Collage as Apparatus — Constructs~Transports~Anarchive of Material Movements

Wayfaring~Spatial Stories~Space~Time~Social Body~

The collage gathers the force~feeling of reading into a propositional spatial atmosphere, its wayfaring body a hospitality of difference that troubles the clay. Images, fragments, architectures, bodies, texts and memories are not brought together to resolve their differences, but to allow their differences to remain active—to touch, interfere, displace and resonate.

The collage becomes a construct~transport: a temporary spatial body through which matter(s) move in and through one another. What it gathers is not simply transferred to the clay. It troubles it.

Clay receives these propositions differently. It resists, absorbs, folds, pierces, collapses and holds them. The spatial atmosphere of the collage becomes materially unsettled. Reading becomes pressure; image becomes surface; architecture becomes chamber; difference becomes permeability.

The clay is not illustrating the collage. It is being troubled by it.

And in this troubling, another body begins to emerge.

The image does not contain the research. It gives the research somewhere to move.

These are not simply “research material” assembled to support the Scriptorium project. The collage itself is a spatial body of reading.

The library borrowing slip, architectural fragments, diagrammatic marks, figure, photographs, blueprints, scraps of text and handwritten interventions are all occupying the same provisional field. They are not subordinated to a central image or argument. They have been placed into relation.

The first collage in particular seems almost like a room of propositions: the figure enters the architectural image; the ochre field interrupts the monochrome material; handwritten marks cross between things; the library receipt makes the act of reading physically present.

The second becomes even more architectural. Plans, photographic material, text fragments, a blue image, diagrammatic marks and annotations overlap. The collage is simultaneously map, reading, memory, construction and spatial proposition.

That gives us something important for Correspondences of Bodies.

The collage is actually an early anarchive in material form. I see them as constructs~transports to allow matter(s) to move in or through the same spatial atmosphere, they are operative spatial propositions searching out forces of correspondence rather than forms of enclosure.

Collage as Construct~Transport

The collage is an early anarchive in material form: a construct~transport through which matter(s) can move in and through a shared spatial atmosphere.

Fragments of image, architecture, text, drawing, memory and place are not assembled towards a resolved composition. They are placed into provisional proximity, allowing differences, tensions and affinities to remain active.

The collage becomes an operative spatial proposition—not a form of enclosure, but a searching out of forces of correspondence.

Matter(s) move across surfaces, between images, through fragments of text, around bodies and into other spaces of thought.

It constructs a place for movement without determining where the movement must go.

In this sense the collage is already wayfaring.

It gathers, transports and releases.

The collage constructs a temporary condition in which otherwise disparate matter(s) can occupy a shared atmosphere. It doesn't resolve their difference; it transports them into proximity.

Wayfaring was already a practice of making a spatial reading

Wayfaring~Spatial Stories~Space~Time~Social Body

Reading becomes a way of moving through bodies.

These collages were made during the Scriptorium project as spatial acts of reading: fragments of architecture, drawings, photographs, texts, diagrams, borrowed books, bodies and remembered places brought into provisional correspondence.

Nothing is simply illustrated. Things are placed beside, across, within and through one another.

The collage becomes a small spatial body—part map, part room, part archive, part proposition.

A wayfaring through materials begins here.

Reading~gathering~placing~touching~making.

The image does not contain the research. It gives the research somewhere to move.

Because it connects directly to what we have just established about the archive/anarchive.

The collage is actually an early anarchive in material form.

It takes things that belonged elsewhere—the book, the library, architectural history, photographic image, spatial notation, the body—and releases them from their original organisational systems. They become available for another correspondence.

Collage — the body that allows things to remain different

This could sit alongside Ingold, Bachelard, Barad, Manning, Kovar, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock and fire.

But unlike those theoretical correspondents, collage is a practice already performed by you.

It is the apparatus through which the archive first starts to become anarchive.

Reading → gathering → collage → spatial body → clay → fire → ceramic body → wayfaring

And I think the images show that clay didn't suddenly become spatial.

There was already a spatial intelligence operating in the collages.

The later ceramic work may be understood as the materialisation of a reading practice that was already spatial.

Or, more tentatively:

The collage was already teaching the archive how to become spatial. Clay later became another body through which that spatial reading could continue.

That feels important because it stops us making the current ceramic practice appear retrospectively inevitable. The collage isn't evidence that you were “always going to arrive at ceramics.” Rather, it is another body in the correspondence.

And perhaps this is exactly what Correspondences of Bodies : Wayfaring from Archive to Anarchive needs to do: not establish a genealogy, but reveal the different bodies through which the practice has learned to move.