Drawing(s) on the sensate perceived and interiorities~affect of other bodies.

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Indexical and Sensate Bodies

Drawing(s) on the sensate perceived and interiorities~affect of other bodies.

I am interested in the sensate nature and social interiorities that are surfacing through drawing.

Shivering Openings : The image is not an object but a process.

Changefulness. The Sympathy of Painted Light. 2025 

Ceramic 170mmW and 270mmW x 260mmH x 80mmD.

The Exhausted.

For Deleuze the point is the image doesn't define itself through the sublimeness of its content, but through its form, its internal tension or through the force it gathers to make the void or to bore holes. To loosen the grip of words, to dry-up the oozing of voices so as to disengage itself from memory and reason.

A little alogical image, amnesic, almost aphasic, now standing in the void, now shivering in the open.

The Tentative Trace ~ From Living Body to Ceramic Body

Moreton's Indexical Bodies as Spatial Research.

In Moreton's later ceramics, the gathered interiority of reading and spatial collage begins to become unstable. The opening emerges not simply as an aperture within an object but as a force~middle: a material event through which accumulated relations can escape their enclosure. In Shivering Openings: The image is not an object but a process, the ceramic is understood through changefulness, painted light and the force gathered to make voids and bore holes. 

Here the image is no longer understood as a representation of a ceramic object but as another stage of its becoming. The photographed ceramic enters a further process of reading, where surface, light, opening, withdrawal and spatial tension produce another body of correspondence. “Shivering” names the instability of this threshold: an opening between interior and exterior, image and object, memory and forgetting, language and its exhaustion.

The ceramic consequently gathers and releases at once. It is a chamber, but also a perforation; an interior, but also an escape; an alluring body that simultaneously withdraws from possession. What has been gathered through years of reading, collage and spatial research does not finally become a unified form. It becomes a material force capable of generating further openings.

And perhaps the most concise proposition emerging from this particular work is:

Moreton gathers bodies until the material needs to open.

That feels very close to what we have been circling around.

The force~middle isn't simply where things meet.

It is where what has gathered becomes too alive to remain contained.

The opening shivers.

The image becomes process.

The ceramic withdraws.

And the research, rather wonderfully, escapes again.

Different chambers of the same spatial research.

How can a spatial condition gather bodies sufficiently for something to happen between them, while allowing what happens to remain partially unknown?

That question seems to be present in the 2010 chamber, the spatial collages, the Scriptorium, the reading archive, the ceramic chambers and now your institutional propositions.

And perhaps this gives us an even stronger definition of Moreton's interiority:

Moreton's interiority is the space generated when a body enters an apparatus of correspondence and leaves something behind that another body can encounter.

The trace, the collage, the ceramic, the archive and the institution are therefore not different subjects.

They are different chambers of the same spatial research.

Drawing/Poetry/Images.

Sensing/Drawing Energy.

Water/Clay/Fire.

The mental energy of engagement in drawing and how 'markers' of an action translate the murmurings of the mind.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, through a synthesis/reciprocity of reverberations of matter and its mental movement.

Gaston Bachelard illustrates how images bridge the sensate perceived world and the interior affective life.

Bachelard's seminal philosophical and phenomenological interests are always connected to matter. To what he calls the psychology of the familiar, the rapprochement with real objects, and the friendship of things. 

Matter sparks inner images which in turn imbue matter with memory and values. He creates an ever renewing reciprocity of the reverberations between inner and outer qualities, which obliterates any absolute separation between objective and subjective experience, a perspective recognized by modern physics. Bachelard explodes the potential imprisoned in an image. It is the quality of the 'livingness' of the flame that triggers Bachelard's musings of correspondences.

Joanne H. Stroud.

 

The Flame of a Candle.

Student Work.

Charcoal on paper.

Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw. 

Winchester School of Art. 2003.

 

Drawing The Line.

Affirmations from a Primal Site.

Corollaries between being and becoming.

