Vessels of Retreat/Dark Pots : The Body and its Entanglements with Things/St Ninian's Cave, Scotland.

Vessels of Retreat : Dark Pots around the Innerness of Ceramics 

Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places

Thrown ceramic vessels fired on the remote beach at St Ninian’s Cave, Scotland.

 

These vessels were originally thrown on a momentum wheel situated in the small niche like space of a scriptorium. The interiority of the bowls seek to reflect the quietness and openness of a ‘retreat’ through material and the muted light of its surroundings. A post firing process was employed of removing the bowls and their still molten interior into a chamber excavated on the beach to become reduced by local organic material and to cool. Once cooled the bowls were washed in the Irish Sea to reveal their glazed interiors for the first time.

Heidegger’s topology, Being Place, World.

Jeff Malpas on the concept of place and how it relates to core philosophical issues found in Heidegger’s engagement with place, his philosophical starting point: of finding ourselves already ’’there” situated in the world, in “place.”

Clarifying the relation between space and place which contains inherent difficulties in as much as they are necessarily connected (inasmuch as place carries a spatial element within it even while space is also a certain abstraction from out of place), but there has been a pervasive tendency for place to be understood in terms of purely spatial. Jeff Malpas

SPACE= ROOM TO MOVE

or as a verb To Make EMPTY, EVACUATE, EMPTY OUT. The Production of Space/Human Agency/Place

PLACE=VTLLAGE, TOWN, or OTHER SETTLED LOCALITY.

PLACE=HOME

PLACE=A VERY SPECIFIC FORM OF BOUNDEDNESS/GATHERING As a gathering of elements that are themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together within the place they also constitute.

DESIGN=TO PUT IN PLACE

Place referred to merely in the sense of position or location - usually the location or position of some already identified and determined entity.

Slippages, Anomalies and liminal spaces. Our relationships with space and place.

THE MEMORY OF PLACE

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE UNCANNY

Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape into the body and its experience of the world. Trigg analyses monuments in the representation of public memory, “transitional” concepts such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves.

STOA, a complex topology.

The Stoics took their name from the place where they met. In the stoa they talked as they walked along the long shaded alcoves. The stoa offered shelter from the sun and rain without becoming an enclosed room. It was an in-between and transitional space, neither outside nor inside. Conversations could commence through casual interruptions in a site of gossip, rumour and information.

We imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation and for sociality without the duty of domestication.

The stoa is the pivot point at which private and public spheres interact and from which the cosmopolitan sense of being and belonging from the vantage point of the stoa, then the telematic linking of two screens in the public squares of Australia and Korea can be viewed in a new light.

The linking of these screens creates a new transnational public space, a space for the creation of a new discourse on the topology of the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art practice.

Thinking the place of art within this context is more than jumping from either the local to the global, the private/oikos to the public/bouletrion, or even the singular to the universal. It is more like the liminal zone of the stoa.

Public Screens and Participatory Public Space Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire

Flesh and Stone,

The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Richard Sennett.1994

Basically a long shed, the stoa contained both cold and hot, sheltered and exposed dimensions; the back side of the shoa was walled in, the front side consisted of of a colonnade which gave access onto the open space of the agora. Though free-standing the stoas were not conceived as independent structures, but rather as edging for the open space of the agora.

Sennett: Flesh and Stone, page 50. Bringing Things to Life

Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials Tim Ingold

EWO= The Environment Without Objects

THINKING AT WAVERLEY, as a site of multiplicity and memory. Walking is Thinking, Richard Long

Heidegger-To participate with the thing in its thinging

Our most fundamental architectural experiences, as Juhani Pallasmaa explains, are verbal rather than nominal in form. They consist not of encounters with objects - the facade, door-frame, window and fireplace - but of acts of approaching and entering, looking in or out, and soaking up the warmth of the hearth (Pallasmaa 1996: 45). 

