The Black Workbooks : Forces of juxtaposed areas.

Harleston 290623

Research Creation : Revisiting the image archive as an anachive for movements in material matters.

Perception, folds in an infinite play of foregrounding and backgrounding.

Eternal objects are nodes of relation for this elastic process of pulling in and out of experience's continuum. Perception moves-with these openings towards changes in nature occasioned by minuscule folds that are endlessly unfurling and bending on the edges of juxtaposed areas.

Erin Manning, Deleuze, Relationscapes.

Black Artist's Books

Visual Art, WSA 2007 

Like a mist or fog that makes their surface sparkle at speeds that no one of our thresholds of consciousness could sustain.

Deleuze, 1993.

Brian Clarke : Properties of Matter and Imagination (Working Text)

Brian Clarke

The Art of Light/Paul Greenhalgh,2018.

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Architecture and Material Practice, Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Water and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard.

Properties of Matter and Imagination

FUSION OF PHYSICAL/METAPHYSICAL

Working Title : An Inquiry with a Material Practice

The poetics of glass as a super-cooled liquid.

Molten Fluidity.

An organic flux frozen for an instant.

Chaos and order, flow and turbulence, pooling and shifting translucence.

Chemistry becomes alchemy, the banality of the raw materials - sand, metal and minerals – turn into a magical universe of the imagination. Perhaps this is the key to Brian Clarke's stained glass; it embodies the fusion of two things that normally don't mingle; the physical and metaphysical.

Botanical

Cosmological

Biographical

The screens are an intense site of innovation and artistic consolidation. Some of the screens are principally about the organic flow of forms derived from nature; some of them deal with ideas that push into universal concepts and have a symbolist, otherworldly ambiance; and some yet their driving force incidents, memories and emotions that shaped the artist's life.

The Modern World (the artist's attitudes to)

Life

Violence

Mortality

Many of the screens are highly specific to an incident or influence, the titles give us a clue to the complex symbology at work and the intertwining of the artist's personal response with wider perceptions about place.

Contrapuntal/Counterpoint music introduces multiple melodies that are equally important.

Polyphony describes the use of overlapping melodies.

For Clarke the concept of a screen as a vehicle of artistic expression is not a new concept, rather it clearly resonates back through his life, becoming part of his artistic consciousness virtually from the start of his work in glass.

Literal and Phenomenal Transparency

Layering of Planes/Layering of Spaces

Rowe and Slutzky 1982

What exactly is a screen and what does it mean in the context of modernity?

A screen is simultaneously a physical object and a complex conceptual metaphor. We use screens to divide and to mask things off from each other, and as boundaries/barriers to hide behind. At the same time, the screen provides ways of looking at things/displaying; we screen films and we screen people. We look through them, and they can act as a catalyst that changes our vision of whatever is on the other side. In its usage in art, a screen is automatically a series of images – a diptych, triptych or polyptych – a sequence of free standing panels that allows the artist to develop a narrative and aesthetic theme.

Screens divide up space and make it function differently.

Alabaster windows before glass. (contemporary windows by both Soulages/Sigmar Polke/Iglesias

The Glass House

The screen as emblematic of modernity.

Conceptually, the sensibility at work in many early Modern buildings was one of space divided by screen walls and windows. In this sense, the giant windows at either end of Norman Foster's seminal Sainsbury Centre building for example are light-screens.

The nature of Brian Clarke's architectural practice, in which his core practice is painting.

It is through painting that I understand how to view architecture. It is through painting that I can appreciate the rhythm of the poem. It is through painting that I can appreciate and draw pleasure from the structure of a well-composed sentence. And it is through painting that the complexity of music makes itself understood to me. It is through painting, in fact, that I am.

Brian Clarke, 1989.

I do not identify mostly with painting, but I identify mostly with all other things because of painting.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

Clarke is gripped by the technology and engineering of how a building is made, but also by the psychological function and its emotional impact, he refers to himself as an architectural artist.

The medium of glass in its modern form will only be seen when people have been sufficiently exposed to it.