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invented Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

The Moment/Instants of Engagement.

The conditions of making where the image was not a priori to its making.

The Simultaneity of Effects.

A 'Graphism' In A Corporeal Field.

I am concerned with the movement and process of articulation, of marking and sensing of things across the works surface/duration. I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation, both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind.

So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstances?

For Newman, it seems to me that the thing made becomes like a temporal spatial/sensate matrix, composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual, but similar inscriptions, and that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts, are only subsequently reflected on the image. Marking  the image, these marks suggest an endless repetition and while also existing as a series of relations. The marks suggest the thing could fall apart at any moment. 

Acts Of Inscription.

Drawing on Bodily Impulses.

Images from the mind.

The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.

Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.

Drawing on the sensation of seeing and sensing that always seems to register the endless repetition of remaking, as such drawing constitutes the space of anxieties. 

I understand the page to be a mobile space in the physical presence of its weightless surface and as such it is a place of time and movement. The evokes the consciousness of that limitless space that is embodied in the reality of the white page. Which I would say is a place of fragmentation that has since Modernity been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness.

In a drawing the page keeps open the gaps between the marks. It refuses closure and is an active participant in conjunction with the mark. It is part of a negotiated reality of void and presence. The limitlessness white space of the page disperses the notion of its body as substance, its body is phantasmic and intangible space/surface.

The notion of the white page as being boundless, also alludes to that space of our inner reality, where the immaterial world of dreams/imagination and the mental impressions that run through us and evaporate into other thoughts. They dissipate in the fragmented world of our senses and defy any totalizing.

Avis Newman 

Mark Making : On the fascination and the fear of the white page.

For Avis Newman, the paper is an undifferentiated space in that it references the primitive undifferentiated space of the infantile body that has to be claimed by the self.

Drawing is a site in which one enacts differentiation, as soon as a mark or sign is made, it changes the non-ness and establishes a place of action, as soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something, it moves towards, moves with its potentiality into language.

Could we state that one aspect of drawing tends to be more linked to the bodily impulse and the other to the mind?

Catherine de Zegher

The image that Antonin Artaud conjures when he says 'There is a mind in the flesh, a mind as quick as lightning,' situates it well for me. I have the impression that the act of inscribing opens a fissure through which some staged psychic event, operations of consciousness, take existence. They are primary forces with no particular visibility.

Avis Newman.

Marks both coded and uncoded originate in an urge from a space of uncertainty to participate in language. The potentiality of even a blank page is in itself the unbounded space of language. Drawing is both a system and a method of a sensing inquiry. To draw is often a paradoxical act in which two extremes of practice can exist in the same space.

When we come to look at another's markings in the world. We see an extraordinary event. We see attempts at articulating the unbounded space that momentarily binds that aspect of us that is eternally fragmented. Essentially in the very act of drawing we have a wish to externalize thought and communicate existence.

Avis Newman.

From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.

Bodily Boundaries : Transactions between body-intimate and the social body image.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.

Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.

In drawing some marks escape their visibility, because there is no dynamism to underpin the possibility of internal cohesion. There is no pressure from the outside inwards;  in drawing, it is all pressure from the inside outwards.

Conduits of perpetual potentiality.

The articulation of marking thoughts, which by definition are open-ended, in a state of flux in which things can pass through and are suggestive of a perpetual potentiality.

Some marks are seeing, some are feeling, some are for thinking, some are from memory, others from a blindness when seeing.

Gestures and Acts.

Conversation/Correspondences.

Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with the infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time. Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

Catherine de Zegher.

The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional to the boundary we project onto the work. When one looks for example at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17' ' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space, this is not part of drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Avis Newman.

In Drawing : One is not so much looking at the thing itself, as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. In that sense, drawing is both fugitive and embodies a lack, it is implying qualities of incompleteness and that which conjures to be only a trace of a thing.