As inhabitants, we experience the house not so much as an object but as a thing. (Ingold 2008: 8)

Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places

Ceramic Gate/Waverley Stoa : Objects in a landscape/studio space of Gordon Baldwin

One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity, Miwon Kwon. 1997

The Reading Room (a library of subjective taxonomies on the alchemy of building)

The Listening Room (a soundscape interior in time with its environment)

The Sheltering Corridor (a modernist Stoa as a place for encounters/dialogues)

The Pot Room (a installation of thrown objects creating the interior partitions)

The Empty Studio (a adaptation of architecture through the ritual of creativity)

Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object, mindfully and experientially explores voids, vernacular materials and agency of spaces.

Utsu means nothing or emptiness, the void.

Wa means the border between nothing and something.

I want to make what we don’t see, and that means I must make what we see. My work is a container for what we don’t see.

Taizo Kuroda, Potter.

Natural Connections, Exhibition Proposal.

Humanities about the processes and experiences that map the evolving human condition.

Humanities and the Arts.

The Body and its Entanglements with Things.

The Ceramic House, 

A space of life. 

Exhibition 

Architecture of the ceramic vessel

Ideologies of Innerness 

The Archive

Flesh can house no memory of bone; only bone speaks memory of flesh. Voids, spaces between the bones, residues of the flesh

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Understanding the beliefs and practices that enable Relational Egalitarianism 

Kuper, Tim Ingold

Exhibitions, Pavilions, Huts and Observatories.

The Parallel of Life and Art, Alison and Peter Smithson The Physical Self, Peter Greenaway

Thames Dig, Mark Dion

The Barcelona Pavilion, Mies de Rohm

The Solar Pavilion, Alison and Peter Smithson

Field Photography: Light on Natural Phenomena and Site.

Pinhole photography and photograms on light sensitive paper with annotations from both research material and working practices. Visual material and artefacts acquired from archaeological sites whilst participating in recording the archaeological process at St Mary Magdalene Leper Hospital, Mom Hill, Winchester. The work explores subjectivities in the recording of natural phenomena, the spirit of place and its scientific inquiry and production of fabricated forms in the realm of a contemporary art context.

The Social : Catching The Light/Architectural Apparatuses/Spatial Methodologies

It would probably not be wrong to define the ex­treme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses.

To recapitulate, we have then two great classes: liv­ing beings (or substances) and apparatuses. And, be­ tween these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a sub­ject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses. Naturally, the substances and the subjects, as in ancient metaphysics, seem to over­ lap, but not completely. In this sense, for example, the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification.­

 I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of liv­ing beings.

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Alternative Photography : Photography and Architectural Space.

Photogram, a numinous construction, spaces amongst and within other spaces

Catching The Light.

The Entwined History of Light And Mind. Arthur Zajonc

PROXIMITY OF SPACE 

INTIMACIES IN SOCIAL SPACES 

SCRIPTORIUM

THREE STAGE METHODOLOGY (Kikutake) Mitsuo Taketani 

KA ‘ESSENCE’

KATA ‘SUBSTANCE’ 

KATACHI ‘PHENOMENON’ 

Characteristics of an architect

CHI ‘BLOOD’

TACHI ‘TEMPERAMENT’ 

KATACHI ‘EMBODIMENT’

The Phenomenology of Reading. GLAS, Derrida Literature and Language. 

The Stride of The Mind

Reading Rooms. Figuring Space. Text/Fumiture/Dwelling Reading with Paths

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012 

Relativity/Relationality through Walking and Thinking. Subjectivity. Space - Politics - Affect

Waverley Abbey. Cistercian Monastery

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre- spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg 

Immaterial Architecture : The Glass Observatory

Photograph (132) Cyanotype Alternative Photography

Documents from research archive

Tracing Light: Petworth House, West Sussex 2000 David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

Light And The Genius Loci

For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in 'a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun in the system of perception'.

Mutations Of Light

Petworth Window, 6 July 1999 Light's Windows And Rooms

Passing towards the Invisible.