During the 20^th century – the age of specialisation – theorists and historians were obsessed with separating out the arts disciplines, positioning them in specific groups or classes, and then subjecting them to philosophical discourse as to why they belonged there. In short, the Anglo-Saxon world in particular artificially created the categories of art, design and craft, and then intellectually policed them. Stained glass was inevitably positioned as a craft, with all the confused cultural and economic consequences of this class allocation.

Clarke with the complexity of his practice and interests has led to embrace the concept of gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art). A concept first championed by Richard Wagner, who perceived opera as a means of combining all of the arts, including music, and literature, in order to completely surround the spectator. In the visual arts, it is essentially about generating a complete art environment, in which all elements are orchestrated into an aesthetic whole.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, designers of the De Stijl movement.

Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor

I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material
Neo Baroque, Postmodern rendered/computer generated surfaces.
New Forms of Media Aesthetics, Peter Greenaway

Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.

The Interrupted Grid/Motifs

Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies

The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena

Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.

The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.

Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome.

Grisaille

Pointillism

Divisionism

Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thorn Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends)

The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.
Mesh Topologies 

Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.

Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.

An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making.

The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead – a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline – into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else – the poetry, ideas, emotions – emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Night Orchids

Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together.

The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke's recent work; mortality.

The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.

There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes – Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.

Robert Storr.

Francis Bacon

The Logic of Sensation

Gilles Deleuze

Memento Mori

The inevitability of things.

The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.

Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modern art.

The use of memory as a conceptual tool.

'Every instant has a thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.

Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level'.

Memory is a means by which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.

Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.

Objective and subjective visions of life - and death – come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.

Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.

A Valediction of Weeping.

Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.

Liminality

Numinous

Spiritual

Transendental

A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.

Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.

Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal.

The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.

I don't want to do anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.

Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana.

Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.

The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body.

Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.

Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.

Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.

Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. ( the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)

Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.

Objects and Traces/Map Reading : Visual Archaeology/Anthropology in Social Space

The map fosters interpretation and exploration

Inseparable Attendant : Place and Process

Assemblage and blueprint : Site drawing/Leper Graves

Drawing figure/ground, documentation of work in progress.

Life "drawing" trace on paper with water and field chalk. Work submitted to Interfaith Group Show at the Link Gallery, Winchester 2010.

"This particular event invokes for me the notion of simple material relations and collaborative gestures that underpin human agency. Art space/practice can promote these working intimations."       Artist's Statement (archive)  07.12.2009.

Anthropological Landscape : Morn Hill, Winchester

Panspermia : Cyanotype Drawing
150x240 cms
Human form drawn on paper with cyanotype and black ink. Astronomical data and traces of seed heads together with reference material/notes (directed panspermia) in pencil.

180621

MATERIAL MATTERS/Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies : STRANGE TOOLS AND THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

STRANGE TOOLS
ART and HUMAN NATURE
ALVA  NOE

THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

DAVID HARVEY

As David Harvey argues in his seminal Condition of Postmodernity, architecture becomes one of the aestheticised products by which global capitalism and political regimes express themselves. It is with this realisation that we must reverse the equation. Not space and time in architecture, but architecture in space and time, in an  concepts of the former acceptance of Harvey’s conclusion that ‘neither time or space can be assigned objective meanings independent of material processes, and that it is only through investigations of the latter that we can properly ground ourselves’.

ARCHITECTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

Jeremy Till | Collected Writings | Architecture in Space, Time 1996

There is a feeling of intimidation for the architect faced with a broad cultural landscape, and so an understandable reaction is to look for stable elements. In this way architecture, fixed and permanent, shrugs off the ephemeral and the present, and enters into dialogue with the deeper structures which may condition culture. The language of traditional anthropology (mythic, ritual, cosmic, symbolic) is used as a vehicle for architectural exploration, with the intent that architectural will engage with enduring and stable cultural factors. The architect here reverses the role of the anthropologist. Where the latter may investigate and describe social practices through their inscription in space and time, the architect describes temporal spaces in which to set those practices. There is an emphasis on architecture as a setting for ritual and as the embodiment of archetypal human situations, all constituted within cultural tradition. At its worst this approach reeks of conservative nostalgia, at its best it is a project of interpretative re-visioning of an active tradition in which to set human action. It is an architecture that is firmly rooted in space and time, but in very particular interpretations of them. The space is one of concrete representation, informed by the search for authentic meaning. The time is one which combines the cyclic movements of cosmology and nature with a backward-looking naturalisation of history, both characterised by the sense of reinterpreted repetition. The implication is that time and space should stand outside the contingent forces of the present, and that production must resist immanent distractions in an attempt to ground architecture in a more profound cultural horizon. It is this detachment that is both the real strength of this approach but also its weakness, because in looking for the truth it bypasses the real.

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

Inside Phenomena : Innerness and Interior : Material Matters

Theory and Analysis.

Architecture and Material Practice.

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Material Matters : Architecture and Material Practice.

Hylomorphism which understands materials as a subset of matter, does not provide a way of positively distinguishing materials, and underscores the architectural tendency to use materials as mere finishes, exchangeable and superficial. In turn it is no surprise that materials become supplementary in architecture and are used to decorate or to signify.

Gaston Bachelard is a rare example of a philosopher concerned with this problem. Not only is he aware of philosophy's tendency to privilege form over matter, he raises the question of individuation: I was immediately struck by the neglect of the material cause in aesthetic philosophy. In particular it seemed to me that the individualizing power of matter had been underestimated. Why does everyone always associate the notion of the individual with form?

Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter.

 

Russell Moreton

MA Interiors.

UCA Farnham. 2014

In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?

This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.

In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?

Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.

This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)

A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.

Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.

There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.

‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson, 2009:36)

Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)

Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)

The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?

Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.

I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)

Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.

‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.

Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.

Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.

The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.

Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.

His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.

Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)

Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)

In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)

His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it helps us to gather in our surroundings.

‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson, 2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves, 2009:8)

This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.

His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?

Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.

Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.

Everyday Enchantments : Playing with Constructed Situations

Research Collage, Reading Rooms/Waverley Abbey

Cyanotype, blueprint  with notes/formulae/string on paper

Reading Rooms : Waverley Project

The Ruin/Paper Cups

Lead,photographic ( pinhole) and inkjet visual material from flickr stream, fixing tapes, cyanotype on tracing paper,pierced and re-positioned elements on paper.

Drawing on the snow, a field in Hampshire.
Enchantments between materials, snow and paper.

MAPPING : Ritual, fire and stone : Human Filament
Astronomical data with outline of human form,candles,string and stones on paper.150cm x 240cm

Working Practices
Drawing.
Installation and Working Sites
Architectural Glass and Ceramics
Liquid Light and Pinhole Photography

Colouring Light : Brian Clarke : An Artist Apart/Unframing Architecture

Don't Forget The Lamb : Brian Clarke

Filtered Light/Boundary Transgressions.

Between art and information/photography and the invisible

Vectors of Subjectivation

The excitement that accompanies the darkroom/laboratory genesis in which something entirely unexpected is bought to light and comes across undiminished.

Colliding Particles of Reality : Darkroom Alchemy.

An affective in-between that activates an intermediary of relations.

Wim Delvoye : Gothic Works

Brian Clarke

Lead/Lamb

Glass/Lamina

Stained Glass, Painting, Appropriation or/and Collage.

Lead Based Drawings/Lead as the ground of the work.

A lot of people are interested in skulls, but not nearly as much today as in the past.

The skull is not only a memory of who we were but also an image of what we will be.

I think it will probably engage artists as a subject for as long as art exists.

You realize that in the midst of living, death is with us, and I wanted to stay with the skulls.

Brian Clarke.

The Passage of Flesh : Ann Mandelbaum

Whispers of Immortality, the skull beneath the skin, TS Eliot.

Layers Of Meaning : Martin Harrison.

Only colour-happiness with glass culture.

Light permeates everything and is alive in crystal.

Glass brings usthe new era; brick culture is a burden...

Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur, 1914.

Immateriality and Transparency

Technique and Expression in Glass Architecture

The Poetics of Glass

Lightworks : Layered Constructions/Interspaces and Transitions

Simulacrum : Installation in the New Building E. ON Eergie AG Munich.

Andreas Horlitz, 2006.

What thrills me about light is the involuntary subjective response that one has to its expression against the engineering of a building, against a tree, against skin.

But more than anything else it's the way light passes through the membranous filter of leaves.

I suppose I wanted to engage the same kind of disciplines that an architect has to deal with when he's building, because I feel what I do is so integrally married to architecture.

In a way what I'm doing is coming as close as I can to creating my own architectural experience without the interference of an architect.

Lamina : Brian Clarke, 2005.

A thin layer of bone, membrane, a thin plate of tissue, the expanded portion of a leaf

Don't Forget The Lamb : Brian Clarke, 2008.

Lead and Stained Glass

Oil on Canvas

You see stained glass by virtue of the passage of light through it, whereas you see a painting by the light reflected off it. So, in contrast to the static condition of a painting, a stained glass window is in a constant state of change as the day progresses, the clouds move, traffic or people pass by behind it.

Immaterial, Ultramaterial : Architecture, Design and Materials.

Substance, Ron Witte, 2002.

Bodies in Space

Spatial Practice

Spatial Representations

Francesca Woodman : becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible, 

becoming-a-subject-in-wonder

Lone Bertelsen

We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectivation.

Guattari, 1995.

The figures in Francesca Woodman's photographs often leave the ground, and the photographs themselves seem strangely ungrounded. 

Both the figures and the photographs themselves are mobilised: they become “trans-situational” 

(Massumi,2002) and open up towards “a new space-time” (Irigaray, 1993).

As part of this mobilised opening, Woodman often camouflages the body and/or moves it in front of the lens during exposure.

Camouflage : Neil Leach, 2006.

A Theory of Camouflage.

Camouflage is not restricted to the visual domain. It can be enacted within the domains of other senses, especially smell and hearing.

Camouflage can therefore be read as an interface with the world. It operates as a masquerade that re-presents the self, just as self representation through make-up, dress, hair style etc., is a form of self re-presentation.

Camouflage refers to both revealing and concealing. Camouflage delineates a spetrum of degrees of definition of the selfb against a given background.

Mimesis, Sensuous Correspondence, Sympathetic Magic, Mimicry, Becoming, Death

Narcissism, Identity, Paranoia, Belonging, Sacrifice, Melancholia, Ecstasy,

Mimesis :Paradox or Encounter

Jane Bennett, 2018.

Skin-Surface-Subjectivity.

The body is the origin point for a discussion of spatial practice.

The Roman Years : Isabella Pedicini

Between Flesh and Film, 2012

Francesca Woodman

Gordon Matta-Clark

Spatial Agency and Relationscapes

Yves Klein

Works-Writings

Klaus Ottmann, 2010.

The Battle between Line and Colour.

The Performative Body

Few things are as fascinating as an imprint. An imprint is the trace of a presence-within-absence, the substratum or deposit of a being who no longer exists, the mark left by a moment beyond recall.

Such impressions pose the problem of being and nothingness, fullness and emptiness, presence and absence. Far from seeking to sidestep that problem, Klein's anthropometries address themselves to the heart of the issue.

Klein strove for dematerialization, for the emancipation from matter, in order to overcome the predicament of the art of his time. He ultimately abandoned both pictorial content and form, immersing himself in the boundlessness of pure colour.

Since re-presentation is a cultural artifice, presentation alone can sustain an 'authentic natural realism'. The imprint preserves the memory of the contact. It is a natural 'inscription' preceding writing. 

The aesthetic of the trace is opposed to the aesthetic of mimesis.

It counters the mimetic with a presence.

Body traces, traces of 'health', are records of a pristine state of life.

Seeing chromaticity arising from the modulation of light.

Pierre Soulages/Jean-Dominique Fleury : Conques 1987-1994.

