Anthropological Concerns : The Social Life of Materials

Spatialities exploring dynamic inductive reasoning.

Making~Dissolution : Building Documents/Composite Bodies

Urbanism : Making Disorder

Urban Bodies : Disorder~Dwelling~Dissolution

Performing and Crafting Spaces.

Spatial Material : Making Learning Experiences~Holloways

Vibrant Matter.

 

On Materiality~Ruination : Ceramics Of Scepticism.

Palimpsest Mapping, Site Occupations and Structures.

Scriptorium : Drawing~Listening~Reading : Spatial Document.

Listening Compositions~Bodies : Creative Matter(s)/Materialisms.

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

Visual~Art~Materialisms : Exploring Materiality and Connectivity.

Dissolutions and Structures. 2013

Sun based temporal documentations. 

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

New Assemblages/Materialisms.

Spinoza/Lived Durations.

The Silent Transformations.

Spatial Bodies : Constellations/Spatial Composition.

Spatial Bodies/Visual Art Practices : Material Assemblages/Drawing : Cultivation Fields/Thinking Diffractively

Matter(s) of Inquiry : Abject(ion) Gathering Affective Energy.

Affective Formulation : Processual/Durational Material Flows/Mattering Matter(s).

Transitional Compositions and Events/Anti-Objects. 

‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. 

What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’

Kengo Kuma.

On Anti-Object : An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.

‘A monument is a form that preserves time through the compression of space, a form in which visual perception is the parameter. A monument is a compression of time and space’ (Kuma,2008:92) Anti Object.

‘My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.

‘Like McTiernan or the theorist Paul Virilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)

‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’(Kuma,2008:3)

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?

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

An asperity of thoughts/Vibrant Matter : Braking Down/Diffracting/ The Apparatus of Reading/Research

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Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl

Building/Uncertainties into the explorations of making. Rem Koolhaas.

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REVIEW into INTERIORS MA UCA 2013-15 Research into new forms of translation/transmission

MAKING vibrant gaps/assemblages between the texts/images/objects and everyday things LANDSCAPES OF AFFECTIVE AESTHETIC ATTRACTION

MATERIALS THEMSELVES become the TOOLS of PERCEPTION 

Enchantment from the potential of things.

The Fabric of thoughts

The invisible within the visible (energy,magic,causality)

RELATEDNESS, connected to the Place and Function of Things within a Field.

Texts, form their own contexts/reflexivity, breaking down phenomena into meaning, conclusions and critique, they render phenomena and its psychic information redundant.

We think we know how we should feel sociologically, yet in doing so we deny ourselves the direct affectiveness of people and objects that can provide different perceptual relationships.

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE=ECOLOGY Lygia Clark : A Space open to time. Cornelia H. Butler

The World is a Collage

Collage and montage are quintessential techniques in modem and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Hapticity and Time

Notes on a fragile Architecture

The Perception of the Environment Essay in Livelihood, dwelling and skill Tim Ingold

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception Madeline Schwartzman

STILLNESS IN A MOBILE WORLD Bissell, Fuller

ECOLOGICAL approaches/affordances to aesthetic perception ART and AESTHETIC PATTERNS : into an ecology of mind.

Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information that it contains. Camouflage is addressed, perhaps, less to architecture itself than to the subjective processes by which 

human beings experience architecture. Illustrated by the photographic practice of Francesca Woodman, we see her seemingly absorbed by her environment in way that shows a desire to both identify with, and become part of her surroundings.

A desire/transgression met and mediated through a certain sensitivity and openness to the environment, fostering a sense of connectivity between human beings and their environment.

Neil Leach

EXISTENCE, SPACE and ARCHITECTURE Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Developing the idea that architectural space may be understood as a concretization of environmental schemata or images, which form a necessary part of man's general orientation or 'being in the world.'

SUBSTANCES guide the kinds of practical actions that the organism senses from elements of the environment, creating affordances/utilities for the human body.

SURFACES separate substances from medium, the wall and roof of my house afford comfort by separating me from water and too much air.

AFFORDANCES as aesthetic sensations determined both by the environment and qualities we impose through observation, sensation and perception.

Without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible. The rational organization of society has its own Aesthetic Attraction

Symmetrical Patteming/redundancy : provides for the observing mind a maximum of insight with a minimum of intellectual effort.

Colour Light Time

Quintessentially relational phenomena in which location, background, density will provide for different perceptual relations.

Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

WORKING TEXT: 16/May/2020 The R Value in Academia

Reading/Reflexivity/Research with precision and indeterminacy 

Research Material : Studio/Archive 2004-2020

The Language of Specitivity/Places of Inquiry Extradisciplinary Investigations

Social Utilities/Contemporary Art Practices imported from Political Philosophy

The return of limited and ancillary projects where the human being is the fulcrum and the fire of research in replacement of the medium and the instrument.

A whole range of materials and topics that do not fit, that can create an eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields.