The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent theme in William Henry Fox Talbot's early speculations.

CATCHING THE LIGHT

The entangled history of light and mind Arthur Zajonc

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900 Sight Unseen

Picturing The Universe Corey Keller

Invisible objects, penciled by nature's own hand.

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the 'world itself.

The Social Photographic Eye Jennifer Tucker

Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.

An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand.

Invisible Worlds Visible Media

Tom Gunning

William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6x22.5 cm.

Techniques Of The Observer

On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century Jonathan Crary

The Camera Obscura and its Subject

Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject­ effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' world.

UNDER THE SUN

By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.

An Epiphany Of Light

David Alan Mellor

Christopher Bucklow, Guests Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Matter is provisional and that includes me. If the physics is correct then we are neither alive or dead as we commonly understand it, but in different states of potentiality.

From The Adamantine Land

Variations on the art of Christopher Bucklow David Alan Mellor

Etienne-Jules Marey

A Passion For The Trace Francois Dagognet

Painting, Photography, Film Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

A Bauhaus Book

L. MOHOLY-NAGY:

DYNAMIC OF THE METROPOLIS SKETCH FOR A FILM

ALSO TYPOPHOTO OSKAR SCHLEMMER

MAN

Interaction of Color Josef Albers

The Elements of Color Johannes Itten

Pedagogical Sketchbook Paul Klee

The New Landscape in art and science Gyorgy Kepes

The Colour of Time Garry Fabian Miller

The Majesty of Darkness Adam Nicolson

The Unmade

The Pregnant

The Half Erotically Unmade

Camera Obscura of Ideology Sarah Kofman

An optical instrument, which used in drawing, allows one to see at the same time the objects being drawn and the paper.

I Am Not This Body 

Barbara Ess

Working Collages

Ann Wilde, Ulrike Meyer-Stump

A German Tradition of Photographic Typology

Collages made from contact prints from Blossfeldt's negatives, showing the isolation of particular motifs. The working collages were an archive, not for the negatives but for motifs.

The viewer is less interested in the subjects of the pictures, than in the effect created by the formal system subsuming them.

His photographic archive of plant forms is not a finished work, but material awaiting processing.

 

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects

Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.

The Fanciful and The Scientific.

The Playful and The Reverent.

The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.

Between Evanescence and Substance.

Between Illusion and Specificity.

Between Slickness and Tactility.

Today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus, In what way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle with ap­paratuses?

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).

Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.

Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of serenity, a poetics of dwelling.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.

Art as Spatial Practice.

Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.

West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Posted 2018

Drawing/Building Scripts : Collage/Photography

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre-spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg 

New Ceramics/Drawings/Constructions/Apparatuses/Daylight

Ceramic Forms/Inscriptions/Lines of Knowing.

Wayfaring, walking/sensing between things. 

As wayfarers we experience what Robin Jarvis has called a progressional ordering of reality, or the integration of knowledge along a path of travel.

Up. Across and Along, Tim Ingold.

Structural Modalities/Making/Tensions : Spatial Forms to gather/interact with discursive research

Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.

The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.

The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.

Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness)

Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark

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 innemess. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.

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

To build, dwell and explore the space of drawing through intuitive and abstract making.

Drawings/Constructions/Apparatuses.

There is no stage at which humankind does not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space.

Lefebrve.

Like drawings, assemblages drawn and made showing the paths taken.

Landing Sites/Holding Places.

Between The Body/Sensing Spaces/Voids.

Perceptions, body, organism, environment,

Mezzanines, lofts, basements, balconies, walkways, scaffolds, access platforms.

Living Architectures/Narratives/Dwelling within the Ruinous. 

Tarkovsky.

Bachelard.

Making Gestures and Connections in Space. 

The Memory of Objects.

The Provocative Combination of Densities.

Inner Architectures/Clay/Sensorial/Conceptual/Places

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 

And round it was, upon a hill. 

It made the slovenly wilderness 

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild. 

The jar was round upon the ground 

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere. 