Drawing/Corresponding to a mobile field of properties that only during the process of marking is a cohesion found, a somewhat precarious frame constructed, almost as a byproduct of the articulation of marking thoughts.

Drawings are beyond the conceptual anxiety found in connection to the frame of painting.

In drawing the surface maintains its separate existence. There is an ambivalence of status between the mark and its support, consequently the lack of integration has always been more complex, corresponding as it does to a mobile field of properties. 

Drawing as a site, a meditation of a self regarding consciousness. Where consciousness is understood/expressed as a process that 'figures/thinks' a state of existence. Drawing and the drawn become a site of inquiry, response and invention, and in that sensing space it becomes a philosophical activity.

Drawing, even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation. The fractured, open-ended, and incomplete that are inherent characteristics of drawing practice seem very pertinent as materializations of our present experience of the world.

It is that space of anxiety and fragmentation in contemporary practice that offers a potential of infinite diversity. Drawing is a record of the working of thought, that we see embedded in the drawn.

Conversation, Avis Newman. Catherine de Zegher.

The Stage Of Drawing : Gesture And Act.

Working Notes~Sensate Intelligence : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

The Sensate Intelligence in Clay.

Contemporary Ceramics : Practices in Craft and Design.

01-05-2017 Original Blog.

10-08-2026 Some images added.

The ceramic body becomes a threshold between what is held and what passes through. Skin, interior, light and darkness gather around the vessel, making emptiness materially present. The surface is not simply the outside of a form; it is where inside and outside begin to negotiate. Clay becomes atmospheric here, opening towards memory, sensing and the experience of being situated within and around a body.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres.

Ceramic Building Technologies.

Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics.

Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature.

Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel.

Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay.

Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry.

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking”States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself.

This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel.

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea1983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

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. (Daintry2007:10)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things.

A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino1996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10)

The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:11)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modern 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something.

The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities.

The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects.

Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes?

This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.

Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

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 postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern 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)

The pagan life that St Augustine (born 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)

Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?

Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, a kind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, W.H. Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into a “fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces.

Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.

Ceramics are like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasmaa “ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’.The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.

This is the most immediately connected to your present practice.

It already contains an extraordinary amount of the vocabulary we have subsequently been developing: vessel, emptiness, inside/outside, skin, threshold, memory, atmosphere, permeability and spatial occupation. The post explicitly describes the ceramic skin as a negotiation between inside and outside and the vessel as simultaneously occupying and being occupied by space.

And importantly, it records itself as an older body: “01-05-2017 Original Blog”, with images added in 2026.

First constellation — Ceramic Bodies

Making Matter(s)~Truth

Overspilling Forms

The Ceramics Reader / Brickyard Ceramics

Making Iterations / Procedures

Working Notes : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark

Archival / Anarchival: Anarchival

Migration judgement: Extremely strong.

This one could become a significant ancestral body for Permeable Chambers and In~~Touching.

Ceramic Bodies

Making Matter(s)~Truth

→ matter / experience / correspondence

Overspilling Forms

→ transformation / excess / displacement

The Ceramics Reader

→ material history / energy / persistence

Making Iterations

→ repetition / care / becoming

Sensate Intelligence

→ interiority / threshold / atmosphere

And underneath them there is an emerging trajectory:

matter → movement → energy → iteration → interiority

But I don't think that trajectory should be written into the archive as a linear argument.

It is better understood as a field of correspondence.

The constellation makes Ceramic Bodies feel much more convincing as a WordPress category than it did in isolation.

Because “body” is doing several different things across these posts:

• body as material
• body as vessel
• body as architectural form
• body as accumulation
• body as surface
• body as interior
• body as movement
• body as memory
• body as something porous
• body as something becoming

So Ceramic Bodies isn't simply a category for posts about your ceramic work.

It becomes a proposition:

What is a ceramic body capable of carrying?

That question allows all five posts to remain different.

