Persistent Bodies ~ Correspondence Kept~in~Play

Persistent Bodies ~ Reading, Clay, Ceramic

Confessional : Vessel, Sculpture or Fiction.

A Troubling Interiority. 300926

 

A Propositional Setting for a Spatial Practice.

 

Confessional : Vessel, Sculpture or Fiction?

 

Other Bodies~Other Propositions

 

Gatherings For Speculative Bodies.

Confessional and Conversational Spaces.

Study Spaces~Research Creation : Seating with Cabins.

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

 

Interior Social Places : Perforated Inner Spaces~Intervals~Interiorities

 

 

Pigeon Houses/Dovecotes for Philosophers.

 

What do I know?

Michel de Montaigne.

 

A house for confessing animals.

Michel Foucault.

 

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.

 

 

Clay-Ceramic/Thinking Architectures/Interior Places.

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

 

The ceramic is therefore not a conclusion to making but a speculative body within its continuation: a sensate chamber in which material, spatial and philosophical relations can gather, weather and begin again.

 

In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.

 

Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own

 

Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.

 

 

Collages.

Spatial and Reading Apparatuses.

Making Spatial Research Creation.

 

Pink Cosmos~Panopticon : Research Collage~Diffractive Inclusions and Annotations.

 

Body, Personal Relations and Spatial Values. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space~Place~Perspective of Experience.

Reading does not remain outside making. Its soundings pass between bodies of thought, images, materials and places, sometimes surfacing as propositions, sometimes withdrawing into the material conditions of a work.

The reading body moves between these correspondences without requiring them to converge. Ingold, Manning and Barad remain distinct within this gathering, their differences continuing to resonate through the movements of spatial practice. Clay encounters these soundings otherwise. Through making and firing, propositions acquire another condition of existence: a materially persistent body whose interiority remains open to further encounter.

What persists is not an idea preserved intact, but the possibility of its becoming otherwise.

Reading~clay~ceramic: persistent bodies already enduring their weather~~world, carrying relations forward into situations not yet known.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It passes between bodies, withdraws, and remains~in~play.

The Reading Body ~ Correspondence Without Convergence

The reading practice brings Ingold, Manning and Barad into correspondence, not to reconcile their thinking, but to allow their differences to remain active within the work. Each becomes a distinct sounding within a wider field of inquiry, offering ways of attending to movement, material relations, touch and the emergence of bodies. Their thinking is neither applied to the ceramic nor secured within an explanatory framework. It enters the movements of making, where it may be taken up, resisted, altered or carried elsewhere.

The reading body acts as an intercessor within this gathering. It moves between texts, images, materials and architectural situations, allowing propositions to pass between them without determining their final destination. Sometimes a correspondence surfaces explicitly, finding expression in a written proposition or a material decision. At other times, its sounding withdraws, becoming less immediately recognisable while remaining active within the ceramic's spatial and material relations.

Reading, in this sense, becomes a practice of ambiguous inhabitation. The reading body dwells within the relations between ideas and things, neither standing outside them as an observer nor dissolving into their differences. It keeps these relations available~in~play, allowing them to acquire other conditions of existence through making.

The ceramic body becomes one such condition. What has been encountered through reading may persist there, though not necessarily as a recognisable idea or an identifiable influence. It may surface as an aperture, a chamber, a resistance of material, an uncertain interior or a relation between bodies. The correspondence has changed its condition without exhausting its possibilities.

The reading body carries the soundings forward, allowing them to surface, withdraw and enter other bodies. Its work is not to preserve an idea intact, but to sustain the possibility of its further becoming.

The ceramic becomes materially persistent, while the propositions that have passed through its making remain available~~withdrawn for futurity.

Reading Interiority : Drying Rooms~Spaces and Intervals in Clay

Interiority / Atmosphere

This foregrounds the drying room as a spatial and atmospheric condition, rather than treating the post primarily as a theoretical text.

The drying room becomes a spatial condition of reading: clay is still changing, neither fully provisional nor materially settled. The reading body encounters this condition through touch, while Barad's writing opens that touch towards responsibility, otherness and a futurity that cannot yet be fully inhabited.

Clay as a troubling interiority of reading and as an material interval that becomes available for a developing spatial inquiry.

Clay allows us to reach out, as it touches us, touchings~bodies reaching out into the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never touch. Their touching is to respond~In~correspondence.

For Karen Barad.

Living compassionately requires recognizing and facing (touch~ing) our responsibility to the infinite of the other (that we are) welcoming the stranger whose very existence is the possibility of touching and being touched.

The stranger who gifts us with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come (a futurity perhaps of the withdrawn ceramic that was touching compassionately the bodies of stranger~in~clay.

 

Reading Interiority ~ Drying Rooms, Spaces and Intervals in Clay

A drying room is neither simply an interior nor a space of waiting. Clay occupies a changing condition, gathering the traces of its making while moving towards another material state. Its persistence is not yet secured; its possibilities have not disappeared.

Reading enters this interval as another form of touching. Words, materials and bodies encounter one another without becoming the same. Through Barad, touching becomes a question of correspondence and responsibility: how bodies reach towards an otherness they cannot fully know, and how this encounter changes what it means to respond.

The clay body is already situated within a weather~~world, exposed to forces through which its condition continues to alter. Reading does not stand apart from these movements. It becomes another body within them, carrying soundings that may surface through making or withdraw into the material relations of the ceramic.

Perhaps the drying room is a space of such ambiguous inhabitation: where the provisional persists, where the withdrawn remains available, and where the stranger is not simply encountered but helps to make another encounter possible.

Reading~clay~ceramic. Touching~being touched. Persistent bodies, still~in~~play.

What might pass between bodies without becoming their possession?

interiority,

spatial practice,

reading body,

clay~ceramic,

correspondence,

touch,

material thinking,

Karen Barad,

threshold,

speculative learning,