Arte Povera, an aesthetic-philosophical movement, artists that chose to live with direct experience and feel the necessity of leaving intact the value of the existence of things. An 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.

Germano Celant 1940-2020 

Developing discursive reading 

WORKING DOCUMENT/LANDSCAPE LANDSCAPES/Thinking Spaces

Concepts of space-time/Ecologies, embodiments through identity, individuality and environments. Our universe is evolving in time as our views are evolving

RIVERS/Eddies and husbandry

(in/with the phenomena of water, thinking with the fish in mind) 

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being. SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

Architecture/Built Environments Ecology/Political Philosophy

Spatial Practice, Culture, Creativity and Environment

Diffractive erotics of the body in her speculative post studio practice 

Asperities of flesh, dirt and the built environment

Neil Leach, Camouflage, F Woodman

 

The Enchantment of Modem Life.

Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett

Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise

Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate David Childers, Heart In My Soul

Spatial Practice Interior Design

Building a precision/working praxis that is both aesthetic and technical that can give an intimate understanding of the material and its situation.

Subjectivities interwoven through light and media Asperities of fabric and texture : White Collaged Postcards

CREATING AN ANTHROPOLOGY TOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE DEVELOPING MATTER AND DESIRE IN ART BASED ACTIVITIES

WORKING NOTES, 24 October 2018

SETTING UP THE CRITICAL DISTANCE / DISCURSIVE FIELDS OF ANALYSIS MEASURING AFFECT

PERFORMATIVITY ITS EXPERIENTIAL QUALITIES/PSYCHIC IMPACT RESEARCH IN LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN Visiting the Archive : Exploratory Workshop

September 1, 2018. W&BA Harleston

CREATING THE FEEDBACK LOOP

BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN PARTICAPANTS AND ARTISTS RADICAL INTERVENTIONS INTO THE EVERYDAY

Walking and Making with Clay, Brockwood, Speculative Learning Program

' the clay itself seemed to absorb them into a wandering relation with the landscape' A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit.

In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty.

Tracks Across The Landscape

Setting up a critical spatial practice within the walking landscape of the everyday. Edward Thomas, Paths

John Piper, Covehithe, South Bank Show, painting/drawing both on site and in the studio. 

Watts Gallery, analysis and audit of activities from which to develop visitor programs and the experiential circulation of those who visit.

Melancholy and The Landscape, Jacky Bowring.

Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in the Landscape. Investigation into the creative membership and activities of W&BA.

Sculpture Trail, Curatorial Strategies/Market/Audiences

From newsletter to art themed walks, Historic Culture/Landscape and Tourism Plotting points of social interactions, asking Why Here, Why Not There?

What directs events, governs outcomes? Success and failures?

Management and event led, members as audience? MA Arts Management

New Cultural Diversities

10 Days at the Laundry, Winchester 2009.

Group of creatives based in and around Winchester School of Art, use of fallow site in which to respond and to create for 10 days a contemporary arts festival. This original event 'fused' new creative partnerships that went on to produce other groups and exhibitions. The follow-up event 10 Days in the City, was funded, had more prestigious venues, but lacked the cohesion and community of the first site.

Supplementary content, resources, dossier outlining the inquiry of which the work is a part. MOVING THE CULTURE

DISCURSIVE FIELDS FOR NEW TYPOLOGIES/OPERATIONS AND TACTICS CONCRETE POETRIES

LOWER GREEN, NORWICH

' At the surface, the gorgeous materiality of Okon's work is seductive but her intention to breach superficial readings is much more serious. This conjugation of material is also a conjuration, an earnest attempt to attempt to imagine and materialise new possible realities.'

Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology, Andreas Weber.

SITE SPECIFIC EMBODIMENT, working, making, discovering. Post Studio Practices, Daniel Buren. Deep Arts Ecology Investment and Nurturing, 'it always begins with the art, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 

The heavy, awkward investment of actually getting people to 'place' to participate is difficult. New technologies could offer solutions that could in turn promote innovative creative ecologies.

NEW TOPOLOGIES FOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE NETWORKS, MESHES, NODES, CONNECTIONS

Becoming embodied within the making of the work, within an intimate dwelling place. Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe.

Crafted Scenography, 

Exhibition, 

Visual Art, Tacita Dean

Shadowcatchers 

OUTPOST

STUDIO as a discursive site for un-doing and re-making relations/aesthetics between objects/the social/the everyday.

STUDIO ANALYSIS 2018-2020 21 September 2018-19 August 2020

Art School Spaces Outpost Studio Spaces Urban Fallow Institutional Buildings 

Open Plan Office Spaces

Studio 3.16, Central Norwich, nearby parking, Floor area/footprint 5.0mx5.0m, wall spaces 2x2.4mx5.0m, well lit, open plan, large making table 1.2mx2.4m. Electricity, small heater, lighting, running water WC, access 24/7.

