Moments/Marks/Gestures differ because of their fecundity.

Outpost 010724

The Rehabilitation Of The Imagination.

Correspondences between humankind and the world.

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

russellmoreton.com

In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.

Gaston Bachelard 

Imagination must infuse a second life into familiar images, it must create 'metaphors of metaphors'.

Reverie, reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication.

Gaston Bachelard.

Moments differ because of their fecundity.

The Intuition Of The Instant.

The imagination is not a state, it is the human existence itself.

William Blake. 

For Bachelard, Blake's poetics, presents a complex around the dialectics of rock and cloud. A dynamic imagination, he is a poet of absolute imagination for whom the unreal directs the real.

The Reverberation of Images.

In a word, the phenomenological approach is a description of the immediate relationship of phenomena with a particular consciousness. It allows Bachelard to renew his warnings against the temptation to study images as things. Images are lived, experienced, re-imagined in an act of consciousness which restores at once their timelessness and their newness.

Therefore a poetic image does not duplicate present reality.

From phenomenology Bachelard retains above all the admonition to return to 'phenomena themselves' this requires putting aside naïve belief in the reality of things and approaching phenomena through consciousness which is always intentional, always consciousness of something.

I realized then we were thinking the same thing. As we looked into each other's eyes, I felt, once again, the anxiety that had taken root in our hearts a long time ago. The light reflecting from the spray of the fountain lit R's face.

The boy was fiddling with a nondescript stone as though it were a toy with some elaborate hidden mechanism. His plain light blue gloves had obviously been knit by hand. They were connected to each other with a strand of yarn, to keep them from becoming separated. I remembered wearing the same kind, long ago, and, in this basement so full of anxiety, they seemed like the lone sign of innocence and peace.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

The Immaterial Body.

Proposals through transparency and trans-illumination.

Sensate Inscriptions. 

The Mechanized Image.

Thresholds and projections of creative perception.

Drawing into the visual field.

Paint, pigments, lines, bought to light. 

Gestures, lines from sensations and its seeing.

Life Drawing/Corporeal Social Bodies.

Drawing/Sensations into the memory and anxieties of physical things.

Drawing attention to the relations of the body.

Social and sexual politics.

The Modernist Offence.

Schiele And The Naked Female Body.

Gemma Blackshaw.

Feminist art historians have developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between sex and spectatorship.

As Abigail Soloman-Godeau has claimed in her exploration of photography and female subjectivity in the Second French Empire, the barriers between what is deeped licit and illicit, acceptably seductive or wantonly salacious, aesthetic or prurient, are never solid because contingent, never steadfast because they traffic with each other – are indeed dependant upon each other.

How might such an engagement with difference, with the binary system, shift not only our understanding but also our appreciation of Schiele's representation of the naked female body, of what continues to be described and displayed as 'the nude'? 

Egon Schiele.

The Radical Nude.

Making :

 

Visual Art Archive : Russell Moreton

russellmoreton.com

Making : Anthropological Objects~Fabrications on Humaning.

Tim Ingold.

Ceramics~Fired Clay.

Russell Moreton Saatchi Artist.

Waiting Room Installation 2007 : Visual Art Winchester School of  Art.

Outpost Studios, Gildengate House. Weather world correspondences, stained glass, plastic tape.

Textual Readings~Documents in Movement~Thought.

Changefulness : Clay inscriptions carried through to fired clay. 

The Sympathy of Painted Light (detail). 2025, Ceramic, 170mmW and 270mmW x 260mmH x 80mmD.

Fired Clay Books~Folded and fabricated interiors. 

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

Hans Coper : Pots that are 'Worlding' that situate a certain fidelity, a willingness to survive and endure.

Hans Coper : Potter, "the experience of existence" 

CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE.
FARNHAM, SURREY. UK
RUSSELL MORETON

russellmoreton.com

“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”

Hans Coper, Artist Statement 1969.

