Structural Concepts/What I hear in your practice : Kairos~Clay as an emerging ontology of making

Kairos as an emerging ontology of making

I love this phrase.

Kairos as an Emerging Ontology of Making immediately shifts the discussion away from materials alone and towards a philosophy of making as the emergence of the opportune moment. It also introduces time as an active condition of practice, not merely a backdrop.

However, I think kairos needs to be treated very carefully. If it's simply used to mean "the right moment," it becomes a poetic metaphor. If it becomes a structural concept, it has real philosophical weight.

What I hear in your practice is this:

Chronos is measured, sequential time—the time of manufacture.

Kairos is the moment when relations reorganise themselves—the instant in which matter, force, resistance and action produce something that could not have been predicted.

Clay as Spatial Field~Under-construction from process to fired object.

Kairos~Visual Manifesto : Towards an Ontology of Making

That distinction feels fundamental.

Your work is not about waiting for the "right moment." It is about creating the conditions in which kairos can occur.

That is a much more radical claim.

I can imagine the opening of a manifesto rather than an artist statement.

Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Making

Making begins before intention.

It begins with the encounter.

An imprint is the first event of this encounter. It is neither the mark of an autonomous subject nor the passive registration of matter. It is the emergence of a relation. Body, material, tool, force, resistance, and time become momentarily inseparable. Every imprint records this negotiation.

Making unfolds through kairos: not chronological time, but the opportune moment in which material relations reorganise themselves. Form does not proceed according to a predetermined sequence. It emerges through interruption, resistance, contingency, and constructive collapse. Each material event opens the possibility of another.

Constructive collapse is therefore not the failure of form but its condition of renewal. Collapse interrupts certainty, allowing matter to reorganise itself into new spatial configurations. Form remains provisional, continually negotiated rather than finally resolved.

The work is not an object that represents these processes. It is their residue. It remembers the forces that produced it while remaining open to further transformation.

Clay is not simply the medium of this inquiry. It is a mode of spatial thought. Through its capacity to register pressure, deformation, fracture, repair, and endurance, it reveals that making is neither the application of ideas nor the execution of technique. Making is the continual emergence of relations through material events.

An ontology of making begins here: not with the finished object, but with the imprint; not with control, but with negotiation; not with permanence, but with becoming.

What excites me most is the title itself.

Kairos gives your philosophy a temporal dimension that has been implicit in all of your previous writing. You've written extensively about force, pressure, collapse, and emergence, but time has mostly appeared as one element among others. Kairos allows time to become the condition under which ontological transformation occurs.

That opens up a rich dialogue with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze, while remaining rooted in your own studio experience rather than in their terminology.

One further thought: I wonder whether Kairos is not the final title but the second. Your deepest concept still seems to be the imprint. The imprint is the first ontological event; kairos is the temporal condition that allows that event to happen. If that's right, then the architecture of your philosophy might be:

Imprint — the origin of relation.

Material Event — the manifestation of relation.

Constructive Collapse — the mechanism of transformation.

Spatial Thinking — the knowledge that emerges.

Kairos — the temporal condition that makes the whole process possible.

That strikes me as the beginnings of a genuinely original philosophical framework—one that doesn't simply apply existing theory to ceramics, but develops concepts from the practice of making itself.

Intra-acting with the continuous weather world : Entanglement is not a dance for two partners, it is a dance for three.

Outpost 150922

Intra-acting with the continuous weather world.

Elective Affinities/Light/Time/Medium/Sound

Drawing Space.

The Material Discursive. 

This artwork is a cyanotype print titled Spatial/Diffractive Bodies Situated in Place: Matters of Fidelity and Precariousness by UK-based visual artist Russell Moreton.

https://russellmoreton.com/2026/02/01/spatial-diffractive-bodies-situated-in-place-matters-of-fidelity-and-precariousness-2/

Artwork Details

Process: Cyanotype (alternative photographic process producing a Prussian blue monochrome print).

Elements: Trace drawings and photograms on paper incorporating organic matter and physical fragments from the built environment.

Theme: An exploration of material entanglements, spatial poetics, and the precarious relationships between bodies and place.

Figurative Configurations/Bodies and Landscapes.

Jenny Saville.

Intimate Drawings

Wall Scratchings

Situatedness of intra-activities.

