Drawing Towards an Ecology of Materiality/Embodiment/Emotion/Affect

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Relation-In-The-Making.

Spaces between objects, Giorgio Morandi.

Emergent Evolutions.

These micro-perceptions are perceptions without objects, hallucinatory tendencies in the sense that they express nothing but the emphasis on the quality of becoming. They do not give us a body fully formed or an object-in-place, rather they fold perception into a becoming-body-of-movement, creating the emphasis of quasi formation that is relation-in-the-making.

An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling.

Momentum Wheel : Lucie Rie Installation.

We perceive/perception is the force for the worlds infinite unfolding, with objects catching the edges of their contours, participating in the relation they call forth.

Erin Manning.

The smooth paint of the background turns out to be made of many translucent layers, intended to cover over outlines that Giacometti rejected, always in favour of a smaller and smaller head.

John Berger.

Diffractive Thinking/Reading abstractions in the middle of things and both ways at the same time.

Karen Barad.

MAKING

Anthropology

Archaeology

Art and Architecture.

Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making. For Ingold instead of treating art and architecture as compendia of objects for anthropological or archaeological analysis, he advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.

Hungate Site Visit.

Water/Light/Architecture.

Ceramic Vessels/Lead Tray/Water/Mirror.

Cyanotype Solution, unexposed, unwashed.

White gesso on biscuit ware.

White lead glaze.

Ceramics and Architecture.

Ceramics for a reflective solitude, an architecture of silence.

Figural Jars/Abstracted Human Clay Vessels/Cinerary Pots.

Sainsbury Centre.

Julian Stair.

Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Mezzanine Gallery.

Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Materiality, Embodiment, Nonhumans, Hylomorphism, Things.

One of the peculiarities of material culture studies over recent decades has been its virtual divorce from the traditions of ecological anthropology. This is odd, given that both fields are broadly concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Students of material culture are interested in people's relations with things. Ecological anthropologists study how human beings relate to their biotic and abiotic environments. For the former, persons and things are bound in relational networks; for the latter, human beings and other organisms are bound in webs of life. Yet practitioners of these two fields are speaking past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. 

Tim Ingold.

Archaeology, Volume 41, 2012.

The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect.

Sarah Tarlow.

When David Sylvester asked Giacometti about the thinness of the sculptures he had made without a model, Giacometti said 'they get narrow despite myself'.But then added, 'from life, they do this less'. Models put up a resistance to the thinning gaze, as if they were resisting Giacometti's willingness to let them go.

Drawings That Shrink.

Drawings that are extremely tense, a sign that the object/model is resisting.

Relations on the figure and the rejected lines and their borders on the drawing.

And so Yanaihara tilted and shrank, and sank down towards the bottom of the frame. As he shrank down, he also shrank away, back in space, away in time and perhaps in imagination, away from firm memory and towards insecure recollection. At some point Giacometti abandoned the drawing and began another.

Giacometti was fastidious about the placement of the easel, the canvas, and Yanaihara's chair, and he put little red blocks of clay under the stretcher to keep the canvas at a precise angle. None of that helped him anchor the figure: still it kept shrinking. The principle of its shrinking is clear in the dozen preparatory drawings, because many of the rejected lines remain visible. What mattered was the relation between the head and the borders of the drawing. That's why the drawings have drawn borders with lines scattered like matchsticks inside them.

On Drawing/Seeing to abolish the principle of disappearance, but it never can, and instead it turns appearance and disappearance into a game.

The crucial sadness of drawing  is it is unsurpassably close to the object, but always separated from it. Drawing bends my thoughts towards the nearly indescribable distance between the model and the motions of my hand, or should I say between the movements of my eyes as they pass over the model, and the sweep of my hand as it moves across the paper. Or the feel of the model, as I imagine it, and the texture of the paper as it slides under my hand.

The game of drawing is intricate enough with its slant rhymes between the feel of the model in my mind and the feel of the paper. It is made more difficult because drawn lines have the power to remake my own imagination. Every line I draw reforms the figure on the paper, and at the same time it redraws the image in my mind. And what is more, the drawn line redraws the model, because it changes my capacity to perceive. 