Hans Coper’s iconic assembled ceramics frame the later part of the twentieth century with an ambivalence of both alienation and reconciliation. His pots reveal differences that have resisted the homogenizing effects of the culture of the time. They embody and are a physical testament to what the potter himself has reflected on his life, “endure your own destiny”1 within the space and time of the human condition.
Born in 1920 into a prosperous middle class background, his childhood years were spent in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany. In 1935 his father Julius, is singled out like many other Jewish businessmen for harassment and ridicule under National Socialist Party. This would result in the Coper family moving frequently to escape the attention of the Nazis. Tragically in 1936 Julius takes his own life in an attempt to safeguard the future of his family. The remaining family, Erna Coper and her two sons return to Dresden. In 1939 Hans at the age of 18 leaves Germany for England, the following year he is arrested in London and interned as an enemy alien. He spends the next three years first in Canada then returns to England by volunteering to enrol in the Pioneer Corps. In 1946 a meeting with William Ohly who ran an art gallery near to Berkeley Square, brought about an opportunity for a job in a small workshop run by Lucie Rie, a refugee potter from Vienna. Hans Coper now began earnestly through his engagement with ceramics to reveal a continental modernity “whose work seemed uncomfortably abrasive to the traditionalists.”2
Hans Coper and Lucie Rie worked together at Albion Mews for 13 years forming a friendship and a working relationship that was mutually reciprocated through practical concerns, innovation and experimentation. There is a creative synergy in place through their mutual sharing of process and experimentation within the practicalities of the studio space. A documented instance of this reciprocal inventiveness is in the appropriation of the technique of “Sgraffito” which Lucie Rie employs after being inspired by some Bronze Age pottery at Avebury Museum bearing incised patterns, which are displayed with some bird bones, which may have been used as tools to incise the pottery. These “dark bowls of Avebury”3 are transposed through the use of manganese engobe and a steel needle into Lucie Rie’s ceramics, Hans Coper although not present appropriates the bird bone for the engineered steel of a pointed needle file and uses the action of an abrasive hand tool to remove layers of the manganese engobe. In this way Coper is enacting onto the surfaces of his ceramics, the very agencies that Modernism was acting out in the realms of architectural space and surface treatment of materials. In 1959 a move to Digwell Arts Trust would bring to a close his working relationship with Lucie Rie. Coper now became involved with a number of architecturally based projects through the Digswell Group of architects and building professionals. Coper’s engagement with the Digwell Group was not without problems and creative frustrations, but seen in retrospect it became an experimental period where Coper was strengthening his ability to bring his pottery into a spatial communion with the modernist architectural sensibilities of the time.  However it was a wartime friend Howard Mason who introduced Coper’s work to Basil Spence, from this introduction Hans Coper was commissioned to design the candlesticks for the new modernist cathedral at Coventry. The Six Coventry Candlesticks completed in 1962 explicitly reveal a sensitive and progressive spatial awareness to the architectonics of built spaces. The candlesticks delicately tapered and waisted are made in sections and assembled on site onto rods set into the architectural interior. These assembled thrown and fired towering forms seem to be more about a presence than their actual physicality. They appear to paradoxically transcend the monumentality of their setting through their very immateriality, their slight of form being perfectly balanced to accommodate a single candle and its temporal flame.
As a maker of pots he was in constant touch with his working process, an analogue process, a creative membrane that surrounded the agency of making and thinking. He was able to pursue his vocation “My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration”4 His resultant works reflect what might be termed a “machining in” of a creative durability that is both ancient and modern that contains both tensions and fragility, and that above all seems to exist in a state of timelessness.

 His assembled “pots” are constructed from thrown components, “throwing” as a process that he remarks on “I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now”. It is through the wheel, the body and the interplay between clay and air that the inner space that defines the form is created. Adam Gopnik writing about the art of Edmund de Waal describes what I might be termed a spatial sensibility “the pot-ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”5 Hans Coper further adds sensuality to this “innerness” when he encloses it in a skin that appears archaic through a deeply physical surface treatment of engobes, incised grooves and scratching of the raw pot; then when finally once fired the dry vitreous surface is further machined and abraded to give a graphite-like sheen.
Hans Coper’s pots speak in silence of this interior “architectonic” space that is itself reverberated through an almost archaic modernity. He seems to be able to tune the interior, to load its mass, its void.
There is a strong sense of the vessel, the concrete with the emptiness, even an analogy to corporality set in motion by his treatment of the surface and interiors of his pots. The pots themselves belong to ever extended families, to new familiarities created by the subtle interlays between the negative spaces created through the spatial awareness that has been crafted into their very making. The pots through proximity with each other are in a spatial communion, they act to define particular spaces by defining boundaries and creating thresholds between exterior surfaces and space. These pots are themselves are “encounters” they ask us to be attentive to the responsive sensory inner space set up in residence by the permeable world of the ceramic vessel.