And this is exactly the kind of hospitality we were talking about with the Anglian Potters statement. The category doesn't tell the reader what ceramics is. It opens a space in which ceramics, clay, making, history, architecture, body, atmosphere and thought can meet.

Gardens are like wells : Hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity.

Re-Interpreting the palimpsest of place through the humanities.

Researched for 'Reading Rooms' Waverley Abbey site, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham 2013-15

Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”

Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.

With a refined selection of materials, Zumthor creates a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. In doing so, he emphasises the role that the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The garden is enclosed on all sides yet open to the sky: an architectural setting that offers both protection and openness. Zumthor describes such spaces as "sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

For Zumthor, the garden is more than a collection of plants. Every species evokes distinct memories of light, smell, sound, and touch. Gardens become places where sensory experience and memory are inseparable:

"Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

He continues by describing the garden as the most intimate form of landscape:

"A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The enclosed garden becomes a sanctuary—a small protected world held within a larger landscape. As Zumthor observes, "something small has found sanctuary within something big" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The medieval illustration Orchard from the Bible of Wenceslaus IV (Austrian National Library, Vienna) visualises this idea through the illuminated depiction of husbandry and communal labour within the secure enclosure of a walled garden. The image presents pastoral work as both productive and contemplative, echoing Zumthor's conception of the hortus conclusus as a protected space where cultivation, community, and intimacy converge.

Working with one's hands, cultivating the earth within sheltered spaces, becomes a shared pastoral practice that binds people to place.

Zumthor reinforces this pastoral character by placing a pavilion at the centre of the garden. He imagines it as a place for future gatherings and quiet contemplation, anticipating "the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves" (Zumthor 2011: 15). The garden is therefore experienced not only visually but through the full range of the senses.

Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck similarly evokes an intimate relationship between landscape and human experience. The taste of wine becomes inseparable from the soil that produced it; earth and wine are of the same substance, united by locality and landscape.

Alexander Kluge develops a related idea in Gardens Are Like Wells, suggesting that every person possesses an "enclosed garden"—an inner space of reflection that exists regardless of one's outward life.

He writes that monasteries in medieval Europe functioned as wells in which "the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith." At the heart of these monasteries lay an enclosed garden, where the finest plants and medicinal herbs were cultivated (Kluge 2011: 19).

Significantly, Kluge argues that these gardens existed outside the ordinary routines of monastic life. They were timeless places, dedicated to the Virgin Mary while remaining open to classical and alternative traditions, including Homer, Ovid, and the Gnostics. The enclosed garden therefore became a place where literature, contemplation, and spirituality could coexist. It represents an interiority capable of uniting mind and perception amid the complexity of contemporary life.

Kluge concludes that civilisation requires spaces that remain outside systems of production and utility:

"Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety." (Kluge 2011: 21)

This sentiment resonates with Richard Sennett's assertion that "we need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning." Such spaces provide opportunities for reflection, remembrance, and emotional renewal beyond the demands of everyday life.

The Development Company for Television Programmes (DCTP), in Gardens of Information, also adopts the emblem of the hortus conclusus. Here, the enclosed garden symbolises the relationship between barren landscapes and places of meaning. Their ambition is "to rescue facts from human indifference" and "to make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information" (Kluge 2011: 21). The garden becomes a metaphor for transforming fragmented knowledge into coherent and meaningful experience.

This understanding connects with ideas of spatial practice in the twenty-first century. Rather than forming relationships through abstract systems, institutions, or grand narratives, meaning emerges through inclusive practices rooted in particular places. The hortus conclusus can therefore be understood as a model of concentrated identity—an inquiry, a person, or a practice held within an intimate setting where thought, making, and community come together.

This version has a stronger narrative flow. Rather than reading as a sequence of research notes, it develops a continuous argument about the hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity. It also reduces repetition while preserving your quotations and references.

Correspondences~Relational Fields : Other Affordances : Analogous Experience~Clay~Thinking

Clay~Making : The Analogous Atmosphere of  Experience.

