An Ecology of Asperities : Clay~Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies in Critical Conversations (2026).

 The surface is where the body records its relations.

 

Maternal Body : Clay Impression and Fragmented Form. 2010

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand.

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.

Indexical human body trace onto fired clay, white gesso, wax, calico, cotton, rusted wire.

The ceramic body does not merely occupy space. It develops organs through which space can be sensed, gathered and made otherwise.

The hole becomes a threshold through which the practice itself changes scale.

The minor is not insignificant. Its force is cumulative.

The future is not necessarily beyond the material encounter; it may already be gathering within it.

Rather than positioning clay within an ecology from the outside, Moreton approaches clay as an ecology through which the maker becomes permeable.

Ecology of Asperities.

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

The paper proposes an ecology of asperities: a condition in which minor material disturbances—incisions, traces, tensions, fractures, holes, borings and surfaces—become spatial events through which bodies encounter one another. These gestures are considered not as isolated formal decisions but as affective events within a wider correspondence of material, body, atmosphere, time and space.

Particular attention is given to the hole as a developing distinction within the practice. In earlier work, a singular, human-scaled and indexical hole emerged through an encounter with P. D. James’s The Children of Men, where the fertile centre of the human body was reimagined as absence. The hole became an excavation within the ceramic body: an absent centre that nevertheless opened a threshold towards possible futures. In later works, this singular opening becomes smaller, multiplied and dispersed through the ceramic body. Borings and perforations produce a distributed porosity through which air, light, atmosphere and other material relations may gather.

The movement from the singular hole to multiple minor openings suggests a shift from absence as existential condition towards permeability as ecological practice. The minor gesture becomes cumulative; the threshold becomes a field.

Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies. 2026

A Reading Apparatus ~ Bodies, Correspondence and the Aesthetic Atmospheres of Making

An opening proposition

The surface is where the body records its relations.

An ecology of asperities begins with the recognition that a body is never simply an enclosed or self-contained entity. It is continually being made and remade through encounters with other bodies, materials, forces, environments and durations. Its boundaries are neither entirely fixed nor entirely dissolved. They are negotiated through contact, pressure, resistance, tension, adhesion, incision, fracture, perforation and withdrawal.

The ceramic body becomes a particularly generative site for this inquiry. Its surfaces register encounters; its apertures produce passages; its cavities gather interiorities; its material resistances expose the limits of what can be imposed upon it. What appears to be an object gradually becomes a spatial participant: a body through which other bodies, movements and atmospheres can be sensed.

The movement from the singular human-scaled impression of the maternal body towards smaller, dispersed perforations is important here. The hole no longer operates only as an absent centre. It becomes a distributed condition of permeability. A minor material gesture begins to produce a wider field of spatial and affective relations.

The Critical Friend conversation with Lydia Catterall opens this ecology further. It brings the work into correspondence with other bodies and experiences: bone, vulnerability, kinship, care, walking, drawing, installation, institutional space and the weather-world. These encounters do not make the bodies equivalent. Their differences, resistances and partial connections are precisely what allow new environments to emerge.

The following readings are offered as propositions rather than definitive interpretations. They are intended to keep the artwork moving.

The work as a gathering of bodies.

Ceramic ~ Human ~ Architectural ~ Photographic ~ Textual ~ Institutional ~ Environmental

The ceramic body does not stand apart from the human body that made it, the architectural spaces it enters, the photographs through which it becomes visible, or the texts through which it is encountered and interpreted.

These are not simply different representations of one thing. They are distinct bodies with different capacities, durations, material conditions and forms of agency.

The maternal body impression, for example, carries a human trace into clay. Yet the fired ceramic body is not simply a substitute for the human body. It has its own material existence, its own vulnerability, weight, resistance and temporality. Its relationship to the human body is one of correspondence rather than equivalence.

The photographic body introduces another condition. It holds an image of the work within a particular representational present, while the ceramic continues to exist beyond the photograph, gathering new relations through time, placement and encounter.

The textual body does something different again. It allows the work to enter other conceptual and imaginative environments without exhausting what the material can do.

Proposition: An ecology of asperities is an ecology of non-equivalent bodies. Their differences are not obstacles to relation; they are the conditions through which correspondence becomes generative.

The object as an active participant.

Object ~ Body ~ Continuation ~ Material Agency

What happens when the ceramic object is no longer understood as the final outcome of making?

The object becomes a continuing participant in the practice. It carries the traces of its production, but it is not confined to those traces. It continues to gather, alter and produce relations through its placement, handling, exposure, movement and encounters with other bodies.