1 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers : p75.
2 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers : p22.
3 Birks, Tony. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine. Stenlake Publishing ltd: p44.
4 The Essential Potness. Hans Cper and Lucie Rie 2014. Collingwood and Coper Exhibition 1969. Victoria and Albert Museum.
5 Gopnic,Adam. 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things : About the Art of Edmund de Waal. New York; Gagosian Gallery : p6-7.

Selected Bibliography.

Birks, T. 1976.Art Of The Modern Potter.London: Country life Books.

Birks, T. 1983. Hans Coper. London: William Collins Publishers.

Birks, T. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine : Stenlake Publishing ltd.

Coatts, M. 2008. Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Potters in Parallel. London:

Graves, A.2005. Hans Coper: Sculpture in Architecture. Interpreting Ceramics Issue

Gopnic, A. 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things: About the Art of

Jones, J.2005. Keeping Quiet and Finding a Voice : Ceramics and the Art of Silence. London: Interpreting Ceramics Issue 5.

Edmund de Waal. New York : Gagosian Gallery.

Whiting, D.1996. Coper at Coventry. London: Studio Pottery no 20.

2014.The Essential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie.

Marking~Clay : The~Transition~of~Matter : The Lived Duration between Two States.

New Assemblages/Materialisms.

Spinoza/Lived Durations.

The Silent Transformations.

Spatial Bodies : Constellations/Spatial Composition.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Readings of Movement and Attention : Slow Philosophy/Clay/Ecology of Material Thinking

Land Forms/Architectures from marking movement.

Clay, Greenware. Studio Space.

Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021

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

A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010

The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve 

Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically 

Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010

Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010

New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay

The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object 

Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad

Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012

From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective

Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies

Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them

Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008

Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers

Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate

Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability

The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution

Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice

Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy

Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline

The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)

The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 

So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002

Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006

The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions

A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  

New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative

Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's

New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006

Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it

The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries

Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection

Expressing itself expressing 

Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions

Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact

The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement

Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 

A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside

The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017

Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice

'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey

Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005

With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 

Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence

Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994

The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler

The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world

Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen

Architectural Stratification/Installation : Crafting/Painting Transformative Reconstructions/Relationscapes

Outpost 200623

Of doing and un-doing, of being~becoming un-done by theory. 

Sensing Spaces/Caryatid.

Painting Matter, Lime, Gesso, Charcoal, and Indian Ink on paper.

Water.

Ceramics and Architecture.

 Architectural Stratifications, Carlo Scarpa, Intervening with History. 

The Placing of Pots.

The Hungate.

The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

A Moment of Pure Presence.

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

Jane Bennett

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

Philip Fisher.

Analysing The Observed.

To abstract from the observed means to simplify the complexities of seeing.

Piet Mondrian.

Space and Form are ignored in this type of Abstraction, the Lines and their Vectors of Movement become a Map, Mapping Forces onto the Surface of the Picture.

Thinking with directional, durational markings/feelings/intuitive judgements.

Small Perceptions/Perceptions in Folding.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another, as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze, 1993.

Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaging landing sites.

Relationscapes.

Erin Manning.

'Incoherence' exists, which is why the composition 'Art' exists.

Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them. By giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they remain forever incoherent.

Andre Aciman/Edmund de Waal. 

For nearly fifty years my darkroom and studio have been the focus of my solitude.

Landing Sites.

The Expanding Field of Relations.

Organism/Person/Environment

I need silence to be able to think clearly, and an empty space where my thoughts can accumulate undisturbed.

Duration.

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid flowing time which is intertwined with an experience of being, where past, present and future merge into an experiential time of the individual being/becoming.

Steven Holl.

Darkrooms were dangerous places as well as magical ones, they are a painful metaphoric yoking of creation and destruction.

My final print is a golden square enclosing the pinkest dusk sky I had ever seen or imagined.

Filtered Light/Pot Metal Colours/Silver Stain/Filtows/Filters/Shadows.

The Light Gatherers.

Bodleian Libraries.

March 2022-October 2023.

Light Laboratory/Creation as Duration.