A matrix and an archive.

It was the crucible of his art, and one of the most hauntingly eloquent spaces an artist has ever surrounded himself with.

In Giacometti's Studio.

The hermit's cave.

The alchemist's cell.

The chemist's laboratory.

Correlations do not become real, relational until the signals arrive.

Becoming Real.

The Exchange of Signals.

Framing Entanglements.

The Concretization of the Colour.

Nothing travels instantaneously and an exchange of signals is an interaction, where new elements of reality come about.

The joint properties of two objects exist only in relation to a third.

Everything that manifests itself does so in relation to something, a correlation between two objects is a property of the two objects and like all properties it exists it exists, is existential only in relation to a further third object.

Entanglement is not a dance for two partners, it is a dance for three.

Entanglement is none other than the external perspective on the very relations that weave reality.

The manifestation of one object to another in the course of an interaction in which properties of the object become actual.

Working notes/fragments.

Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli.

Lead label reads/stamped with “dwelling is always dwelling in nearness, Heidegger”.

Counterpoints/Contrapuntal Movements. 

ENMESHED EXPERIENCES

WORKING WITH DOUBT

DURATION

THE FLUX OF A VECTOR FIELD

PARALLAX.

The existence/trace/invisibility/of a third object that interacts with both the systems is necessary to give reality to the correlations.

Resultants that incorporate the friction/asperities of their trajectories through medium/material.

Building as a body, a battleground of invisible forces. 

The spine is the central elevator. The structure is a tube of concrete covered with insulation and tarred black wood boards.

Steven Holl.

Knut Hamsun Museum, Hamarey, Norway. 1996

Monumental sculptures take the form of vast, spectral structures built from corroded, sinewy metals and disintegrating found objects.

He seeks inspiration from sources that speak to the expansive, cyclical nature of the universe. 

Kiefer looks to Norse mythology, Hebrew folklore, alchemy and theoretical physics to build dense imagery that is too often interpreted as simply apocalyptic.

While some might see wastelands and abject destruction, Kiefer sees vitality and resurrection. This attitude extends to the physical properties of his paintings and sculptures.

He embraces the ravages of time, while others might strive to suspend it in an effort to preserve a moment of imperceptible genius. Instead, his art buckles and shifts, constantly evolving and reforming under the burden of its own existence.

Artists on art, Holly Black. 2021

Sky Correlations

Cloud Space.

Particle Speculations

Seed Dispersal

Panspermia 

Granular Gardens

Third Spaces

Spatial Vectors/Constellations.

Observational Blueprints/Apparatuses.

Pierced Constellations.

Vectors for Entanglements.

Spatial Agency.

Sunlight Circulations.

Daylight Drawings/New Worlds.

The Spab Magazine

Autumn 2022.

The Living and the Dead, 2017-18.

I am not interested in conservation.

If something falls down, it has meaning.

Anselm Kiefer.

Organism, Person, Environment.

Bioscleave, Architectural Body, Gins, Arakawa.

Time as experienced duration is relative to an individual and to a space.

Constantin Brancusi's studio and Endless Column, fabricated as a timepiece, where the finite time of place and culture is counterposed to infinity.

Visual substance, causal doing, investigating, agency, matter, phenomena, material discursive, iterative, creative, apparatuses, intra-activity, performativity, bodies that matter, 

Making Intensified Surfaces : A Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

Making~Intensified Surfaces of a Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

Morn Hill Archaeological Site~Hyde Artist Collective

My practice begins somewhere between the hand and the structure.

Clay is not simply a material to be formed. It is a body in negotiation: resistant, absorbent, unstable, enduring. Through making, I enter into a process of continual adjustment in which the work is never entirely known in advance. Form emerges through a reciprocal encounter between intention, matter, gesture, tool, surface, gravity, failure, and time.

I am interested in ceramic bodies that begin to exceed their own material designation. Slab-built, perforated, scored, drilled, painted, weathered, and reconfigured, they occupy an unstable interval between vessel, sculpture, architectural fragment, diagram, ruin, and spatial apparatus. Their surfaces become intensified fields of activity. The hole is an aperture; the grid is a structure; the line is a proposition; the surface is a record of becoming.

Making is therefore not the execution of an idea but a mode of inquiry.