This connects with the conversation's proposition that the objects are still doing something after the artist has finished making them. They are not simply remnants of an activity that has passed. Their material conditions continue to act within the present.

The ceramic body is therefore neither passive nor autonomous in an absolute sense. Its activity emerges through particular relations: the surface against the hand, the aperture against the light, the object's weight against its support, the interior against the surrounding atmosphere.

The object may be dormant in one situation and activated in another. Its potential is not guaranteed by its presence alone.

Proposition: The artwork is not simply what making leaves behind. It is a material participant in the continuing composition of the practice.

The studio as a distributed interior.

Interiority ~ Reading ~ Walking ~ Thinking ~ Making

The studio is often understood as a bounded place in which the artist works upon materials. But the practice suggests a more dispersed interiority.

Making extends through reading, walking, thinking, remembering, photographing, writing, handling, conversation and the movement between different environments. These activities are not supplementary to the work. They are part of its material and conceptual composition.

The studio therefore becomes an interior that travels. It is carried through the artist's attention, bodily habits, memories, encounters and attachments. It also gathers other interiors: the ceramic cavity, the architectural chamber, the photographic image, the library, the gallery and the spaces opened by conversation.

The Critical Friend conversation makes this distributed interior visible. Lydia Catterall questions these associations as they enter the practice as new spatial propositions. They change the conditions through which the work can be understood and encountered.

Proposition: The studio is not a container for making. It is a permeable and distributed interior through which making continues to take place.

Care as a spatial proposition.

Care ~ Handling ~ Exposure ~ Hospitality ~ Weather-world

The conversation raises an important question: what happens to an artwork after it leaves the conditions in which it was made?

Transport, storage, handling, installation and exhibition are often treated as practical matters surrounding the artwork. Yet these conditions have consequences for its continuing existence.

Lydia's analogy between the care of artworks and the care of living bodies opens a different way of thinking about presentation. How might a work be handled? What kinds of environments allow it to remain active? What forms of exposure, proximity or movement might alter its relations?

This does not mean that the ceramic object should be protected from all disturbance. Its vulnerability is not necessarily a condition to eliminate. Rather, care becomes a question of attending to the particular material and relational conditions through which a body persists.

The studio, gallery, home, garden, landscape and public environment each compose different possibilities. None is neutral.

Care becomes a spatial practice because it concerns the conditions through which bodies encounter and continue with one another.

Proposition: Care is not something added after making. It is a continuation of making through the composition of environments, relations and conditions of encounter.

Installation as an embodied condition.

Installation ~ Movement ~ Attention ~ Attachment ~ Correspondence

The proposition "I am the installation" allows installation to move beyond the arrangement of objects within an architectural enclosure.

It suggests that installation might be understood as a condition of embodied correspondence: the artist's movements, attentions, attachments, reading, thinking and material engagements are themselves part of the spatial composition.

The work does not begin when objects are placed in a room. Its spatial relations have already been developing through the movements and encounters that constitute the practice.

The ceramic bodies carry something of these movements, but they are not simply extensions of the artist. They have become distinct bodies, capable of entering relations beyond the artist's immediate presence.

Installation consequently becomes a distributed event involving the artist, the work, the architecture, the viewer and the conditions of their encounter.

Proposition: Installation is not only what is arranged in space. It is the embodied and relational condition through which space becomes active.

Aesthetics as atmosphere and relation.

Silence ~ Weight ~ Porosity ~ Vulnerability ~ Light ~ Wonder ~ Duration

The aesthetically charged is not an applied quality or a judgement of beauty. It emerges through the intensities and differences of a gathering.

A ceramic surface may hold silence, but that silence is not emptiness. It is composed through weight, texture, light, resistance, withdrawal and proximity. A perforation may appear as a small formal event, yet its consequences extend through the atmosphere surrounding the object.

The conversation's movement towards bone, vulnerability, kinship and care introduces other sensate registers. The work becomes available to ways of sensing that are not confined to visual recognition.

Atmosphere is therefore not something a space contains. It emerges through the changing relations of bodies and their capacities to affect and be affected.

This allows aesthetics to become a form of attention: a way of noticing how different material and spatial conditions compose experience before that experience is fully understood or named.

Proposition: Aesthetic atmosphere is an emergent composition of relations, rather than a property possessed by an individual object or imposed upon it.

Asperity as a relational event.

Resistance ~ Tension ~ Friction ~ Porosity ~ Intra~~Touching

Asperity is not simply roughness, irregularity or the physical character of a surface. It is the active condition through which bodies encounter one another.