As I draw, the model becomes defective. The image in my mind is marred by the marks I put on paper. And so because a drawing cannot quite be touched, because it shifts when I try to fix it on paper, because it does not simply transcribe something in the world, because it can never bring back what I once loved – because of all that, drawing is an intense expression of the defect of distance.

John Berger.   

Creative Ecologies/Drawing Concepts : Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

Propositional Drawing/Speculative Architecture.

Drawing Inscriptions : Situatedness in Ceramics

Notes Towards a Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Shallow - Space Constructions

Veils

Structural Cuts : Skyspaces

Skyspaces : Autonomous Structures

Site Specifity

Dark Spaces

Autonomous Structures : Models

Perceptual Cells

James Turrell

Fundacon 'la  Caixa' 1993.

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

The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.

Volume And Space.

Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, 'Man Pointing,' is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.

Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.

Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.

Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.

The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.

Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.

Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold. 

Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.

The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Affordances of Things.

Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.

Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.

Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.

An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.

Matter and materials are lively and require attention. 

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.

Aleatory, by chance, lots of the 'acts' of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry' He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.

Breathing/Drawing : Inhalation and an exhalation of being.

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Situated Practice Live.

Critical Spatial Practices.

The conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event.

Making/Living in the matrices of situatedness.

Seated nude, 1958 Oil 116x89cm.

Alberto Giacometti devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning, engaging in an extended exploration of how to reduce the figures's mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force. Up until his death in 1966, Giacometti pushed the limits of representation, setting into motion ever-unfolding phenomenological investigations that remain at the core of art making today.

How can matter-bronze, plaster, charcoal, paint-embody truth? And how, if at all, can art preserve the essence of the living?

Nothing disappears completely.

In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.

Production of Space.

Henri Lefebvre. 1991

Spatiality-Space and the Object.

Of or relating to space, existing or occurring in space, having extension in space.

The Multiplicities and heterogeneous nature of space and spatiality.

Abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and materialized, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute.

Concetto Spaziale, Lucio Fontana.

The protean nature of space and its ability to bring the unconscious into the open. 

Merleau-Ponty.

Lived Body and Space.

Situatedness and Place, multdisciplinary perspectives on spatio-temporal contingency in human life.

Hunefeldt/Schlitte. 2018

Sites, Situations and other kinds of Situatedness.

Fields of Care.

Interactions between bodies and our habitats.

What is outside eventually comes inside.

The irreducible fact of the human condition is that we are open. The bodies we house are open bodies, dependent on interchange and communion with surrounding life. Surfaces are two-sided like the skin, we cannot touch without being touched in return, and because we are open , we need boundaries strong and flexible enough to also close. Complementarily and interdependence belong to this openness. 

Architecture is a Verb.

Sarah Robinson. 2022

The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something's site or situation.

The way we inhabit our everyday spaces, reveals the extent to which our bodies extend into and integrate with the features of our surrounding.

The Architectural Body.

Organism/Person/Environment.

Arakawa and Gins.

Making, is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following it where it leads, instead of imposing a form upon a matter. Matter so shaped informs the processes of its shaping.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Making is not a matter of imposition or a hylomorphic process. But of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material. What this understanding entails is that rather than interpreting the creative process 'backwards' from a finished object to an idea in the mind of an agent, one must rather 'read it forwards' in an ongoing generative movement, that is once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic.

Sarah Robinson, Tim Ingold. 

The mutual shaping of body and place is captured in the Greek word Choros. The root of choreography referred not only to dance, but also to the dancing place, and the group that dances.

Chora, closer to the meaning that Suzanne Langer articulates is the space of forces, a generative place that depends on participation, a territory that appears through continual remaking and reweaving. 

Topos, like its modern usage in topography suggests, was space that can be mapped.

Notion of a Place-Ballet.

The 'Spanish Steps' are not only crystallisations of movement, but generators of movement. We can navigate our living spaces in the dark, because we have already integrated the locations of our furnishings into our repertoire of movement. We create a zone of familiarity, with its integrated gestures, behaviours and actions that sustains a particular task or aim.

The reciprocity between one's body-routine and the environment supports these integrated movements, resulting in a fusion of interpersonal and communal exchange and effective attachment.

Places/Public Spaces become meaningful because they support our personal body-routines in an inter personal setting. 

David Seaman.

Place-Ballet, propositional movements of dancers around objects and the exhibition space.

10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester. 2009 

Bodies/Interchange/Communion with Surrounding Life.

Breathing, a balancing act of sustaining openness.

There really is an inhalation and an exhalation of being.

We not only breathe in and out, we breathe in a certain rhythm, our heart beats in rhythm, our perceptual experience oscillates in rhythms. Our experience of colour once again lays bare the facts of this unending rhythm.

We speak of 'inspiration' and the word should be taken literally. There really is an inspiration and expiration of being.

My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as I still have 'in my legs' the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it.

Phenomenology of Perception.

Merleau-Ponty.

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time.

Practitioners and theorists whose work overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond. 

Practices that incorporate, event scores, insertions, even banalities, and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation as well as duration. 

Projects located between Art and Architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operate. Such projects operate at a triple crossroads, between theory and practice, between art and architecture, between public and private, Jane Rendell is keen to stress three particular qualities of these works, the critical, the spatial, and the interdisciplinary.

Situatedness then is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or/and being situated.

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Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture

Organism/Person/Environment

Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.

Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.

The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.

Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.

The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.

Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.

A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.

Between Art and Information.

Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.

The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of  things.

The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.

In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.

Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.

The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.

The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.

Tactile Light.

The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.

For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.

Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.

Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency

Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.

Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.

Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints

Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.

The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.

Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.

Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis, wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.

Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.

Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light

Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.

The Process Of Drawing Is Left Visible.

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The Process Of Drawing Is Left Visible.

On Drawing, John Berger.

Raveningham.

Garden/Ground/Circulation Diagrams.

Notes appropriated from 

The Scripted Drawing.

Social conditioning underpinning education.

Cultivation Field.

Spatial Registers/Spatialities/Ideologies between consciousness and social existence.

Collaged Activities/Inquiry

Boundaries/in the making between the personal and the commonly shared.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Frames of Consciousness.

Stencils/Templates/Windows/Intermediaries.

Double Occupancy/Discourses and Events.

The Confessional Metaphor.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus.

The Individual/Birth to Presence.

Jean-Luc Nancy.

Circulation Diagram.

Architectural Programming.

The Shower Room.

The Changing Room.

The Life Drawing Room.

The Darkroom.

Mobile Architecture/Event Architecture.

Further Figuring It Out.

Maussion's very choice of the nude recalls the most classic of strategies within the tradition of easel painting, but as we have seen it is one mediated by the mechanical effects of photography and the distance of memory.

William Jeffrett, 1995.

Charles Maussion. SCVA/UEA Norwich.

Life Drawing/The Contested Sociological Subject/Corporeal Gaze.

Drawing as an extended method of seeing and of recording experience.

Drawing From Life as Ideas and Process.

We have schooled ourselves to see, by acquiring the capacity to depict ourselves.

The human body, drawings/depictions seen through concentrations of our personal/private selves.

Alberto Giacometti. 1901-1966.

Standing Nude, 1955.

Sainsbury Centre, UEA Norwich.

The body as the instrument of our emotions and our sensuality. 

In all its starkness this figure is a most sensitive and complicated mechanism. The naked human is seen as a symbol of existence achieved through observation of painful acuteness.

Herbert Boeckl. 1894-1966.

All Boeckl's life-drawings are distinguished by a strong physical presence. He is truly concerned with interpreting life in terms of human bodies, of the beauty of functioning muscle and bone and with the tactile aspects of flesh, as well as the knowledge of what lies beneath it. His nudes speak a physical language. He uses charcoal as a technical means to best achieve lucidity.

Boeckl is not concerned with 'beauty of line' as his predecessors Klimt and Schiele were, he always sees the body in the context of space and draws 'from within'. He builds up his figures from a structural core, the surface of his forms take on a strongly moulded, modelled aspect through a great economy of means.

Naked to Nude, Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler. 1977. 

Rendering sensuality in everyday occurrences.

Drawings as concepts, forms of thought/seeing.

Ambient light and shadows over architectural surfaces.

Blurring the conventional distinction between the figure and the ground.

Life Drawing and the psychology of nakedness.

The practical and theoretical problems of confronting/drawing the human form.

Drawings from life contain a sense of physical presence, of a functioning logic.