Glass vessels, as light filters shining the enlarger light through them and creating photograms. Garry's work oscillates with differential velocities. He works with great deliberation and then he works with abandon. I keep thinking about the tension between deliberation and abandon. You look at a painting by Agnes Martin and experience the temporal aspect of lines repeated slowly over days and weeks. A cell like structure repeats and changes, you repeat so that in return you can find the smallest oscillations of difference. An expanded field where you sense the development of different kinds of time, movements and their durations.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

Farewell to an Idea, Wallace Stevens/Edmund de Waal. 

Haecceity, thisness of things, which engenders feelings between ourselves/things/world.

I was grateful to have been able to live with so much pure colour for so long.

Space-Enfolding-Breath

Lake Of The Mind.

Ideas are already abstract.

Abstracted Transcriptions.

Drawing, Vectors and Forces of Subjectification.

Lines, mappings of forces across the surface of the picture.

Drawing on, analysis with, Dominants.

Formed by the dynamic forces derived from the outlines of objects and their surrounding spaces.

Palimpsest Collages

Psychogeographic Mappings

Architectural Models

The Process of Drawing/Building is Left Visible.

Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley.

Crafting Recovery and Regeneration.

Transformative Reconstruction.

SPAB, Summer 2023.

Michal Saniewski.

Falerone, San Francesco Monestry. Italy.

It's the forefront of modernisation, something that we thought the city was. The countryside is still the place where new ideas and experimentation actually take place..

Countryside : The Future.

Guggenheim Museum, 2020.

Heritage Conservation/Preservation

How do we insert new fabric into old and respect layers of history, of which the earthquakes are an inherent part? Perhaps some of the scars and cracks should be preserved to serve as a poignant  reminder of the past, becoming a living memorial? And perhaps there is potential to develop a new language of additive, 'surgical' architecture, where the contemporary timber frames serve a protective function, supporting and bracing the damaged medieval walls,  but at the same time can be inhabited, framing new uses and reprogramming internal spaces.

The reconstruction process should be used as an opportunity to add value beyond what existed before the earthquake. 

Exploring possible new functions and uses of currently empty spaces and damaged buildings, the local community was asked to participate in the act of psychogeographic mapping and thus rediscovering and revaluating the town on different levels.

Key themes of the New European Bauhaus initiative.

Renovation of existing buildings and public spaces in a spirit of circularity and carbon neutrality.

Preservation and transformation of cultural heritage.

Regeneration of urban or rural spaces.

 

Could Falerone become an experimental hotbed, an example of sustainable, community-driven reconstruction of urban fabric and place identity? The new crafts school could be an opportunity to achieve just that, stimulating collaborations not just with other towns and universities, but with regional authorities and even with the EU. 

Studio Cyanotypes.

Tools/Working Drawings and the Semblances of Spatial Agencies.

Keywords.

Visual Substance, Causal Doing, Investigating, Inquiry, Process, Agency, Matter, Material, Discursive, Iterative, Creative Apparatuses, Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies That Matter, 

Dwelling/Reverberation/Poetics : Physical Grammar/Passages

Outpost 200623

On The Experiential Level of Life

Investigating/Expanding 'The Spatial/Sculptural'
Space over Time/Operative Design

Tony Cragg

IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL

Demonstration

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

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

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

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

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

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

Objects/Subjects in Space : Passages in Sculpture

OPERATIVE DESIGN : SPATIAL VERBS

To serve as a fundamental tool for spatial and architectural interpretation

Spatial operations, illustrated beginnings to activate architectural inquiry.

This catalogue thus introduces the possibility of understanding spatial formation as a process that can be derived from fundamental actions, here grouped into volumetric addition, subtraction, or displacement, which define a lexicon of starting points for the creation of space and also imply the relationship between oneself and the space created.

OPERATIONS

to | Expand | Extrude | Inflate | Branch | Merge | Nest | Offset | Bend | Skew | Split | Twist | Interlock | Intersect | Lift | Lodge | Overlap | Rotate | Shift | Carve | Compress | Fracture | Grade | Notch | Pinch | Shear | Taper | Embed | Extract | Inscribe | Puncture |

MAKE SPACE

Space matters. We read our physical environment like we read a human face.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses

Juhani Pallasmaam Steven Holl

2005

How to set the stage for creative collaboration

Scott Doorley, Scott Witthoft, David Kelley

2012

Surface + Volume

Generative Process

Combinations and Aggregations

Implementations

Writing and Seeing Architectue

Christian de Portzamparc, Philippe Sollers

2008

In and Out of material : Passages in Sculpture

COMBINATIONS

to | Inscribe + Inscribe | Intersect + Intersect | Split + Split | Embed + Embed | Taper + Taper | Bend + Bend | Branch + Branch | Shift + Shift | Notch + Notch | Inscribe + Intersect | Intersect + Split | Split + Embed | Embed + Taper | Taper + Bend | Bend + Branch | Branch + Expand | Expand + Shift | Shift + Notch | Notch + Twist |  

Languages,dialogues,conflicts that can evoke form,experience and interaction.

