Drawing/Building Scripts : Collage/Photography

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 

Echo Chamber: Listening to La Jetée

Material Matters : When your mind starts moving~mattering spaces between actuality

Making : The Processual Character of Attentionality.

Clay.

Dwelling.

Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought.

Tim Ingold.

Ingold insists on a flat, continuous and processual ontology of dwelling and becoming.

A Practice of Transformational Modalities.

Making/Curriculum/Dwelling/Landscape/Place.

The Processual Character of Form.

Organic life, as I envisage it, is active rather than reactive, the creative unfolding of an entire field of relations within which beings emerge and take on the forms they do, each in relation to the others. Life is the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.

For Ingold, there is no environment without the folding and enmeshment that is the process of life. Organisms are not folded in on themselves and surrounded by an 'environment'. Instead organisms are points of growth of environment, and whose relations are rhizoidal; and the environment is better understood as a domain of entanglement.

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

 

Makings~Silent transformations~translations from the continuous weather-world.

Translations~Places of Inquiry.

russellmoreton.com

Interactions and correspondences wayfaring through the weather-world of clay and texts.

Continuous Readings~Translations : Weathering and the Passage of Air.

14 Weather-world.

'Can man live elsewhere than in air?' asked the philosopher Luce Irigaray.

The Life of Lines

The Life Of Lines.

Tim Ingold.

Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is interested in developing collaborative and speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.

A site-based practice that further develops into speculative learning, creative propositions for knowledge production through Spatial Practices.

Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material further develops his inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased.

His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.

Assemble forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.

For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His finished fired constructions could become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s).

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham. Spatial Practices MA, Canterbury School of Architecture. Visual Art BA Hons, Winchester School of Art. Ceramics HSND, Epsom School of Art and Design.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton

Wayfaring Places : Studio Compositions~Immersive Cells of Inquiry.

Undisciplined small spaces, places of refuge and solitude. A physical space, where an atmosphere quietly echoes spatial metaphors of enclosure, interiority and the sited and situated condition of making.

Studio Environments : Reconstructions and Fictions. Studio spaces for speculative making.

Wayfaring Landscapes~Affective Aesthetics of Difference.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton

 

 

With The Drawing Board : On the transitiveness of going along with things.

The Drawing Board, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

The Granary Studio, Brockwood Park, Bramdean. 2013

The Minor Gesture : The Diagram of the Painting/Fielding the Feeling of Force taking Form

Outpost 240723

russellmoreton.com

The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.

Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.

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

The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.

Relationscapes, Erin Manning.

Propositions of Force/Appetition.

The Work's Diagram.

The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.

Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.

Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.

Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.

Creating work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s). 

The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.  

We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.

Erin Manning.

Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment. 

Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging. 

Organism-Person-Environment

A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.

Fielding how we think-feel.

Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.

A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.

Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.

A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.

Erin Manning. 

The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.

For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.

We Land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Actuality is the decision amid potentiality. 

A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.

Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.

For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.

A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.

Apparatuses/Diagrams

Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.

In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.

The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.

The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.

Sculpting in Time.

Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.

For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.

Erin Manning.

Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall

Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.

Cultivation Field Research Collage

Geological era 1800.

The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'

Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.

Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.

Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared. 

Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy

Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman

Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.

From Models to Drawings.

Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments 

Filtered Light.

The Body and Spatial Boundaries~A Spatial Inquiry into Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Outpost 280122

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries.

russellmoreton.com

Tim Ingold.

From science to art and back again: The pendulum of an anthropologist.

https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/2237/2055

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing, entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.

Making Matter(s)~Truth : The unison of experience and imagination in a world to which we are alive and that is alive to us. Tim Ingold

 Architectonic Space: Fifteen Lessons on the Disposition of the Human Habitat.

The purpose, dynamic and potential of Anthropology.

russellmoreton.com

The poetics of order:

Dom Hans van der Laan’s architectonic space

Caroline Voet

Already in his first writings in the 1930s, Dom van der Laan aims to define architectural principles that provide an intellectual expression of the act of dwelling (‘wonen’). To dwell is to enter into a relationship with one’s surroundings, meaning to understand them. For van der Laan, this is the primordial function of architecture: it makes space readable. From his Benedictine background, he draws concepts that enable him to understand this complex process of cognition. He studies the old church fathers such as St Thomas Aquinas, especially his comments on Plato and Aristotle. The Benedictine way of life builds upon the intertwined relation between mystery and matter, between intellect and senses, believing that this relation can be expressed through a Platonic order.5 Professor van Hooff, in describing the work of Dom van der Laan, defines cognition as a dual process of synthesis and analysis.6 On the one hand, there is the act of living, a synthesis of the concrete and singular reality. On the other hand, there is the process of analysis by the abstracting intellect. For us to know the concrete and singular reality, an intense interrelation between the two processes is needed.

http://www.vanderlaanstichting.nl/pics/pdf/130105-poetics_of_order-Caroline_Voet.pdf

Oceanic Metaphors~An Interpenetrated Meshwork

On Human Correspondence.

For Marcel Mauss, real-life human beings inhabit a fluid reality in which nothing is ever the same from one moment to the next and in which nothing ever repeats. In this oceanic world every being has to find a place for itself by sending out tendrils which can bind it to others.

