspective or analysis. Each drawing is first of all a 'working sketch', the individual work forms part of a much wider and longer project and is an instance within that exploration.

Drawing/Project.

Both words drawing and project are both spatially and temporally orientated, project implies a throwing forward, a casting into the future towards some yet to be realised destination, drawing variously as an extruding, a gathering and a pulling closer. 

Drawing allows you to both evolve, describe, communicate all at the same time, it holds together many disparate factors, potentials, all of which may influence an outcome.

Colouring Light : Brian Clarke : An Artist Apart/Unframing Architecture

Don't Forget The Lamb : Brian Clarke

Filtered Light/Boundary Transgressions.

Between art and information/photography and the invisible

Vectors of Subjectivation

The excitement that accompanies the darkroom/laboratory genesis in which something entirely unexpected is bought to light and comes across undiminished.

Colliding Particles of Reality : Darkroom Alchemy.

An affective in-between that activates an intermediary of relations.

Wim Delvoye : Gothic Works

Brian Clarke

Lead/Lamb

Glass/Lamina

Stained Glass, Painting, Appropriation or/and Collage.

Lead Based Drawings/Lead as the ground of the work.

A lot of people are interested in skulls, but not nearly as much today as in the past.

The skull is not only a memory of who we were but also an image of what we will be.

I think it will probably engage artists as a subject for as long as art exists.

You realize that in the midst of living, death is with us, and I wanted to stay with the skulls.

Brian Clarke.

The Passage of Flesh : Ann Mandelbaum

Whispers of Immortality, the skull beneath the skin, TS Eliot.

Layers Of Meaning : Martin Harrison.

Only colour-happiness with glass culture.

Light permeates everything and is alive in crystal.

Glass brings usthe new era; brick culture is a burden...

Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur, 1914.

Immateriality and Transparency

Technique and Expression in Glass Architecture

The Poetics of Glass

Lightworks : Layered Constructions/Interspaces and Transitions

Simulacrum : Installation in the New Building E. ON Eergie AG Munich.

Andreas Horlitz, 2006.

What thrills me about light is the involuntary subjective response that one has to its expression against the engineering of a building, against a tree, against skin.

But more than anything else it's the way light passes through the membranous filter of leaves.

I suppose I wanted to engage the same kind of disciplines that an architect has to deal with when he's building, because I feel what I do is so integrally married to architecture.

In a way what I'm doing is coming as close as I can to creating my own architectural experience without the interference of an architect.

Lamina : Brian Clarke, 2005.

A thin layer of bone, membrane, a thin plate of tissue, the expanded portion of a leaf

Don't Forget The Lamb : Brian Clarke, 2008.

Lead and Stained Glass

Oil on Canvas

You see stained glass by virtue of the passage of light through it, whereas you see a painting by the light reflected off it. So, in contrast to the static condition of a painting, a stained glass window is in a constant state of change as the day progresses, the clouds move, traffic or people pass by behind it.

Immaterial, Ultramaterial : Architecture, Design and Materials.

Substance, Ron Witte, 2002.

Bodies in Space

Spatial Practice

Spatial Representations

Francesca Woodman : becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible, 

becoming-a-subject-in-wonder

Lone Bertelsen

We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectivation.

Guattari, 1995.

The figures in Francesca Woodman's photographs often leave the ground, and the photographs themselves seem strangely ungrounded. 

Both the figures and the photographs themselves are mobilised: they become “trans-situational” 

(Massumi,2002) and open up towards “a new space-time” (Irigaray, 1993).

As part of this mobilised opening, Woodman often camouflages the body and/or moves it in front of the lens during exposure.

Camouflage : Neil Leach, 2006.

A Theory of Camouflage.

Camouflage is not restricted to the visual domain. It can be enacted within the domains of other senses, especially smell and hearing.

Camouflage can therefore be read as an interface with the world. It operates as a masquerade that re-presents the self, just as self representation through make-up, dress, hair style etc., is a form of self re-presentation.

Camouflage refers to both revealing and concealing. Camouflage delineates a spetrum of degrees of definition of the selfb against a given background.

Mimesis, Sensuous Correspondence, Sympathetic Magic, Mimicry, Becoming, Death

Narcissism, Identity, Paranoia, Belonging, Sacrifice, Melancholia, Ecstasy,

Mimesis :Paradox or Encounter

Jane Bennett, 2018.