Research, inquiry and practice as a systematic approach through operative terms.

Investigating the 'Spatial' its formal/experiential essence/action and character for spatial opportunities.

The Feeling Of What Happens

Body,emotion and the making of consciousness

Antonio Damasio

1999

The Architecture Of The Jumping Universe

A Polemic

How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture

Charles Jencks

1995

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

ARCHITECTURE, ART AND DESIGN

V&A Contemporary, Lucy Bullivant

2006

to fold

to modulate

of tension

of entropy

Richard Serra, "Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself" [1967-1968]

to roll to crease to fold to store to bend to shorten to twist to dapple to crumple to shave to tear to chip to split to cut to sever to drop to remove to simplify to differ to disarrange to open to mix to splash to knot to spill to droop to flow to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to bundle to heap to gather to scatter to arrange to repair to discard to pair to distribute to surfeit to compliment to enclose to surround to encircle to hole to cover to wrap to dig to tie to bind to weave to join to match to laminate to bond to hinge to mark to expand to dilute to light to modulate to distill of waves of electromagnetic of inertia of ionization of polarization of refraction of tides of reflection of equilibrium of symmetry of friction to stretch to bounce to erase to spray to systematize to refer to force of mapping of location of context of time of cabonization to continue

AGGREGATIONS

to | Reflect | Expand

Reflect + Pack | Skew

Pack | Inflate

Pack + Stack | Branch

Stack | Bend

Array + Stack | Rotate

Array | Taper

Join + Array | Pinch

Join | Split

Poetics and Place

The Architectures Of Sign, Subjects and Site

Kristen Kreider

2014

A Hut of One's Own

Ann Cline

Open Office/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture

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

SPATIALITY

Writer as mapmaker, literature of the city and urban space, concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism.

Robert T. Tally Jr

2013

OPERATIVE DESIGN

A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs

2012/18

IMPLEMENTATIONS

to | Carve + Offset

Poli House : Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Offset program | Perimeter Services | Thickened Openings

to | Embed + Branch

Villa 1 : Powerhouse Company

Branched Programs | Volume Wrapper | Embedded Entry

to | Embed + Overlap

Casa para un Carpintero : RCR Arquitectes

Overlapping Program | Circulation Core | Embedded Entry

to | Expand + Nest

House N : Sou Fujimoto Architects

Expanded Outer Volume | Nested Private Program | Nested Living + Dining




Collage/Drawing Frame : Passages in Sculpture
to | Overlap + Expand

House in Minamimachi 2 : Suppose Design Office

Overlapping Light Wells | Stacked Program | Expanded Volumes

to | Bend + Shift

Nursing Home : Aires Mateus

Shifted Volumes | Bent Massing | Embedded Massing

to | Embed + Taper

Leimondo Nursery School : Archivision Hirotani Studio

Tapered Volumes | Thickened Roof | Embedded Program

to | Lift + Carve

Gouveia Law Courts : Barbosa and Guimaraes

Carved Massing | Lifted Program | Carved Plinth

to | Lift + Extrude

Carabanchel Housing : Dosmasuno Arquitectos

Extruded Living Spaces | Lifted Massing | Carved Plinth

to | Overlap + Rotate

Ironbank : RTA Studio

Rotated Volumes | Stacked Utility and Circulation Cores | Plinth and Street Facade

Anthony Di Mari

Nore Yoo

Volumetric Spatial Operations/Agents/Variations/Combinations

Additions

Subtractions

Displacements


Colour/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture/Architectural Glass

Mesh Topologies : Pattern and Chaos

Speculative Narratives 12

DSC_0018 Spatial/Visual Apparatus

Spatiality : Space over Time
DSC_0476 Spatial/Architectural Drawing

Reading Collage : Spatial Drawings/Documents/Analogue Photography

Speculative Narratives 8
Flickr