Projects/Contexts bought into the studio space

Drawings/Southampton roof rubbing, drawings/art works as sociological shelters/habitats Immaterial Paintings/Cyanotype, layered papers

Raveningham sculpture elements from intervention Cley, sketch books and paintings

Re-presentation of drawings/collages with new research material/contexts

Paintings displayed with large analogue phonographic images and collages Architectural concerns, coloured glass, aesthetic surfaces, paintings with raw materials Installation of research bookcases as diffractive elements/spatial practice within the studio White paintings, used layers of paper texts, meshes and cloth

Ceramic objects on field paintings/grounds

Research material, folders, wrapped ceramics with fabric, yellow ochre on paper

Canvas painting, inclusions, shells/stones, cyanotype/yellow ochre, gesso/white paint, pierced 

STUDIO WORKS

Paper/canvas paintings 1.5mx2.4m Canvas re Raveningham Shelter, 2.4mx2.4m

Spray paint, large floor works left undisturbed during making Future proposals Cley 2021, Artpocket activities, Project Space,

WORKING NOTES

OUTPOST 12/09/2019

A Philosophy of Solitude

Hand Bookbinding

Lead/Waxed Paper

Art puts US on Display

Strange Tools

Art and Human Nature

The Politics of Things

The properties of Light

Fred Sandback/Luis Barragin

On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them Melancholy and the Landscape Process-Relational Philosophy

Jannis Kounellis

Christopher Wilmarth

The Ground of The Image

Sally Mann, The Flesh and The Spirit 

The Eyes Of the Skin

Kengo Kuma, anti object, hut, poetics of shelter in the immediate environment.

Thinkers and Vessel Makers.
Weaving the body into architecture
Kengo Kuma

Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.

‘The phenomenology of space – the matter of how we experience it.’

Raveningham Sculpture Trail : Spatial Garden/Dwelling with the Landscape.

Hungate Exhibition. 2023.

Making felt through intervals/editing from within.

The Scriptorium 

Performative Canvas as Shelter ( prearticulation for an installation, not used) 

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.

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

http://www.gjf.cz/archiv/kengo-kuma-woven/?lang_code=en

‘Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space.’ (Schaik,2008:80)

‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)

‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’

Kengo Kuma.

On Anti-Object : An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.

‘A monument is a form that preserves time through the compression of space, a form in which visual perception is the parameter. A monument is a compression of time and space’ (Kuma,2008:92) Anti Object.

‘My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.

‘Like McTiernan or the theorist Paul Virilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)

‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’(Kuma,2008:3)

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?

‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)

Art and The Humanities in reference to Waverley Abbey
Contemporary Art Practices, Installations and Interiors

This research and its design proposal are centred on the arts and the humanities and their ongoing function in our contemporary society. The emphasis of this inquiry is located by the spatial practices of architecture, fine art and performance. My project is a field event and symposium that would be able to host intellectual dialogues, lectures (TED) workshops, performative events and exhibitions. I am particularly interested the relational production of social spaces and the aesthetics of builtspaces, both historical and ephemeral. The proposed use of Waverley Abbey near Farnham as a possible site and retreat for this venture is valid as it links a possible interdisciplinary territory of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Tim Ingold (Making) Colin Renfrew (Figuring it Out) and others have for many years been researching and mapping this new spatiality.

What remains of Waverley Abbey and its sense of place are critical to the holistic and contemporary underpinning of this experiential event. Founded in 1128 it was the first Cistercian Abbey to be built in England. It is recorded that Cistercian life was initially based on manual labour and self-sufficiency, this was further supplemented by other activities like agriculture and brewing that enabled the abbey to support itself. Later over the centuries education and academia began to dominate the concerns of the abbey. The abbey was suppressed with its dissolution in 1536, although records show its activities were already at this time substantially diminished. The ruins and their site then enter into the imaginary realm through classic literature in the novel Waverley by Scott. Further on a pictorial reference from an engraving shows the ruins now incorporated as a fashionable landscape feature within the newly built Waverley Abbey House.

On a contemporary note Waverley Abbey has featured in a number of films ranging in genres from period costume dramas through to fantasy, together with post apocalyptic visions of dystopia. A recent film shoot required the construction of a sixty-foot tower made from internal scaffolding with a skin that recreated the adjacent ruinous fabric of this historic site.

Encountering the site is currently only manageable by foot; this short walk in the surrounding landscape sets up the sense of place and prepares our own subjectivities to its reception. It is in this expectation, this thinking in the landscape that the pastoral and educational aspects of the site become apparent. Currently access is only available through one directed pathway; a multiplicity of other access points and even other structures (bridges, earthworks and thickets) could begin to open up the spatial palimpsest already located at Waverley. What remains of the architectural fabric with its diminished interiors still grants a hospitality and refuge for both the body and the imagination. This activity opens up the experiential space of encountering ourselves through the enjoyment/entanglements of layered social space.

Waverley Abbey is a public monument in the custodian care of English Heritage. It can only be accessed by walking about a quarter of a mile from the limited parking spaces.