Thus hanging on to one another beings strive to resist the current that would otherwise sweep them asunder. Things do not aggregate and they do not fuse. They do however interpenetrate their many tendrils and tentacles interweave to form a boundless and ever extending meshwork.

 

On The Gift~Octopuses and Anemones.

The Life of Lines.

Tim Ingold

russellmoreton.com

The Ceramics Reader : Brickyard Ceramics~Complexity grounded in basic things/movements

A sanctuary for promise.

Clay+Ceramic : Complexity grounded in basic things.

A source of energy, intense and exuberant in the early days, more subtle in later decades, but always leaving its mark on so many artists' work.

The Archie Bray Foundation : A Legacy Reframed.

Patricia Failing.

But the Bray energy field left its mark on ceramics history did not emanate from the early production pottery alone. The Foundation provided unique opportunities in the early 1950s, and not all were associated with celebrity visitors. LaMar Harrington remarked on one of the most significant contributions the Bray made to Peter Voulkos's artistic development:

It was the sheer abundance of material. He could be as prolific as he could be and throw the biggest pots he could throw in part because he had carloads of clay-enough clay to absorb his tremendous energy. I don't think he would have become the artist he did without that opportunity. I also think the look of the brickyard-the slag heaps and misfired bricks-had some effect on the style of his later work. As for Rudy Autio, the slab constructions he made for architectural commissions at the Bray gave him some of the insights that came together in those large figurative pieces of the 1960s.

The Ceramics Reader.

Fired Clay : Markings and Volumes.

russellmoreton.com

 

Encountering Material Matter : Making/simple undertakings of attending to the material.

Outpost 200924

On the simple undertaking of attending to the material.

russellmoreton.com

Oceanic Metaphors~An Interpenetrated Meshwork.

For Mauss, real-life human beings inhabit a fluid reality in which nothing is ever the same from one moment to the next and in which nothing ever repeats. In this oceanic world every being has to find a place for itself by sending out tendrils which can bind it to others.

Thus hanging on to one another beings strive to resist the current that would otherwise sweep them asunder. Things do not aggregate and they do not fuse. They do however interpenetrate their many tendrils and tentacles interweave to form a boundless and ever extending meshwork.

 On The Gift~Octopuses and Anemones.

The Life of Lines.

Tim Ingold

Material Matters.

Architecture and Material Practice.

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Sensory Corporeality

Making Bodies~Experiential Clay : An emotional rootedness in our primal self, Beuys.

Intrinsic to how we gain consciousness of our world.

Abject(ion) Explorations, something instinctive, innately human, visceral, an organ exploring a strange situation.

Joseph Beuys.

Clay as process : Moving~Eruptive~Living~Experiential

Beuys understood that creativity is central to human existence. Making-works-with-matter that makes the mind~body~move through change and transformation as well as emotional rootedness in a primal self.

Tactile experience adheres to the surface of our body, we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quiet becomes an object, correspondingly as the subject of touch. I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere. I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go in the world and tactile experience occurs 'ahead of me' and is not centred in me.

Maurice Merleau Ponty.

Phenomenology of Perception. 1945

The practice of architecture and the discourses surrounding it are, as so many ways of understanding and constructing the world, structured around a distinction between form and matter where the formal (and conceptual) is valued over the material.

On the encounter of a woodworker making a table.

Mattering forms that can have a future potential to affect and be affected, and rise out of its individual past formed by cultural actions for a preconceived particular purpose. The material, at any particular point in time, is brought into existence through a developing chain of events, both 'natural' and cultural, and has the potential for a myriad of future interactions and transformations. Massumi suggests that what is important in this encounter is not the distinction between form and matter for:

There is substance on both sides: wood; woodworking body and tools. And there is form on both sides: both raw material and object produced have determinate forms, as do the body and tools. The encounter is between two substance/form complexes, one of which overpowers the other.

Brian Massumi.

Massumi provides us with an (Deleuzian materialist) alternative to the hylomorphic account of the architectural material, which suggests that material is itself active and does not distinguish between the physical forces (the plane smoothing it) and immaterial forces (the building standard that determined its fire treatment in a certain way) that produce it.

For Massumi, distinctions between real and ideal, between digital and manual, between formal and material – all disintegrate.

The World is Full of Holes

There is always some kind of truthy interpretation space in which your thoughts and ideas and actions are taking place, and the thing to remember about this space is that (1) it's not optional and (2) it's not totally sealed off, it's perforated. What does that mean? First of all, it means that not only the mental but also the physical (and psychic and social) ways we 'interpret' things are in that space.

Being Ecological, Timothy Morton. 

Encountering/Thinking with and in Clay.

Developing an indifference to be able appreciate/coexisting with ambiguity.

After construction, of joining and relating matter into a spatial form of inquiry.

Marking/Inhabitation of the ceramic structure through earthen slips and natural occurring oxides.

Drawing in the Hungate.

Wellbeing.

Caryatid 

Blind Drawings in the Rotunda/WSA. 

Drawing/Feeling through touch and sound.

Michael Grimshaw. 2003.

Creating a meaningful relation to phenomena/mattering.

Three types of metronome speeds,

Unknown plastic figure/animal,

Hand clapping,

Another persons heartbeat,

Blind paper tags,

Cotton Wool,

Toy bear,

Caryatids : Drawings in wax, charcoal and Indian Ink.