The jar was gray and bare. 

It did not give of bird or bush, 

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (1919)

Innerness for the potter is always at the heart of the practice, as manifested through the opening up of the thrown vessel.

Inner spaces of defined interiors forming vessels that are intrinsically cyclical through light and dark by way of their surfaces and volumes.

Like the cellar, the pots interior and its containment of light and shadow becomes a dwelling space for a submerged primordial memory. (Bachelard/Trigg)

The clay links the vessel to both locality and our geocentric position.

‘Pleasure is moving from darkness to light and vice-versa.’ 

Grafton Architects. Sensing Spaces: 2014

The pot promotes an architecture of the soul, of an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination.

In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. 

Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.

Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment 

Splitting.

Spatial representations/cuttings into the urban/social fabric of architectural redundancy.

Gordon Matta-Clark.

The co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction, by selective excavation and creative demolition.

Castelvecchio an attitude to history. Carlo Scarpa.

Site is the un-doing of place.

Generative and provisional, site-specific investigations for sensing place.  

Hand Built, Slab Ceramics.

Oxide washes, incised lines and piercings undertaken to the raw clay forms.

Architectural Facades/Camera Obscura. 

Dark Room.

Garry Fabian Miller.

The internal mechanisms with which we see and experience visual and physical phenomena depend on a bottom-up approach. Building up from elements of abstraction, the opposite top-down approach of given figuration stifles necessary imagination.

Curiosity, imagination and enthusiasm all hold a power in the mind to ignite the creative act.

The Lake of The Mind.

Steven Holl.

Stochastic thinking suggests an interconnected ecosystem of architecture together with all of the arts to achieve new levels of correlation.lay

Making/Photography/Process and Aesthetics

Found Objects : Archaeological Photogram

When you make photograms, without the use of a camera, you can indeed call that abstract photography, as the lens and the corresponding registration medium are lacking. No longer do you have pictures of reality or objects; you only have their shadows. It is a bit like Plato’s cave, where one could only imagine reality; the objects themselves were not visible.
—Thomas Ruff

Frameworks with Enclosures 6

Of the mason's who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.
Tim Ingold 'Making'

The Mirrored Abbey :  The Photographic Aesthetics of Decay

Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason.
The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg,

TRANSPARENT MEDIA : Form,structure, space, enchantment
Double Take
15 APR - 3 JUL 2016

A two-venue exhibition exploring the relationship between drawing and photography, taking place at Drawing Room and The Photographer’s Gallery, London.

Drawing and photography are each considered the most direct, ‘transparent’ media with which to engage with the world.  They share fascinating parallels:  the relationship to the indexical, the blank sheet of paper or surface, graphite and silver, pencil weight and aperture, the sense of an invisible ‘apparatus’ (the camera and pencil), the engagement with surface, light, negative and positive and the trace. Double Take seeks to explore the multifarious ways photography and drawing have been combined and mirrored to extend both practices into new arenas in modern and contemporary practices.

“… a freehand sketch diagram that was at the tangent between idea and imagination…if the parti – the first critical diagram – is not made well, it will be difficult for architecture to follow.  If there is no parti, there will be no architecture, only (at best) little more than the utility of construction.  Buried within their early sketches is the germ of a narrative or language.  The early diagrams are reflective conversations with the language of architecture.”

-  Alan Phillips, Brighton, UK

The Mirrored Abbey : The Photographic Aesthetics of Decay

The Custodians, Richard Cowper 1976.

Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason.
The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg,

Humanity : An Emotional History
Stuart Walton. 2004

Fear
Anger
Disgust
Sadness
Jealousy
Contempt
Shame
Embarrassment
Surprise
Happiness

https://russellmoreton.wordpress.com/

Space Folds/Melts : All that is solid melts into air : Metaphors of Memory : We exist constantly reciprocating between perceptions and relations

 

All that is solid melts into air

Armature :  Memory/Personal Biographies 

The Everyday complexity of things

Saturnian Form : Lead and Library Dates

Spatiality : Space over Time

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

All that is solid melts into air

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

“What metaphor, of all those that have been discussed, best describes the memory of psychology itself’

The author Draaisma Douwe poses this question at the end of an extensive study on the nature of what might be used to give form to ideas about metaphors of memory. The use in my practice of traces, inscriptions, photographic surfaces and materials used as indexical and material memories, call me to give some sense of critical analysis to the issue of metaphor and how it might be “formed” and “utilized” in the situation of work.

The attraction of metaphors is that they bridge or “hold court” within the visual and the textual, in the physical as perhaps a object association to a situation, and in the sensibility of the poetic.

Their inherent ability to be an intermediary between a number of things , gives them a lightness, a brevity and a concise comment on a situation, they auger well as a “what remains” of an experience.

An intriguing quality of metaphors is that they are a union/relation of oppositional associations, which are realized as “go-betweens” active presentations of a specific relation or thought “placed” by the association of concrete and abstract

relations/relativities. They function by their ability to reference their “betweeness” as held open by their associative registers." There is a reference to a set of concrete relations in one situation, in order to facilitate the recognition of an analogues set of relations in another situation.”1 Metaphors are structured and formulated around abstract relations around a concrete factualness of image associations.

G. F. Beck notes that “the metaphor is an intermediary between the agencies of the sensory and the perceptual and those of the verbal and the semantic thought; it belongs neither completely to one nor the other it mediates between analogous and semantic forms of thought

In a metaphor two constituents work to create its meaning, its place of register, the topic term and the vehicle term. This topic and vehicle terminology is used by Martin and Harre' when they write “ that the topic term and the vehicle term are each the centre of a semantic field and that the interaction between these two fields enables us to produce and understand new insights.”2 This research has been further investigated and subsequently the terms structured and functional have now been applied to inform the existing relations of topic and vehicle.

These further defining terms have arisen through metaphors becoming ideally suited to “explaining and teaching theories due to their combination of image and language, and of the graphic and the abstract.”3

This ability of “metaphor” could be directed at making it site-specific to a particular set of relations, an informative teaching device, that might engender interest through its perspectival analysis.

The metaphor is in effect a vehicle of projection in as much as it can project associations of one term over that of another , granting an intermediary state given by a superimposed form over its forming relations. This transparency and its associate projection creates new forms of thought. This value/trait has been intimated by research based around “ interaction theory” presented by contemporary theorists Martin and Harre' although the fundamental theory had already been presented by I. A. Richards in 1936. Richards stated “when we use metaphor we have two thoughts active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.”4

The “essence” of metaphor is that it has the ability ( or rather one appropriates this ability) to use something with a “concrete” image in which to form relations and new forms abstracted from this originating situation. This trait creates and is resolved by a “response", giving comment and a registering of relations. The response of metaphor to a situation could be used to underline a psychological feeling or comment about place.

Another interesting feature regarding metaphor is that metaphors can display a subjectivity, they can be said to become subject to “wear and tear.”

Like all human creations metaphors are subject to wear and tear and the process of interaction between the two domains which is set in motion by a metaphor may become fainter and finally disappear.5

This interaction between “domains” that can slide and eventually fail, and in so doing become obscured , announces the arrival of the phenomenon of the “dead metaphor.” The realisation of the “dead metaphor” is that of a metaphor gradually becoming a literal expression. The metaphor and its prose becomes as it were ossified out of usage, out of the living present. On the subject of dead metaphors Draaisma remarks “ that they have lost their graphic vitality as description of human actions.” Interestingly metaphors have already as it were “been done to death” through literal representation by conceptual artists. My interest is to appropriate their ability to encapsulate differences into a relation that mediates those differences, to aid a sort of summing-up that is “placed between” and is strangely pervasive and fluid , being just held between relations that could suddenly slide or shift. Giving and creating a metaphorical attitude to accompany the experience of place.