The result was a translucent non transparent glass, that let the light through but not the view: a glass that diffused the light not by reflecting it on its surface but from its very texture.

This modulation of the transparency was the natural consequence of the uneven distribution of ting bits of glass of different sizes, and of their partly “deglazing” during fusion.

Maps of Interior Space

A Swimmer Between Two Worlds, Francesca Woodman.

Katherine Conley, 2008.

Extract, on the nature of  photographic light.

The Self-Representational Photography of Francesca Woodman : Harriet Katherine Riches.

Clementina Hawarden/Francesca Woodman

Both photographers' imagery centres on the portrayal of interior space in which the borders and limits of that space are constantly affirmed and re-iterated. 

Staging their female models against walls, learning against fireplaces, positioned adjacent to thresholds and doors, or gazing wistfully through the glazed panes of windows, the interiority suggested in each woman's imagery is always held in tension with what lies beyond, emphasising the boundaries of public and private space.

Riches, it is their shared manipulation of light to exaggerate a sense of physical containment that my interest here lies. In both women's work, light is not only that medium of clarification and development necessary to the photograph itself, but conversely also becomes the means through which a subject is obscured, contained or constricted.

Becoming

The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden.

Collecting Loss, Becoming Decay, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann,

Carol Mavor

Projecting Touch

Francesca Woodman's Late “Blueprints”

Emotion, Space and Society

An intimate mode of looking

Woodman insists on the sheer impossibility of dividing the problems of the self from the problems of the medium, and in so doing it compels an intimacy, an inquiry between photograph and viewer.

Francesca Woodman's photographs, Jane Simon, 2010. 

Francesca Woodman's Dark Gaze : Claire Raymond.

The End of Art and the Question of Legibility.

Outside In : Francesca Woodman's

Rooms of Her Own

Johannes Binotto

To divert our gaze from Woodman's body and consider what is going on next to, behind, and around it. Indeed Woodman's photographs always also capture that other; she incessantly switched angles of view and photographed what was beyond her body: the scene of the action, the room itself, calling on us to turn our attention to the spatial situations in her pictures.

National Galleries Scotland

Self Deceit, Eel Series, Untitled Providence,

Francesca Woodman

The Raw Seduction of Flesh

Photographs by Connie Imboden, 1999.

Human Figure Drawing : Daniela Brambilla 

Drawing Gestures, Postures and Movements

The Artist's Reality : Mark Rothko

Philosophies of Art

Teacher's Manual Brockwood Park School

Enquiry and Investigation, Krishnamurti.

John Berger

Bento's Sketchbook

Storytelling, the invisible and the hidden, protagonists are survivors.

Their stories remain unfinished, because they involve sharing, because in their telling a body refers as much to a body of people as to an individual, for them mystery is not something to be solved but to be carried.

The arts, as technologies, are carried along in the same unpredictable history. Their very finality is uncertain. How then can one found a school of art? Perhaps precisely by bringing together artists, that is to say, technicians, who are no longer assured of disciplinary borders, who explore the frontier zones, the limit zones, the in-betweens. . . .

A paradoxical institution, to be sure, since it institutes a decompartmentalization , giving a place and a frame to operations of unframing.

Sylviane Agacinski, IN-BETWEEN (a notion which is neither a concept nor an image, Tschumi)

At some time, perhaps many times in his life , every man is likely to meet with a thing in art or nature or human life or books which astonishes and gives him a profound satisfaction, not so much because it is rich or beautiful or strange , as because it is a symbol of a thing which, without the symbol, he could never grasp and enjoy.

Edward Thomas
The Inn/One Green Field

In the course of a lifetime there are few decisive conversations: with a classmate in high school, a father or mother, a best friend, an admired mentor, a person whose newfound presence will shape the rest of our existence.
Alain Fleischer, LE  FRESNOY : WHY THAT? WHY THERE?
Bernard Tschumi : Architecture In/Between




Architecture, Light, Art,

The real drawing takes place in the mind, Brian Clarke

Drawing in a volume, Zaha Hadid