CLAY/WITH FIRE : Thinking Architecture/Exploratory Research/Vocabulary

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Thinking Poetics : Architecture and Ceramics.

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.

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.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies : Theoretical Spaces between Objects.

Childhood a density of life not yet sensing the weight of living.

Expanding the space of the forgetting which is infinitely more creative/active than the space of what you remember.

Events manifested through drawing, navigate spaces and their relations between/amongst/entangled by human bodies and spatial bodies.

Outpost 031224

longing to see a woman's face/the words that maketh murder

PJ Harvey, let England shake. 2010

Helena Eflerova,

Wolvesey Castle. 2007

Site Space-Movement/Earthing The Body.

100 Childhood Voyages of Play : The Boat.

The work doesn't fail, it just looses clarity, it retreats.

On Ceramic Spaces/Silences.

Creating and then investigating a silence in its surroundings. A silence that participates in the perception of things it attends/surrounds and resonances with.

Reclamations:

Missing and Abandoned Contexts.

Visual Fine Art 2004-2008.

Winchester School of Art.

On developing subjectivities through contemporary art practices and research strategies. 

Philosophical theory/The Poetics of Space (Bachelard) documented alongside visual material/objects/images/installations.

Relationscapes: Human Body/Spatial Body.

Workings On Affective Potential.

Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place

The Fitzwilliam Museum.

On The Temporality Of Events.

Zuzana Kovar.

That they happen, that they occur, but they do not exist. They are virtual and always in process.

We cannot say that they exist but rather that they 'subsist' or 'inhere' ( having this minimum of being which is appropriate to that which is not a thing, a non-existing entity). They are not substantives or adjectives, but verbs. They are neither agents or patients, but results of actions and passions. They are impassive entities, impassive results. They are not living presents, but infinitives, the unlimited Aion, the becoming which divides itself infinitely in past and future, and always eludes the present.

Deleuze.

Scaffolds/Tentative Architectures : Drawing Architectural Surrounds

Outpost 291024

Space And Subjectivity.

Collage with glass and documentation from Francesca Woodman.

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

Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.

Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)

Tentative/Processual Architectures. 

Arakawa and Gins.

Lucy Orta.

Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.

One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.

Henri Lefebvre.

Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.

Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.

The In-Between.

There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.

Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.

Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.

Frameworks/Scaffolding.

Affective Matter/Mattering.

Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.

Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Disclaimer.

Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.

Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.

This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).

Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.

Project 3.1

Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.

The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The  Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Species of Spaces.

Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.

Russell Coates.

Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.

Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.

Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.

Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.

The simple issues of attending to the material.

Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.

Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.

Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .

Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

The Process of Abject(ion).

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.

A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.

The Social : Catching The Light/Architectural Apparatuses/Spatial Methodologies

It would probably not be wrong to define the ex­treme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses.

To recapitulate, we have then two great classes: liv­ing beings (or substances) and apparatuses. And, be­ tween these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a sub­ject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses. Naturally, the substances and the subjects, as in ancient metaphysics, seem to over­ lap, but not completely. In this sense, for example, the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification.­

 I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of liv­ing beings.

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Alternative Photography : Photography and Architectural Space.

Photogram, a numinous construction, spaces amongst and within other spaces

Catching The Light.

The Entwined History of Light And Mind. Arthur Zajonc

PROXIMITY OF SPACE 

INTIMACIES IN SOCIAL SPACES 

SCRIPTORIUM

THREE STAGE METHODOLOGY (Kikutake) Mitsuo Taketani 

KA ‘ESSENCE’

KATA ‘SUBSTANCE’ 

KATACHI ‘PHENOMENON’ 

Characteristics of an architect

CHI ‘BLOOD’

TACHI ‘TEMPERAMENT’ 

KATACHI ‘EMBODIMENT’

The Phenomenology of Reading. GLAS, Derrida Literature and Language. 

The Stride of The Mind

Reading Rooms. Figuring Space. Text/Fumiture/Dwelling Reading with Paths

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012 

Relativity/Relationality through Walking and Thinking. Subjectivity. Space - Politics - Affect

Waverley Abbey. Cistercian Monastery

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre- spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg 

Immaterial Architecture : The Glass Observatory

Photograph (132) Cyanotype Alternative Photography

Documents from research archive

Tracing Light: Petworth House, West Sussex 2000 David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

Light And The Genius Loci

For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in 'a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun in the system of perception'.