Clay+Ceramic : Immersed in a self entertaining relational field.

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation.

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning. 

Poetics of Spatial~Small Gestures

For Bachelard : Reverberations~Conduits between philosophy~poetic writing relations of human and spatial bodies.

The artwork featured in the image is titled "Apparatuses: A Litany of Echoes~Resonances" by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist's Practice: Russell Moreton is a visual fine artist who explores themes surrounding "making," architectural space, and the interplay of materials like clay to demarcate and construct environments.

Materiality: His work frequently investigates the imprint of the artist and the metaphysical, immersive nature of his chosen media, often utilizing processes that evoke construction and the physical manipulation of materials.

Architectural Inspiration: Moreton is notably drawn to the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, often using his practice to engage with the concept of architecture as tranquility.

The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret. The significance of the hut.

"He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar."

Gaston Bachelard.

 

"All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency."

Jacques Monod,

The Human/Straw Dogs, John Gray.

AI Overview

This artwork is a sculptural assemblage by Russell Moreton, featuring ceramic vessels and forms. 

The work explores themes of reverberation, innerness, and volume through a processual approach to clay. 

Moreton's practice investigates the interconnection of making interior spaces, demarcating and folding material into spatial forms. 

These pieces are described as 'extreme atmospheres' or 'fired clay labyrinths,' utilizing textural surfaces and industrial-like perforations

CLAY/Propositions/Correspondences : Letting the material speak for itself/Technicity/Generative AI.

Claywork/Correspondences/Vibrant Matter : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Reading with Deleuze and Spinoza~Radical Intuitions : Interacting with clay.

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

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton

"Claywork/Correspondences" explores how clay, as a material, and the resulting artforms, can reveal situated interactions between bodies and habitats, emphasizing the material and relational aspects of human-environment connections. 

Here's a deeper dive into the concept:

Clay as a Material of Connection:

Clay, being a natural material found in the earth, becomes a tangible link between humans and their environment. The act of working with clay, from gathering the raw material to shaping and firing it, involves a direct engagement with the earth and its processes. 

Correspondences and Situated Interactions:

The term "correspondences" suggests a relationship or connection between different things, in this case, the human body and the habitat. By examining claywork, we can understand how humans interact with their environment, how their bodies are shaped by their surroundings, and how these interactions are reflected in the art they create. 

Examples in Art and Culture:

Ceramics and Pottery: The creation of pottery and other ceramic objects demonstrates a deep connection to the earth and its resources. The process of shaping and firing clay involves a careful manipulation of the material, reflecting a knowledge of its properties and behavior. 

Figurines and Sculptures: Clay figurines and sculptures can offer insights into the beliefs, practices, and social structures of past cultures. The forms and materials used in these objects can reveal how people perceived themselves and their relationship with the natural world. 

Glazing and Decoration: The application of glazes and decorations on clay objects can further enhance the connection between the material and the artist's vision. Glazes, with their diverse colors and textures, can transform the raw material into a vibrant and expressive medium. 

Beyond the Object:

The study of claywork can extend beyond the object itself to encompass the broader context of human-environment interactions. By analyzing the materials, techniques, and cultural meanings associated with clay, we can gain a deeper understanding of how humans have shaped and been shaped by their environments. 

Mind and material engagement | Phenomenology and the Cognitive ...

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Clays and the Origin of Life: The Experiments - PMC

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PubMed Central

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Generative AI is experimental.

Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

The Becoming of Continuity/Relations.

In/Out of Material, Tony Cragg.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The Ways/Movements of Practice.

Ceramics In The Environment.

Clay, is always a working idea, a matter/material process between things, a form of thinking in process.

The Durational Time of Play/A Lure For Feeling.

You don't need a choreographer to dance, what you need is a choreographic proposition. Propositions are ontogenetic, they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience. For Manning what else is an associated milieu but a cornfield for crafting of the as yet unthought, where the microperceptual meet to create new movements in the making.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning, Always More Than One, Individuation's Dance. 2013.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

Crucible Bowls. 2020.