Skin-Surface-Subjectivity.

The body is the origin point for a discussion of spatial practice.

The Roman Years : Isabella Pedicini

Between Flesh and Film, 2012

Francesca Woodman

Gordon Matta-Clark

Spatial Agency and Relationscapes

Yves Klein

Works-Writings

Klaus Ottmann, 2010.

The Battle between Line and Colour.

The Performative Body

Few things are as fascinating as an imprint. An imprint is the trace of a presence-within-absence, the substratum or deposit of a being who no longer exists, the mark left by a moment beyond recall.

Such impressions pose the problem of being and nothingness, fullness and emptiness, presence and absence. Far from seeking to sidestep that problem, Klein's anthropometries address themselves to the heart of the issue.

Klein strove for dematerialization, for the emancipation from matter, in order to overcome the predicament of the art of his time. He ultimately abandoned both pictorial content and form, immersing himself in the boundlessness of pure colour.

Since re-presentation is a cultural artifice, presentation alone can sustain an 'authentic natural realism'. The imprint preserves the memory of the contact. It is a natural 'inscription' preceding writing. 

The aesthetic of the trace is opposed to the aesthetic of mimesis.

It counters the mimetic with a presence.

Body traces, traces of 'health', are records of a pristine state of life.

Seeing chromaticity arising from the modulation of light.

Pierre Soulages/Jean-Dominique Fleury : Conques 1987-1994.

The result was a translucent non transparent glass, that let the light through but not the view: a glass that diffused the light not by reflecting it on its surface but from its very texture.

This modulation of the transparency was the natural consequence of the uneven distribution of ting bits of glass of different sizes, and of their partly “deglazing” during fusion.

Maps of Interior Space

A Swimmer Between Two Worlds, Francesca Woodman.

Katherine Conley, 2008.

Extract, on the nature of  photographic light.

The Self-Representational Photography of Francesca Woodman : Harriet Katherine Riches.

Clementina Hawarden/Francesca Woodman

Both photographers' imagery centres on the portrayal of interior space in which the borders and limits of that space are constantly affirmed and re-iterated. 

Staging their female models against walls, learning against fireplaces, positioned adjacent to thresholds and doors, or gazing wistfully through the glazed panes of windows, the interiority suggested in each woman's imagery is always held in tension with what lies beyond, emphasising the boundaries of public and private space.

Riches, it is their shared manipulation of light to exaggerate a sense of physical containment that my interest here lies. In both women's work, light is not only that medium of clarification and development necessary to the photograph itself, but conversely also becomes the means through which a subject is obscured, contained or constricted.

Becoming

The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden.

Collecting Loss, Becoming Decay, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann,

Carol Mavor

Projecting Touch

Francesca Woodman's Late “Blueprints”

Emotion, Space and Society

An intimate mode of looking

Woodman insists on the sheer impossibility of dividing the problems of the self from the problems of the medium, and in so doing it compels an intimacy, an inquiry between photograph and viewer.

Francesca Woodman's photographs, Jane Simon, 2010. 

Francesca Woodman's Dark Gaze : Claire Raymond.

The End of Art and the Question of Legibility.

Outside In : Francesca Woodman's

Rooms of Her Own

Johannes Binotto

To divert our gaze from Woodman's body and consider what is going on next to, behind, and around it. Indeed Woodman's photographs always also capture that other; she incessantly switched angles of view and photographed what was beyond her body: the scene of the action, the room itself, calling on us to turn our attention to the spatial situations in her pictures.

National Galleries Scotland

Self Deceit, Eel Series, Untitled Providence,

Francesca Woodman

The Raw Seduction of Flesh

Photographs by Connie Imboden, 1999.

Human Figure Drawing : Daniela Brambilla 

Drawing Gestures, Postures and Movements

The Artist's Reality : Mark Rothko

Philosophies of Art

Teacher's Manual Brockwood Park School

Enquiry and Investigation, Krishnamurti.

John Berger

Bento's Sketchbook

Storytelling, the invisible and the hidden, protagonists are survivors.

Their stories remain unfinished, because they involve sharing, because in their telling a body refers as much to a body of people as to an individual, for them mystery is not something to be solved but to be carried.