Wrapping, tensioning and bandaging introduce a particularly productive vocabulary. They suggest contact without fusion, attachment without complete identification, and the negotiation of forces between bodies.

A bandage holds and constrains, but it also supports. Tension can produce resistance while making another form of relation possible. Wrapping creates an interior and an exterior, but also a boundary that is neither entirely closed nor entirely open.

These actions can be read as spatial propositions. They produce intervals, pressures, thresholds and temporary arrangements through which bodies become differently situated.

Here, intra~~touching becomes a useful working term: not a simple meeting between already complete bodies, but a process through which bodies and their capacities are altered through contact.

Proposition: Asperity is an active relational event. It is the material and affective doing of difference, resistance and correspondence.

The minor gesture and the production of other spaces.

Hole ~ Aperture ~ Threshold ~ Field ~ Ecological Permeability

The movement from the singular hole to distributed perforations offers one of the most important trajectories within this work.

Initially, the hole appears as an excavation of an absent centre, a material distinction through which the human body is encountered otherwise. As it becomes smaller, multiplied and dispersed, it begins to operate differently.

The minor opening is no longer an isolated feature. Its force becomes cumulative. Together, the apertures establish a field of permeability through which air, light, atmosphere and other relations may gather.

This is not simply a formal development from one visual arrangement to another. It suggests a change in how spatiality is produced: from a singular threshold towards a distributed ecology of passages.

The minor gesture becomes consequential because it alters the relations between the ceramic body and its surroundings.

Proposition: Small material events can produce extensive spatial consequences. The minor is not insignificant; its force is cumulative.

Correspondence without convergence.

Difference ~ Kinship ~ Ceramic Democracy ~ Shared Worlds

The conversation opens a further question about how different bodies might inhabit a shared environment without becoming the same.

The ceramic body, human body, architectural body and environmental body each have different capacities and vulnerabilities. Their relations cannot be reduced to a common identity or experience.

Kinship, in this context, does not require sameness. It may be understood as an ongoing practice of attention, attachment and responsibility across difference.

This offers a way of thinking about ceramic democracy: a speculative gathering in which bodies are able to enter relations without surrendering their particular conditions of existence.

The artwork becomes a possible landing site for such encounters. It does not prescribe what must happen there, but it makes certain relations perceptible and allows others to emerge.

Proposition: A shared spatial world need not be a unified world. It can be composed through difference, partial connection and continuing correspondence.

An ecology that remains open.

Research ~ Conversation ~ Anarchive ~ Speculative Learning

The artwork is not a closed statement about an earlier moment in the practice. It is a body that can be re-entered through new conversations, readings, encounters and forms of attention.

The Critical Friend conversation does not simply add another interpretation to an existing object. It changes the research environment around the work. The object is encountered again through new relations with bone, kinship, care, installation, institutional space and environmental movement.

The Axisweb archive can therefore be understood as an anarchive: not merely a record of completed work, but a gathering of material and conceptual traces that can be reactivated and recomposed.

Each return produces a different landing site. Earlier work remains present, but its relations are not fixed.

Proposition: The archive is not the end of the work's history. It is an active environment for its further becoming.

Transversal reading ~ Six propositions moving together.

The six central concerns can now be read as mutually composing conditions rather than separate themes:

Gathering: different bodies enter a shared but non-equivalent field.

Participation: the object continues to act and produce relations beyond its making.

Distributed interiority: the studio extends through the movements of thought, material and encounter.

Care: the conditions of a body's continuation become part of its spatial existence.

Embodiment: installation is produced through the movements and attentions of bodies.

Atmosphere: aesthetic experience emerges through their changing relations.

Together, these propositions describe an ecology in which spatiality is not simply occupied but continually composed.

Closing proposition ~ Towards a spatial practice of asperities.

For Moreton an ecology of asperities is not an ecology of harmonious connections. It includes resistance, friction, vulnerability, interruption, withdrawal and uncertainty. Its correspondences are partial, its interiors permeable, and its atmospheres continually changing.

The ceramic body becomes one participant within this wider field: a body that carries the history of its making while remaining available to other encounters. Its surfaces, apertures and cavities are not merely formal characteristics. They are material conditions through which other bodies and environments may become perceptible.

Moreton's practice consequently moves towards a spatial understanding of making in which no body is entirely self-contained, no encounter is without consequence, and no artwork is necessarily finished when it leaves the studio.

The work is a gathering of bodies. The gathering composes an atmosphere. The atmosphere opens another spatial possibility. And that possibility remains available to further correspondence.