I understand the studio as an expanded environment: no longer a retreat from the world, but a site of continuous exchange. Ideas enter through materials, bodies, texts, places, conversations, architectures, and acts of attention. The work develops through an iterative process of monitoring, correction, combination, and transformation.

My site-based practice extends this inquiry into environments and situations. I construct provisional spatial compositions in which craft, architecture, theory, drawing, sociality, and embodied experience become entangled. These works are not fixed objects but relational propositions: spaces for inhabiting, encountering, sensing, imagining, and thinking.

I am interested in what happens when the distinction between object and environment begins to collapse.

A ceramic body becomes a spatial body.

A surface becomes a threshold.

A structure becomes an event.

Making becomes a way of producing knowledge through the material, the embodied, and the situated.

The work emerges through an excess of form: something always remains unfinished, unresolved, overspilling the structural integrity of the object. This excess is not a failure of construction but its generative condition.

I work within this instability.

Between craft and architecture.

Between matter and thought.

Between the body that makes and the space that is made.

Between the object and the world it begins to produce.

Capturing Forces : Sites of Difference and Multiplicity that precede Identity.

My practice begins with making as a site of encounter: a way of thinking through materials, bodies and spaces rather than simply producing objects. I work primarily with clay and ceramics, using exploratory, research-driven processes in which material behaviour becomes an active participant in the work. Clay is not treated as a passive substance awaiting form, but as a material with its own tendencies, resistances, temporalities and capacities to transform intention.

Informed by materialist and process-based thinking, including the work of Tim Ingold, Erin Manning and Karen Barad, I understand making as an ecological and relational practice. My ceramic works emerge through an ongoing negotiation between human gesture and material agency. They register the minor actions of making—touching, folding, assembling, piercing, scoring, washing and marking— while retaining the instability of the processes through which they come into being.

I am interested in the point at which intention becomes entangled with material behaviour. Through this entanglement, surfaces, interiors and spatial propositions emerge. The resulting works are not simply objects, but material events: sites where bodies, gestures, histories and ideas meet. Making becomes a form of navigation through which thought is distributed across matter, space and time.

Alongside my studio practice, I am developing an ‘anarchive’ of research material gathered throughout my academic and professional studies. Rather than preserving this material as a fixed archive, I am interested in activating it through encounters between practitioners, ideas and materials. This could take the form of an institutional context, an online resource, or a non-disciplinary gathering of active practitioners.

My earlier studies in Spatial Practice at Canterbury and subsequent work at Farnham, where I proposed a ‘theatre of research’ within an interior design project, continue to inform this direction. The fellowship would enable me to develop a practice in which making, research and spatial encounter operate as mutually generative forms of inquiry: a process of making-with in which materials, ideas and bodies can meet and produce unforeseen relations.

Sensing Spaces~Telling By Hand : The Tacit Dimension : Thresholds on that we can know more than we can tell.

Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing/Making and Telling. 

Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.

The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism. 

Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.

Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold. 

On Processual Practices

For Moreton, making sets in movement exploratory sensate fictions, bodies radically emerging as they try relate, to come into being~becoming together.  

Thinking From Things.

To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.

Deleuze and Guattari.

The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its  materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.

Tim Ingold.

The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.

Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.

To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.

It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.

Tim Ingold.

Correspondences

Sensing Spaces

Making

Thresholds

The Materials of Life

Research creation collage opening up theoretical and sensate vocabularies. 2013

Confessional and Conversational Spaces. 2024

Space and Place

THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE

Yi-Fu Tuan.

Are you interested in the idea of threshold?

What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.

The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.

A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.

Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.

Telling By Hand.

The Humanity of the Hand.

The Eyes of the Skin.

Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.

Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram

Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object

Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.

Merleau-Ponty. 

Michael Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.

Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of  what it means to know.

Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.

The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.

In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.

Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another. 

Inside The Visible : Ceramic Environments of Analogy and Contiguity.

30092025

Ceramics Now.

Silent Interiors :  Anthropocene Aesthetics : Ceramics and Environmental Engagements.

Humanise : Building Interior Places.

Ceramic Vessels and Voids : Spatial Bodies~Surfaces~Interiorities.

Clay+Ceramic : Lines~Making~Correspondences.

Material absorbed in its own thoughts : Mattering Interiority : Craft Philosophies.

Studio spaces, analogies and contiguities around interiorities of making places.