The arts, as technologies, are carried along in the same unpredictable history. Their very finality is uncertain. How then can one found a school of art? Perhaps precisely by bringing together artists, that is to say, technicians, who are no longer assured of disciplinary borders, who explore the frontier zones, the limit zones, the in-betweens. . . .

A paradoxical institution, to be sure, since it institutes a decompartmentalization , giving a place and a frame to operations of unframing.

Sylviane Agacinski, IN-BETWEEN (a notion which is neither a concept nor an image, Tschumi)

At some time, perhaps many times in his life , every man is likely to meet with a thing in art or nature or human life or books which astonishes and gives him a profound satisfaction, not so much because it is rich or beautiful or strange , as because it is a symbol of a thing which, without the symbol, he could never grasp and enjoy.

Edward Thomas
The Inn/One Green Field

In the course of a lifetime there are few decisive conversations: with a classmate in high school, a father or mother, a best friend, an admired mentor, a person whose newfound presence will shape the rest of our existence.
Alain Fleischer, LE  FRESNOY : WHY THAT? WHY THERE?
Bernard Tschumi : Architecture In/Between




Architecture, Light, Art,

The real drawing takes place in the mind, Brian Clarke

Drawing in a volume, Zaha Hadid

Brian Clarke : Glas/Derrida : Trans-illumination/Dwelling and the emotional, existential experience of things.

Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Brian Clarke is one of the most important artists working in stained glass. Since the early 1970s, he has collaborated with some of the world’s most prominent architects to create stained-glass designs and installations for hundreds of projects worldwide. He is also a painter of international repute, and has increasingly engaged, over the last two decades, in creating complete architectural spaces - total works of art - that integrate painting, sculpture, ceramic, glass, metalwork and mosaic.

Stained glass has been one of the most spectacular of the European arts for centuries, since its full development in the early Middle Ages. References to stained glass in England date from the 7th century, and by the 12th century it had become a sophisticated art form. The basic techniques used in medieval times have barely changed: pieces of coloured glass are held together in a framework of lead. Early stained glass was made by melting sand, potash and lime together in clay pots. It was coloured by the mixing of metallic oxides - copper for green, cobalt for blue, gold for red - and by the mid-16th century many colours were being used.

A key figure in keeping this magnificent art-form alive and relevant in modern times, Brian Clarke is at once a leader in new technology, and a brilliant aesthetic innovator. The works in this exhibition are at the very frontier of what it is possible to do with stained glass. Stained glass entered the artist’s consciousness early. As a boy, as he was just beginning to determine his commitment to art, he tells us that “I saw a stained glass window being installed in a church in Lancashire and it filled me with interest for the medium.” He went on to be a painter, but he never forgot this early experience, and by 1973, barely into his twenties, he began to work with glass.

This exhibition focuses on two bodies of work produced over recent years: his stained glass screens, begun in 2015, and his works in lead - a core element in the stained glass process - continually produced from 2007.

The relationship between these bodies of Clarke’s work and light is intrinsic. The contrasting relationships are clearly visible - the leaded works absorb the light and the stained glass lets light through. Glass is a super-cooled liquid. There is a fluid quality to this barely static matter, as the layers respond to the changing light. The sense of movement comes from the journey the light makes, creating an ever-changing environment for the spectator.

The artist has always been involved with modern architecture, and has collaborated with Norman Foster on a number of occasions. Because of this, it was decided that the best way to show the stained glass screens - and to celebrate the fortieth birthday of the Sainsbury Centre building - was to show them in the main space, among and around the Sainsbury Collection.

Night Orchids

Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together. The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke's recent work; mortality.

The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.

There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes - Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.

Robert Storr.

Francis Bacon

The Logic of Sensation Gilles Deleuze

Memento Mori

The inevitability of things.

The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.

Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.

Objective and subjective visions of life - and death - come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.

Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.

A Valediction of Weeping.

Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.

Liminality Numinous Spiritual Transendental

A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.

Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.

Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal. 

The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.

I don't want to do anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being. 

Brian Clarke, 2018.

UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.

Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana. Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.

The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body. Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.

Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.

Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.

Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. (the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)

Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modem art.

The use of memory as a conceptual tool.

'Every instant has a thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.

Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level'.

Memory is a means by which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.

Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.

Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor

I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material

Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.

The Interrupted Grid/Motifs

Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies

The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena

Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.

The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.

Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome. Grisaille

Pointillism Divisionism

Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thom Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends) The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.

Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.

Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.

An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making. The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead - a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline - into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Derrida, fragments GLAS

Derrida’s text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and families into unstable figures; their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual hierarchies.

Architectural Transformations, Old Buildings/New Designs.

Space is already structured (Deleuze), it is place that is the relational human praxis of space.

The Dehumanised Nature of Human Consciousness, Silke Panse. Screening Nature : Cinema beyond the human. 2013

Metaphor (as a spatial experience/sensation?) is itself a philosophical concept. Multiplicity and Memory : Talking about Architecture with Peter Zumthor. Six Memos for The New Millennium, Italo Calvino.

Interiors as book, poem, essay, philosophical treatise.

To define these spaces one needs decisive characteristics woven into the fabric of the building in its everyday function. These characteristics or spatial zones will define exact physical limits to be read or navigated as an experiential experience. These zones mark the outside limits or boundaries of layered experiences.

GLAS; Derrida, (a philosopher interested with the “between”) Gias in French means the death knell tolling of a bell. 

The methodology of reading.

Playful interrogations of the borders between philosophy and literary writing. “This anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature.”

Destabilising tactics through different typographical styles, formats and languages.

On The Lefthand Side.

Philosophy as expressed by Hegel, who believed that the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of absolute knowledge and its subsequent passing down through strictly controlled channels.

On The Righthand side.

Subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.

The experience of the text is its reading (like that of a collage) is that neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened up to the other column.

In each column, Derrida cites and grafts (what might these terms generate in architectural space) from Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s journal of the thief and his prose poetry.

GLAS; Has in fact a multiplicity (multiplicity and memory in architecture, Peter Zumthor) of author’s and their authority is always placed in doubt; in fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries that seek to divide it up inside itself. 

Peter Zumthor, interested in the authentic core of things, in emotions and imagining things and not theories. From the emotional/existential experience of things, Zumthor further embodies sensations of remembrance and memory into the fabric of his architecture.

Its fragments offer multiple beginnings and endings. Hegel’s Columns. (Heidegger)

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” spirals through dialogues of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis that is in tum interrogated by conflict and resolution (dwelling) until it comes to rest as an “ultimate harmony” presided over by “absolute reason”.

Genet’s Columns. (Winterson)

Metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles and dark labyrinths.

Derrida by placing both on the same page and in close proximity forces the reader to experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors that blossom up in explosions of meaning; from within the most rigorously unruffled philosophical prose.

Architecture on reality and living (dwelling)

Architecture can go too far in completing and controlling social space and influencing the politics of the everyday. Spatial practices are needed as a plastic and permeable social architecture that loosens and adapts the everyday from the imposition of both state and history. From these first speculative oppositions, architectural practice can be informed with the differences between the logic of design and the reality of place.

Brian Clarke : Properties of Matter and Imagination (Working Text)

Brian Clarke

The Art of Light/Paul Greenhalgh,2018.

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Architecture and Material Practice, Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Water and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard.

Properties of Matter and Imagination

FUSION OF PHYSICAL/METAPHYSICAL

Working Title : An Inquiry with a 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 Modern 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 20^th century – the age of specialisation – 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.

Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor

I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material
Neo Baroque, Postmodern rendered/computer generated surfaces.
New Forms of Media Aesthetics, Peter Greenaway

Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.

The Interrupted Grid/Motifs

Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies

The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena

Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.

The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.

Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome.

Grisaille

Pointillism

Divisionism

Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thorn Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends)

The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.
Mesh Topologies 

Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.

Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.

An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making.

The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead – a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline – into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else – the poetry, ideas, emotions – emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Night Orchids

Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together.

The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke's recent work; mortality.

The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.

There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes – Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.

Robert Storr.

Francis Bacon

The Logic of Sensation

Gilles Deleuze

Memento Mori

The inevitability of things.

The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.

Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modern art.

The use of memory as a conceptual tool.

'Every instant has a thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.

Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level'.

Memory is a means by which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.

Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.

Objective and subjective visions of life - and death – come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.

Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.

A Valediction of Weeping.

Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.

Liminality

Numinous

Spiritual

Transendental

A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.

Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.

Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal.

The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.

I don't want to do anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.

Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana.

Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.

The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body.

Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.

Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.

Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.

Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. ( the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)

Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.