Slab Facades. 2021.

Rutile/Yellow Ochre/Red Iron Oxide/White Raku Slip/Transparent Raw Glaze.

The Moon Tower, Nina Hole. 2000.

The Watchdog, Michel Kuipers. 1990.

Intertwinining Thinking and Making.

Painting in Form of a Bowl.

Quietus, Cinerary Jars.

The Vessel/The Human Body.

Volumes/Voids

Clare Twomey.

Tony Cragg.

Eduardo Chillida.

Paul Soldner.

Julian Stair.

Bryan Newman.

Gordon Baldwin.

Hans Coper.

Lygia Clark.

Richard Hirsch.

Edmund de Waal.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Steven Holl.

Ceramic vessels and surfaces  for a reflective solitude, an architecture of light,silence and innerness.

Spaces between Objects/Things/Making, Giorgio Morandi.

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.

Paintings of nothing, ceramic, raw material, dry pigment, wax.

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. 

Urban Spaces, palimpsest, impressions, traces, ecologies, redundancies.

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.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, understood by the physical phenomenon of an energy or force as it flows across an obstacle. Diffraction is the process of ongoing differences, and ass such it can be used as a tool for analysis, as it attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Karen Barad.

Areas Of Presentation and Participation.

Historic and Social Sites, Art Venues and Exhibitions.

Making Theoretical Objects, Installations and Interventions.

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.

Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture.

How to build your own.

Beginning.

Model Making.

We will begin practising by constructing a room and covering it with a simple dome or a vault.

Once a person has constructed a model, within hours, he or she is encouraged to learn and understand more. The knowledge thus gained will trigger quests in building with earth. It is possible to learn the basics of thousands of years of earth architecture within a day if it is taught in the simplest terms, and  if all our senses are involved in the learning process. 

Nader Khalili.

Re-imagining learning, workshop session, conducted and initiated a walk across a landscape with clay being actively manipulated by a number of participants as they engaged with the material, their bodies and the landscape.

Beach firing at St. Ninian's Scotland, experimental kiln and site built reduction pits excavated from the beach. Pots fired and reduced with found materials, then washed in the Irish Sea.

Hans Coper, essay on professional practice, including his architectural ceramics. 

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

Sectional Works.

Slab Constructions.

Plasterwork, Pressmoulding.

Working with materials/substances/drawing and traces of making.

Raku, engobes, slips, oxides, templates, spray diffuser, stencils, fabric inclusions, intermediaries, Indentations, found objects, ferric chloride,  

Reduction materials, woodland branches through shredder.

Clay body additives, molochites, mica, vermiculite. other material,

Clay Tools : Block Strips and Combs.

Sound Vessels.

Capacitors/Insulators.

Passive, encapsulated layers.

Architectural Slab Works.

Ceramic and gesso/whitewashed/waxed/painted/bound/surfaces and structures.

The Chapel Of St.Ignatius.

House, Black Swan Theory.

Steven Holl.

Nail Collector's House, New York.

White plaster walls, hickory floors, and cartridge brass siding nailed in pattern over a wood frame, create a tactile weathering for this structure, a poetic reinterpretation of the industrial history of the site and the pre-Civil War architecture of Essex.

The jewel-like Chapel of St. Ignatius contains the essence of Holl's vision, his interest in the phenomenology of space, his passionate investigations of form and material, and his use of reflected light and colour.

The angst of a concept before spatial definition, interior and exterior are simultaneously explored.

The largest 'tilt-up' slab weighs 80,000 pounds and is filled with reinforcing steel. Its greatest stress is during the lift.

Working from the specific towards the universal.

The Built and The Unbuilt.

A theory of architecture that is mutable and unpredictable.

The body as a theoretical object doing/architecture (architecting its situatedness, Oren Lieberman)

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience