Making Processual Paths Of Volatility : Ceramics

Outpost 171225

Intricate Local Behaviours : Conversations/Correspondences between unrelated entities.

Lines. (Making/Thinking/Matter/Material)

Tim Ingold

What Is Art ?

Joseph Beuys.

I find it interesting that you say that this stool or box speaks to you, whereas this floor, as you said, doesn't. A similar thing happens to me, and I ask myself: What is this due to, the fact that it doesn't speak to me, or only a little? It makes me think that these ready-made things, this precision, actually compels me to behave in a particular way, not just these things here, but also a certain window, or a specific type of architecture that is very fixed very straight, that derives from something very thought out; this compels me to live or behave in a similar way,

Volker Harlan.

Beuys: Yes, right, exactly; in other words, this lives (points to the box) while the other (points to the floor) is dead. The first doesn't force itself on you, the other continually forces itself on you.

Thinking Processual.

Resistance/Viability : Mapping/Living

Meaning that it is not so much a matter of crossing boundaries, but rather a matter of open-endedness. A place where boundaries have become diluted and single figures are already coupled or heterogeneous figures (in the case of Bacon, man-animal).

Kovar/Deleuze.

The Architecture of Abjection.

The Logic of Sensation.

Working From Simple Things/Gestures/Materials.

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

Theoretical Movements in Clay+Ceramics.

The Circular/Elliptical Matter/Mattering of Things.

Gathering/Pouring/Manifolds : Forms of Thinking. 

Events.

Arte Povera.

The Way, without demarcation, rather a way of viability by which the continuum of life is renewed.

The Philosophy of Living.

Francois Jullien.

The Quiet Mind :  Silently without resistance

(Sound of barking) Do you listen to that dog? Wait, wait. Silently? Listen to it completely silently, which means without any resistance, without any irritation, just listen to it. When you listen quietly there is no resistance, there is no irritation, you do not identify yourself with the dog and the barking of it, your mind is quiet.

Meditation

The meaning of that word is to measure, basically (for oneself).

https://www.krishnamurti.org/transcript/in-meditation-there-is-no-direction/#:~:text=One%20must%20be%20wholly%20and,is%20vain,%20full%20of%20confidence

Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Kounellis/Opera, interventions, unscripted by workmen, bodies on trolleys. 

Penone, wooden frame, human body, empty frame installed in a stream.

Beuys, accumulator, clay balls, wires, simple sturdy wooden table.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.

The Enabling Constraint. 

Erin Manning.

Visual Art Practice. 2024

Whether abject(ion) issues forth from a human body, a space or any other entity, it sets the whole world in motion and instigates a chain of exchanges.

In 'becoming' for Deleuze and Guattari we form a multiplicitous assemblage where individual elements are blurred, and together begin to act as a kind of whole. But a whole that is not fixed, as the assemblage also has a side facing a BwO which is continually dismantling the organism.

Through abject(ion) the smells, textures and physical forms of our body space and this excrement leaking out, become fused together. We become part of the space: the space becomes a part of us.

Abject(ion) re-configure the body and space physically through the transference of matter.

Architecture Without Organs (BwO)

The BwO is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts. A whole that does not unify or totalize them. But that is added to them like a new, really distinct part.

Deleuze and Guattari.

BwO plays a role in the notion of an open subjectivity. Kovar asks, are or how are abject(ion) and BwO related, and how might this relation be played out in architecture?

The BwO for Deleuze and Guattari is a concept that uses the virtual dimensions of the body as a set of potentialities that may be activated through becoming, importantly it is a body, understood as process that is continually constructing and deconstructing connections. 

To speak of process and the continual construction and deconstruction of connections is to implicate numerous entities between which these connections are made and therefore speak of heterogeneity.

Open Subjectivities.

Unmaking The Human Body/Subject.

Blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.

Translucent assemblages are all that are left from the transparency/clarity of the morning that will soon dissipate.

Reliquaries of Light and Darkness.

Bodies, spatial and human in transitional movements. 

The Sacred and The Medical Body.

The Hospital Room.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Cronos.

 

Clay/Working/Learning/Making.

Working in Clay and Fire /Mapping Resistance and Viability.

City of Orion, ceramic objects in the landscape.

Raveningham Sculpture Trail. 2024

Ceramic works investigating the relationship of water to the human body and the architectural body of interior spaces.

Water at The Hungate, Norwich. 2023

Exhibitions with Anglian Potters.

Ferini Gallery, Lowestoft. 5

Undercroft, Norwich. 4

All Saints, Cambridge. 2

2019-2024.

Revisited Contemporary Ceramics

Things of Beauty Growing.

The Fitzwilliam Museum. 2018

Anglian Potters. 2018

Teaching Sessions, throwing/handbuilding.

Brockwood Park School. 2012-2015

Speculative Clay Workshop/Walking in the Landscape.

Teaching Academy, Brockwood Park School. 2011

Raku Firings.

St Ninian's Cave.

Scotland. 2013

Bodyscapes, raw clay installations.

Chapel Arts Studios, Andover. 2010

The Yard, Winchester. 2009 

Contemporary Craft Ceramics. 2004-2006 

Life Drawing/Sculpture, figurative/abstractions in clay. 1996-2002

Dexterity Crafts.

Potter throwing domestic pottery.

Walton on the Hill. 1985

Ceramics, architecturally influenced vessels in slab and thrown processes.

Epsom College of Art and Design. 1981-1984

Industrial Pottery experience.

Grayshott Pottery. 1979-1981

Studio Pottery experience. 

The Hop Kiln Pottery. 1978

A Level Ceramics.

Farnham Sixth Form. 1976-1978

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

Wayfaring Forms : Living Architectures beyond Function.

 

Outpost 030125

Living Architectures/Wayfaring.

Environments formed/experienced through Movement and Attention.

Lines.

Tim Ingold.

Art's Use of Architecture: Place, Site and Setting.

Artists in 'Psycho Buildings' explore architecture's psyche, through the production of places, sites and settings, sites and settings, which engender spatial experiences that connect the viewer psychically, as well as perceptually and conceptually, to broader social issues and cultural phenomena.

Art and architecture are frequently differentiated in terms of their relationship to 'function' or 'use'. Unlike architecture, art may not be useful in pragmatic terms, for example in responding directly to social needs, providing shelter or somewhere in which to perform open-heart surgery, but we could say that art provides a place for other kinds of function – self-reflection, critical thinking and social change. If we consider this expanded version of the term function in relation to architecture, we realise that architecture is seldom given the opportunity to consider the construction of critical concepts and spatial relations as its most important purpose.

Jane Rendell.

Processes/Processual Thinking that constitute entities.

Moving Attentively In The Field of Material Structure.

The Itinerant Library of Excessive Tendencies.

Heterogeneous matter driven by disparate parts and elements of assembly.

Bricoleur Performing Practices.

Discursive Inquiry/Reading/Making.

Abjection flows between bodies, it never solely concerns one body.

For Kovar, when abjection is one of those processes, a very particular assemblage manifests itself. Where boundaries are disrupted, connections made and zones of proximity that are otherwise absent, are reached. Abject(ion) causes an inherent schism on the physical and psychological levels.

It opens bodies, to one another.

It opens up bodies for 'exchange'.

Such that they are in a perpetual process of being made and unmade, unfinished bodies.

It is precisely because abject(ion) is not only psychological but also physiological that it straddles both genders and is not solely reducible to the feminine. Abject(ion) is both feminine and masculine.