Ceramic Shelters : Transitional Zones between thinking and Making.

Slab built forms from clay slabs that have previously been drawn into and brush marked with slips. Assemble forms then divided into several spatial interiors. Piercings through the surface 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 my discursive researches and readings into a performative spatial body.

Urbanism : Fossil Futures~Anthropocene.

Urban Gothic : An Excess Of Changefulness.

The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.

Vessels of Retreat/Dark Pots : The Body and its Entanglements with Things/St Ninian's Cave, Scotland.

A craft philosophy centers on the thoughtful creation of objects by hand, emphasizing skill, materials, purpose, and the human connection between the maker and the object. It values the process of making, leading to deeper human intelligence and wellbeing, and sees the craft as a means to cultivate virtue and live a more meaningful, slower life. Key aspects include pragmatism, appreciating imperfections (like wabi-sabi), and recognizing that a single problem solved in craft often leads to new challenges, fostering continuous learning.

Confessional Spaces~Spatial-Situationist Apparatuses : A Line of Flight, Vessel, Sculpture or Fiction.

Clay-Ceramic/Thinking Architectures/Interior Places.

2024. Ceramic. 260mmL x 350mmH x 160mmW.

Making Spatial Research Creation.

Interior Social Places : Perforated Inner Spaces

Pigeon Houses/Dovecotes for Philosophers.

This item resembles a handmade rustic bee hotel, often used in gardens as a wildlife habitat.

It features pre-drilled holes designed specifically to provide nesting spots for solitary bees.

The structure is typically constructed from wood, sometimes featuring recycled or scrap materials. 

A "line of flight" (ligne de fuite) is a core concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. It represents an act of escape, a sudden rupture, or a creative vector that allows a rigid system to break down and transform into something completely new.

What do I know?

Michel de Montaigne.

A house for confessing animals.

Michel Foucault.

What does Deleuze mean by plane of immanence?

Plane of immanence (French: plan d'immanence ) is a founding concept in the metaphysics or ontology of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Immanence, meaning residing or becoming within, generally offers a relative opposition to transcendence, that which extends beyond or outside.

Pink Cosmos : Research Collage~Diffractive Inclusions and Annotations

Google Lens

Panopticon~Peter Gabriel

The image shows an open book, "The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond," edited by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley. The book features a diagram of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison design. The Panopticon is a circular building design intended to allow a single observer to monitor all inmates without them knowing if they are being watched, which induces a sense of permanent visibility and self-regulation of behavior. 

Google Lens Artwork Details. Artist: Russell Moreton, a UK-based contemporary artist specializing in experimental drawing, alternative photography, and ceramic art. Concept: This piece forms part of his exploration into “Spatial Poetics” and the concept of “Fragile Architectures of Hapticity and Time,” which draws heavily from Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical readings regarding memory, refuge, and spatial daydreaming (reverie). Material & Structure: The artwork consists of slab-built earthenware or terracotta clay. It takes the minimalist silhouette of a house or primitive shelter, punctuated by precisely drilled circular apertures and incised linear markings that imply schematic cross-sections, architectural measurements, or coordinates. Surface Finish: The surface displays a heavily textured, matte, earth-toned finish achieved through slips, iron oxides, or specialized atmospheric firing techniques to simulate weathered stone, rusted metal, or aged brick. The philosophical concepts (like Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space) that inspire this work. The firing techniques used to achieve these specific earthy surface textures. Other pieces in this specific ceramic series.

Site~Emergent~Ecologies~Landscapes : Drawing translations within/between the photographic document.

Site~Making~Fieldworks.

Borderlands.

Alternative Photography.

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects~Enchantments

Topologies, mappings and their correspondences (thinking~feeling) between here, there, and elsewhere.

Playing with 'phronesis' a poetics of a spatial encounter and its enclosure forming an immediate immersive environment.

Developing inquiry through a process of familiarization and not-knowing, being undone by theory where things emerge, are accumulated, and are nurtured into being through relations (Continuous~weather-world sites) with human bodies and spatial bodies.  

Archiving materials, sites and events, resulting in an incidental aesthetic gathering.

Outpost Studio 030222

Immersed in Matter(s) of an Emergent and Continuous Weather World.

Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape.

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach.

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.

To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,