Mutations Of Light

Petworth Window, 6 July 1999 Light's Windows And Rooms

Passing towards the Invisible.

The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent theme in William Henry Fox Talbot's early speculations.

CATCHING THE LIGHT

The entangled history of light and mind Arthur Zajonc

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900 Sight Unseen

Picturing The Universe Corey Keller

Invisible objects, penciled by nature's own hand.

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the 'world itself.

The Social Photographic Eye Jennifer Tucker

Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.

An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand.

Invisible Worlds Visible Media

Tom Gunning

William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6x22.5 cm.

Techniques Of The Observer

On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century Jonathan Crary

The Camera Obscura and its Subject

Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject­ effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' world.

UNDER THE SUN

By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.

An Epiphany Of Light

David Alan Mellor

Christopher Bucklow, Guests Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Matter is provisional and that includes me. If the physics is correct then we are neither alive or dead as we commonly understand it, but in different states of potentiality.

From The Adamantine Land

Variations on the art of Christopher Bucklow David Alan Mellor

Etienne-Jules Marey

A Passion For The Trace Francois Dagognet

Painting, Photography, Film Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

A Bauhaus Book

L. MOHOLY-NAGY:

DYNAMIC OF THE METROPOLIS SKETCH FOR A FILM

ALSO TYPOPHOTO OSKAR SCHLEMMER

MAN

Interaction of Color Josef Albers

The Elements of Color Johannes Itten

Pedagogical Sketchbook Paul Klee

The New Landscape in art and science Gyorgy Kepes

The Colour of Time Garry Fabian Miller

The Majesty of Darkness Adam Nicolson

The Unmade

The Pregnant

The Half Erotically Unmade

Camera Obscura of Ideology Sarah Kofman

An optical instrument, which used in drawing, allows one to see at the same time the objects being drawn and the paper.

I Am Not This Body 

Barbara Ess

Working Collages

Ann Wilde, Ulrike Meyer-Stump

A German Tradition of Photographic Typology

Collages made from contact prints from Blossfeldt's negatives, showing the isolation of particular motifs. The working collages were an archive, not for the negatives but for motifs.

The viewer is less interested in the subjects of the pictures, than in the effect created by the formal system subsuming them.

His photographic archive of plant forms is not a finished work, but material awaiting processing.

 

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects

Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.

The Fanciful and The Scientific.

The Playful and The Reverent.

The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.

Between Evanescence and Substance.

Between Illusion and Specificity.

Between Slickness and Tactility.

Today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus, In what way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle with ap­paratuses?

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).

Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.

Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of serenity, a poetics of dwelling.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.

Art as Spatial Practice.

Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.

West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Posted 2018

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence : Discursive Forms/Research Readings.

Bricolage/Reading : Further Reductions and Fabrications

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that(their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012

Diffractive Gratings/Apparatuses/Methodologies through which to use in thinking from different disciplines.

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

Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres. Ceramic Building Technologies.

Questioning the discursive nature of Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Placing different interdisciplinary practices in conversation with one another.

Situatedness, Performativity, being/becoming attentive to the iterative production of boundaries. (Barad)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ Peter Smithson, 2001

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is (site) specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction ( Opposition/Kengo Kuma and Herzog and De Meuron and Multiplicity/Calvino and Zumthor) and a concern for that which exists.’(Schregenberger, 2005)

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space. 

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics. Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature. Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel. Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay. Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry. 

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’ A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking”States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl, Pallasmaa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself. This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel. 

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

Clay Water Volume Vessel

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mirceal983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996 

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things. 

A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino l996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10) The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an 

awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:l 1)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modem 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something. The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities. The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects (things).

Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes? This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world 

and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.

Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?

Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit 2002)

The pagan life that St Augustine (bom 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)

Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, akind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail.

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, WH Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into ’’fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces. Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.

Ceramics like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasmaa “ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’. The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.