1  G. F. Beck, The Metaphor as a mediator between Semantic and Analogic modes of thought. ( Current Anthropology 19 1978)

2  J. Martin and R. Harre', Metaphor in Science in Metaphor, Problems and Perspectives. ( Sussex 1982) 

3  Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) page 15.

4  1. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. ( Oxford. OUP, 1936) page 93.

5  Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) page 13.

MA Project Development, Reflective Journal: Notes/Analysis/Comment drawn from previous journal entries.

29 November 2009

Photography a process/operating system that holds “Loss” to Dwell in its Detail. Place and its Ruin.

Representation.

The Photograph proposes a “site of Loss” within the continuum of place.

Re-Visit Methodologies and Project Proposal, what might be still relevant and valid, what has occurred to shift the field of perspectives. What has had a limiting effect on the practice in respect to the projects original sphere of operations. Was the project ever thought of in the terms of being “representational” of the practice or was it a device to engage and formulate spatial practices. Recent personal research and events with other proposals for 2010 firmly speculate the need to greatly enlarge the structure of the practice so as to house its diversities, the project is now seen as merely a trace of my activities but it must in some way be representational in its formulation to the practice. 

This bringing together of the various fine-art and visual-art processes present in my practice can only be accomplished through a multi-disciplinary curatorial based spatial relation for the encounter of others. By the nature of a proposal “ a working site” could be seen as an intervention into place from which material sensibilities from fine art practices are interwoven in a situation and experience of spatial relations. Into this field of material and spatial relations a performative element of the practitioner being present and theorising/working could help to create a praxis of informative encounters, which might directly and immediately be implemented into the situation of site. With all this activity and its resultant research derived from site this dialogue , a methodology of sublimation could be engaged that could render down the experience. Maybe in the form of a token of participation, a site driven metaphor, an image that re-constituents the experience and findings of the situation .Added to this gesture it might be possible to engender some sense of hospitality, a feeling that the “visitor” has become an active “interlocutor” for themselves and others, and finally that they have become placed as it were, a “guest” hosted by their own singularities.

Working in and with Theoretical Methodologies in The Visual Arts

Gathering Exploratory Notations : Performative/Speculative Spatial Inquiry

 

Time as a Structure,

I

M                                          a tool acts as a intervention, a memory into material

E

A                                           an apparatus can register directional occurrences into visual information to      form from their abstraction, their objectivity, new sensibilities within our subjectivity.

    Rose Graphs (directional analysis of occurrences) used to plot the occurrences and frequencies of           childhood cancers in and around power stations.

S

A  Working Sites as spaces of experiencing practical intimacies written into the poetic.

N 

     forming relations by registering phenomena’s that collide with the everyday

E 

     time has a duality, a fluidity, a, between, and, the rehearsal has ended, and with it the misreading or        chance is rendered corrected.

V

E  memory as scared time (Chris Marker) or Memory as the intersection of event and its structure, its        dimension of spatial possibilities.

    Information, a superimposed system of transparent relations. Actor-networks, 

    Thinking Sociologically.

N

    Time as an event

Fire-Space, “objects maintain “their” condition”. Law.

Praesentia-the Phenomena of something presented in the light of its time.

Diagrammatic re-enactments drawn as reflections/introspections of a situation. 

A Cosmology of sensibilities illustrated and staged through a predilection for materials and processes, a sort of material allotropy centred around theoretical and physical phenomena.

Cyanotypes, a photographic process that uses a transparency to render a permanent opposite when exposed to sun-light and fixed by washing in water.

Self reflectivity, the ability to cope (gain wisdom) from a new set of co-ordinates and possibilities.

We exist constantly reciprocating between perceptions and relations.

Field notebooks/journals allow and support poetic observation amidst theoretical and practical workings out.

Stillness and an open stage conceived by a lyrical exactitude between trace and material. 

A place between words and worlds.

Intimacy of the practical written up into the poetic

The writers ability “Milton” to hold a number of themes fluid at the same time.