Saturday, 29 March 2025

CLAY/Propositions/Correspondences : Letting the material speak for itself/Technicity/Generative AI.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.





"Claywork/Correspondences" explores how clay, as a material, and the resulting artforms, can reveal situated interactions between bodies and habitats, emphasizing the material and relational aspects of human-environment connections. 

Here's a deeper dive into the concept:

Clay as a Material of Connection:

Clay, being a natural material found in the earth, becomes a tangible link between humans and their environment. The act of working with clay, from gathering the raw material to shaping and firing it, involves a direct engagement with the earth and its processes. 

Correspondences and Situated Interactions:

The term "correspondences" suggests a relationship or connection between different things, in this case, the human body and the habitat. By examining claywork, we can understand how humans interact with their environment, how their bodies are shaped by their surroundings, and how these interactions are reflected in the art they create. 

Examples in Art and Culture:

Ceramics and Pottery: The creation of pottery and other ceramic objects demonstrates a deep connection to the earth and its resources. The process of shaping and firing clay involves a careful manipulation of the material, reflecting a knowledge of its properties and behavior. 

Figurines and Sculptures: Clay figurines and sculptures can offer insights into the beliefs, practices, and social structures of past cultures. The forms and materials used in these objects can reveal how people perceived themselves and their relationship with the natural world. 

Glazing and Decoration: The application of glazes and decorations on clay objects can further enhance the connection between the material and the artist's vision. Glazes, with their diverse colors and textures, can transform the raw material into a vibrant and expressive medium. 

Beyond the Object:

The study of claywork can extend beyond the object itself to encompass the broader context of human-environment interactions. By analyzing the materials, techniques, and cultural meanings associated with clay, we can gain a deeper understanding of how humans have shaped and been shaped by their environments. 

Mind and material engagement | Phenomenology and the Cognitive ...

1 Dec 2018 — The preferred analytical convention is to break the line's cognitive life into pieces: first by separating ourselves fro...


Springer

Clays and the Origin of Life: The Experiments - PMC

In our view, the most promising theory to explain the origin of life is centered around the interaction of active sites on clay mi...

PubMed Central

Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness ...

But there is a key difference: in contrast to the map, Indigenous human life on land is omitted. However, three small figures can ...


British Art Studies

Generative AI is experimental.



Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

The Becoming of Continuity/Relations.

In/Out of Material, Tony Cragg.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The Ways/Movements of Practice.

Ceramics In The Environment.








Clay, is always a working idea, a matter/material process between things, a form of thinking in process.

The Durational Time of Play/A Lure For Feeling.


You don't need a choreographer to dance, what you need is a choreographic proposition. Propositions are ontogenetic, they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience. For Manning what else is an associated milieu but a cornfield for crafting of the as yet unthought, where the microperceptual meet to create new movements in the making.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning, Always More Than One, Individuation's Dance. 2013.










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


Crucible Bowls. 2020.

Slab Facades. 2021.

Rutile/Yellow Ochre/Red Iron Oxide/White Raku Slip/Transparent Raw Glaze.


The Moon Tower, Nina Hole. 2000.

The Watchdog, Michel Kuipers. 1990.


Intertwinining Thinking and Making.

Painting in Form of a Bowl.

Quietus, Cinerary Jars.

The Vessel/The Human Body.

Volumes/Voids


Clare Twomey.

Tony Cragg.

Eduardo Chillida.

Paul Soldner.

Julian Stair.

Bryan Newman.

Gordon Baldwin.

Hans Coper.

Lygia Clark.

Richard Hirsch.

Edmund de Waal.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Steven Holl.



Ceramic vessels and surfaces  for a reflective solitude, an architecture of light,silence and innerness.

Spaces between Objects/Things/Making, Giorgio Morandi.



The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.


Volume And Space.


Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, 'Man Pointing,' is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.


Paintings of nothing, ceramic, raw material, dry pigment, wax.


With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.


The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.


Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.





Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.


Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.


The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.


Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.


Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold. 


Urban Spaces, palimpsest, impressions, traces, ecologies, redundancies.


Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.


The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Affordances of Things.


Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.


Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.


Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.


An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.



Matter and materials are lively and require attention. 

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.


Aleatory, by chance, lots of the 'acts' of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.


In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.


All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.


Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.


A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, understood by the physical phenomenon of an energy or force as it flows across an obstacle. Diffraction is the process of ongoing differences, and ass such it can be used as a tool for analysis, as it attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Karen Barad.


Areas Of Presentation and Participation.

Historic and Social Sites, Art Venues and Exhibitions.

Making Theoretical Objects, Installations and Interventions.


Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.


“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.


Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.


The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry' He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.


With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.


Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  



The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.


Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.


Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.


Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.


Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.


Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.


Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.


Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.


Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture.

How to build your own.

Beginning.

Model Making.


We will begin practising by constructing a room and covering it with a simple dome or a vault.


Once a person has constructed a model, within hours, he or she is encouraged to learn and understand more. The knowledge thus gained will trigger quests in building with earth. It is possible to learn the basics of thousands of years of earth architecture within a day if it is taught in the simplest terms, and  if all our senses are involved in the learning process. 

Nader Khalili.


Re-imagining learning, workshop session, conducted and initiated a walk across a landscape with clay being actively manipulated by a number of participants as they engaged with the material, their bodies and the landscape.


Beach firing at St. Ninian's Scotland, experimental kiln and site built reduction pits excavated from the beach. Pots fired and reduced with found materials, then washed in the Irish Sea.


Hans Coper, essay on professional practice, including his architectural ceramics. 

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.


Sectional Works.

Slab Constructions.

Plasterwork, Pressmoulding.


Working with materials/substances/drawing and traces of making.


Raku, engobes, slips, oxides, templates, spray diffuser, stencils, fabric inclusions, intermediaries, Indentations, found objects, ferric chloride,  

Reduction materials, woodland branches through shredder.

Clay body additives, molochites, mica, vermiculite. other material,


Clay Tools : Block Strips and Combs.


Sound Vessels.

Capacitors/Insulators.

Passive, encapsulated layers.

Architectural Slab Works.


Ceramic and gesso/whitewashed/waxed/painted/bound/surfaces and structures.


The Chapel Of St.Ignatius.

House, Black Swan Theory.

Steven Holl.


Nail Collector's House, New York.

White plaster walls, hickory floors, and cartridge brass siding nailed in pattern over a wood frame, create a tactile weathering for this structure, a poetic reinterpretation of the industrial history of the site and the pre-Civil War architecture of Essex.


The jewel-like Chapel of St. Ignatius contains the essence of Holl's vision, his interest in the phenomenology of space, his passionate investigations of form and material, and his use of reflected light and colour.


The angst of a concept before spatial definition, interior and exterior are simultaneously explored.


The largest 'tilt-up' slab weighs 80,000 pounds and is filled with reinforcing steel. Its greatest stress is during the lift.


Working from the specific towards the universal.

The Built and The Unbuilt.

A theory of architecture that is mutable and unpredictable.

The body as a theoretical object doing/architecture (architecting its situatedness, Oren Lieberman)


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Friday, 28 March 2025

Cyanotype Drawings : Landscapes/Maps and Performative Drawings

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #2
Collage and drawing with cyanotypes, photographs, negatives and painted surfaces.

Mesh/Material/Light, Cyanotype Process
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide.





The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure in 1842.[1] Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints.[2] It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection.[3] Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.[4]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Cathedral : Place Studies

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft.#5

Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris
Visualising Environmental Agency
 
"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Gell 1998)"
"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."
Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.
 
Template and Form 2010.The Yard, Winchester.

Omslagsfoto : 

Landscapes from the Metropolis of Death. Otto Dov Kulka.

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #3
Collage and drawing with cyanotypes, photographs, negatives and painted surfaces.


Blueprint : Kengo Kuma, Sensing Spaces.

Panspermia : Cyanotype Drawing
Drawing on paper,150x240 cms
Full size human form drawn through "performance" on paper with cyanotype and black ink. Astronomical data and traces of seed heads together with reference material/notes (directed panspermia) in pencil.

Anthropomorphic and Botanical Cyanotype Drawing (Detail)
Botanical traces with leper graves


We live our lives sunk in vast forgetting. Milan Kundera, IGNORANCE.

Human mapping of social groups from the occupancy of the Winchester Cathedral "Space for Peace" 2011.
Mono Print : Cyanotype process on paper, 52x42cm.
































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Wednesday, 26 March 2025

Ceramics and Architecture : Making Things, Perception/Thought/Action

 Outpost 100223












Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.


The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.


Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.


Theorial objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.


The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.


Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.


Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.


Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.


Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.


Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity



If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.


Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.



The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.


Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.


Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies


The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.


Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.



Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013



Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.


Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.


Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.


Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.


Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance. Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.


Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation.

London.


Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.


Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.


The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.


An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.


Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

 

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.


Time : Duration and Perception.


Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.


One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.


Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.


Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.


The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..

Steven Holl.





Hungate, Norwich. 



Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023


Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.



Clay Making. 

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.


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Tuesday, 25 March 2025

Robin Welch Potter Raku Fireing 1970ish

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An Ecological Intimacy : Trace Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

Outpost 230824


Life Outside the Circle of Architecture.

A Hut of One's Own.

Ann Cline.


The Importance of The Hut in Contemporary Society.  


For Ann Cline the ostensible subject of this inquiry is the primitive hut, a one room structure built of common or rustic materials. She gracefully weaves together two stories: one of primitive huts in times of cultural transition, and another of diminutive structures in our own times of architectural transition. From these narrative strands emerges a deeper inquiry: What are the limits of architecture? What ghosts inhabit its edges? What does it mean to dwell outside it?


Of Huts.

An ecological intimacy, a return to veering towards both humans and nonhumans.


When we study attunement, we study something that has always been there, ecological intimacy, which is to say intimacy between humans and nonhumans violently repressed with violent result.

Tuning, Timothy Moreton.





Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces And Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.


The Raveningham Projects.

On the nature of crafting sheltering social spaces.

Site specific experiences on making/building/using.

A primitive attunement/dwelling, a return to the affective power between things.


A creative site specific study on 'dwelling, occupancy, and  hosting' through studying speculative architecture with its boundary conditions and formative structures. 


Simple 'undesigned' places valued for their timelessness and authenticity.


Philosophia/Socrates.

Philosophical love of wisdom rather than the possession of it.


A Philosophy of Solitude.

In Defence of Sensuality.

John Cowper Powys.


The Mythical City of Orion.

Storytelling through ceramics and explorative site markings, this sculptural intervention plays with archaeology, ceramic artefacts, and astronomy.


Sensing Self/Marking Realities.

Trace Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

Territories/Borders/Boundaries.







Art-Workings.

Being able to work with and appreciate ambiguity.

An aesthetic timbre of the inter connective causal perceptual qualities of things.


You don't know why you should care about this, isn't that what we are all feeling when we experience something beautiful/wonderous.


Care/Love as an ambiguous spectral aesthetic around ethical decisions.

Being/All Art is Ecological, Timothy Morton


The Working Drawing.

Critical Body Contour/Outline.


The Fossil Line.


A primitive gestural drawing underpinning a Palaeolithic idea on an inter-connective, causal perceptual aesthetic force that invokes and engenders a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy.


Spectral Aesthetics, OOO. 

A line of energy flowing around the extremity of a formed space.


The reserve of a papers surface retains both its former presence and its continuing absence held captive simultaneously.


The Figurative/Experiential Flatness between seeing and sensing self.

The remembered, reconstituted spatial dimensions rendered attractively into volumetric flatness.  




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Sunday, 23 March 2025

Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006


If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.

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












Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.









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

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Saturday, 22 March 2025

Living Places : The Intensity of Inhabitation/Grey Tones Chromatic or Achromatic.

Outpost 181024


Ann Cline.

A Hut of One's Own/Life outside the circle of Architecture.

How to cook a wolf.

Essay as Cookbook.





The pleasure of Sue's little house and her inspired oblivion to the ugliness of poverty, appeals not because of its strangeness, but because of its calm. The pleasure of her little house as with the 'bagatelles' around Paris lay in the intensity of its inhabitation.

At first when you entered it, the house seemed almost empty, but soon you realised that it was stuffed with a thousand relics. You ate by one candle, everything from one large Spode soup plate. I have never eaten such strange things as there in her dark smelly room, with the waves roaring at the foot of the cliff. The salads and stews she made from these little shy weeds (gathered from the cliffs and nearby field) were indeed peculiar, but she blended and cooked them so skilfully that they never lost their fresh salt crispness. She put them together with thought and gratitude, and never seemed to realize that her cuisine was one of intense romantic strangeness, to everyone but herself, moreover it was good.

M. F. K. Fisher.


Inherent Light.

The light that seems to glow from within a colour.


To attend to colour, then is in part, to attend to the limits of language. It is to try to imagine, often through the medium of language, what a world without language might be like.

David Batchelor.


Retinal Studies

Colour, David Hornung. 2005


Knowing Obscures Seeing.

Vision is influenced by our preconceptions about reality. In viewing a scene, we establish unconscious hierarchies that reflect our functional relationship to objects and our momentary priorities.

The camera, like the human eye, sees only shapes and colours. It documents the world impartially through a lens that is similar to the eye. The functional relationship we have with objects creates visual expectations that interfere with our ability to see 'like a camera.'

In retinal painting, one concentrates upon colour and shape while resisting the urge to name individual objects. When vision is directed in this manner, one actually experiences a different way of seeing. The result is a picture in which the subjects seem to be constructed purely out of colour shapes.

The Impressionists developed a way of painting that, at its most extreme, sought to replace drawing as the basis of pictorial composition with the objective transcription of colour shapes as observed in reality. Claude Monet (1840-1926) in particular attempted to build his pictures strictly out of his response to visual sensations. He proposed that the painter should record only the patterns and colours that  fall on the retina and ignore the 'identity' of the subject. This constituted a new kind of realism that reflected the physical nature of vision.


Bridge Tones.

Tones, tints, or shades that combine qualities of two distinctly different colours and act to soften those differences when placed near them in a composition.

Chromatic Darks.

Very dark chromatic greys that have discernible temperature.

Chromatic Greys.

Subtle colours that result from considerably lowering the saturation level of prismatic colours. Chromatic greys weakly exhibit the distinguishing quality of the hue family to which they belong. 


Median Transparency.

An illusion of transparency where the value of the colour at the overlap is halfway between that of the two parent colours. The hue of the overlapping area blends the hues of the two overlying colours equally.


Luminosity.

The amount of light reflected from the surface of a colour. Value is a measure of luminosity.


High Key.

What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly light in value.


Middle Key.

What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly medium in value.


Achromatic Greys.

Greys that are created by mixing black and white. Achromatic greys have no evident coloration when seen against a white background. Black and white are also achromatic.






Greyscale.

A graduated representation of the value continuum broken down into a finite number of steps, usually ten, eleven, or twelve achromatic greys.

Non proportional Colour Inventory.

A graphic rendering of specific colours observed in an object.

Proportional Colour Inventory.

A graphic representation of the exact colours and their proportions in a observed object.


Retinal Painting.

A term coined by Harriet Schorr in reference to painting from observation in a manner emphasizing the faithful transcription of coloured shapes as they appear on the retina of the eye. An outgrowth of Impressionism, this method favours accurate colour rendering over drawing to describe form. 


Shade.

The result of mixing a colour with black.


Tint.

The result of mixing a colour with white.

Tone.

Made by mixing grey (either chromatic or achromatic) with a colour. Tone can also have a more general meaning. The term is sometimes applied to all colours achieved by admixture including tints and shades.


Colour Unity.


The Altered Palette.

Unifying Strategies for Colour Mixing.


Any primary triad will have inherent limitations, but these are what give a palette its character.


Comparisons between the compositional study and the finished inventory clarify just how the inherent light in a design or painting is a projection of the palette from which it originates.


The colour overtones associated with specific pigments will limit possible saturation range. These limitations can be thought of as an expression of the character of illumination inherent in a colour. Just as a fluorescent light produces a characteristic quality of light that unifies what it illuminates,  any primary triad exerts a characteristic quality of inherent light through intermixing. 


An almost fool proof way to achieve family resemblance among a group of colours is to generate them from a limited source. Intermixing any primary triad (plus white) can produce a wide range of tones that share a common light quality.


A triadic dot study, teaches a mode of examination that, in a few steps summarizes the tonal range of a selected palette. The follow-up applies the colours of the study to a composition and puts the palette into action.




Earth Tone Primary Triad.

A primary triad of chromatic greys (so called because of their resemblance to pigments found in nature, e.g., ochres and umbers).


Low Key.

What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly dark in value. 


Ceramic Oxides/Body Stains.

Chromatic greys from earth tones producing weak muted colours.

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Monday, 17 March 2025

Spatial Interventions/Problems/Praxis of Method : Novalis/Bachelard/Arte Povera.

Outpost 131223


Body Movement.

Robert J. Yudell.

The interplay between the world of our bodies and the world of our dwelling places is always in flux. We make places that are an expression of our haptic experiences even as those experiences are generated by the places we have already created. Whether we are conscious or innocent of this process, our bodies and our movements are in constant dialogue with our buildings.







Problems of Method.

Novalis/Bachelard.

No vision invites him to do so, it is the very substance he has touched with his hands and lips which summons him. It summons him materially by virtue of what seems to be a magical participation. The dreamer undresses and enters the pool, only at this moment do the images appear. They emerge from matter, they arise as if from a seed out of a primitive sensual reality. A rapture which cannot yet project itself on the feminine substantiality of water. Water becomes woman against his breast.


Gaston Bachelard would like to develop a philosophy that has no point of departure, and a philosophy that is not a point of departure. Bachelard in his books, attempts to systematize formal material and dynamic imagination.


Space contains compressed time.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

The Autobiography of Lost Possibilities.

Gaston Bachelard.


A dispersed philosophy that must constantly operate on its very edge, at the very limit where its systematizing impulse is challenged by the actual creations in other domains of human activity. Bachelard becomes a 'hinge' between totalizing metaphysical systems and polyphilosophy.


Bachelard does not develop a fully fledged philosophy of values, rather his books offer lessons for working, reading, breathing and dreaming well, all of which constitute an art of living poetically. Throughout his work he developed the paradox, that the primitiveness of poetic consciousness is not immediately given, it can only be a conquest. Images reveal nothing to the lazy dreamer.

Colette Gaudin. 


Guiseppe Penone.

Souffle 6. 1978.


A large earthenware jar on which the artist has stamped the imprint of his own body. This process shows a sensorial conception of art, a concentration on the organic and the original, reasserting the permanent nature of myths and an animist conception. A vitality of matter, material and object.

The National Museum of Modern Art.

Georges Pompidou Centre.


Arte Povera as an artistic praxis, highly critical and anti-cultural. An art that explores a 'strange area' that is interested in elemental human situations. It was the art critic Germano Celano who in reference to the research done by the polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, outlined in his book 'Towards a Poor Theatre' proposed the notion of Arte Povera in 1967.


Epicurean Asceticism.


The Phenomenological Approach.


Problems of Method.


Reading as a dimension of consciousness.


For Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, the essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.


Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.


Bachelard's auditive metaphor 'reverberation' for the poetic image brings together through sound, both time and space. In its reverberation, the poetic image will have made a sonority, a situatedness of being.


Science and Poetry.


Concepts and images develop along two divergent lines of spiritual life. The image cannot give matter to the concept, the concept by giving stability to the image would stifle its existence.


Nascent Material/Media.

Drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.


Drawings loosing their haptic senses of mark-feeling and becoming increasingly camouflaged into an image based on representation of an objectified art form/context. 


Life Drawings subdued by visual representation.

Is the initial situation/situatedness/awkwardness of drawing process becoming overwritten.

Drawings feeling the body marking its presence in the space /stage of drawing.



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Jannis Kounellis: Gray is the Color of Our Time

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Saturday, 15 March 2025

Making Processual Paths Of Volatility : Ceramics/Sinopis Red/Palette from Antiquity.

Outpost 171225

Early palette from Antiquity:

White, yellow ochre, sinopis red (earth red), black (bluish).

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art. 2007


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

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