Showing posts with label Erin Manning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Erin Manning. Show all posts

Sunday, 26 July 2026

Sensing Spaces~Telling By Hand : The Tacit Dimension : Thresholds on that we can know more than we can tell.

Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing/Making and Telling. 

Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.

The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism. 

Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.

Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold. 


On Processual Practices

For Moreton, making sets in movement exploratory sensate fictions, bodies radically emerging as they try relate, to come into being~becoming together.  








Thinking From Things.

To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.

Deleuze and Guattari.


The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its  materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.

Tim Ingold.


The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.

Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.

To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.

It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.

Tim Ingold.

Correspondences


Sensing Spaces

Making

Thresholds

The Materials of Life






Research creation collage opening up theoretical and sensate vocabularies. 2013

Confessional and Conversational Spaces. 2024

Space and Place

THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE

Yi-Fu Tuan.


Are you interested in the idea of threshold?

What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.

The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.

A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.

Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.



Telling By Hand.

The Humanity of the Hand.

The Eyes of the Skin.


Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.


Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram

Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object

Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.

Merleau-Ponty. 


Michael Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.


Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of  what it means to know.

Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.

The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.

In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.

Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another. 


Sunday, 12 July 2026

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 ...

1 Dec 2018 — The preferred analytical convention is to break the line's cognitive life into pieces: first by separating ourselves fro...


Springer

Clays and the Origin of Life: The Experiments - PMC

In our view, the most promising theory to explain the origin of life is centered around the interaction of active sites on clay mi...

PubMed Central

Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness ...

But there is a key difference: in contrast to the map, Indigenous human life on land is omitted. However, three small figures can ...


British Art Studies

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)



Wednesday, 8 July 2026

The Black Workbooks : Forces of juxtaposed areas.

Harleston 290623
Research Creation : Revisiting the image archive as an anachive for movements in material matters.

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

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

Black Artist's Books
Visual Art, WSA 2007 



























Like a mist or fog that makes their surface sparkle at speeds that no one of our thresholds of consciousness could sustain.
Deleuze, 1993.

Friday, 3 July 2026

Towards~Making a holding in place : Tentative Architectures/Ecologies~Wayfaring : Clay/Prebiotic World/Correspondences

Cairns-Smith suggested that the present essential elements of biology-nucleic acids and catalyzing proteins-evolved on a kind of prebiotic scaffolding. Ultimately the scaffolding disappeared, leaving behind the biochemistry that now controls the processes of all living things. The vanishing supporting structure, in the view of Cairns-Smith, could have been clay.


Life Search, Time-Life Books.

05/03/2013










Monday, 29 June 2026

Correspondences and Mediums /Drawing/Speculative Learning Environments

Outpost 300823


Mediums To Correspond With.

The Situatedness of Sinuous Form/Animacy Dancing.

Living/Learning with intensity/shelters and camps, Architectural Association Field Projects.







Garden Constellation.

Raveningham Transductive Mapping/Diagram.

Cyanotype Spatial Drawing.


Transducers convert the 'ductus' the kinetic quality of the gesture and its flow or movement from one register of bodily kineasthesia to another of material flow. 



Brockwood Teaching Academy. 2011.


Speculative Learning Environments.


Brockwood Park Grounds.

A walk in the landscape whilst moving-making with clay.

Developing a mindfulness that is immanent in the attentiveness to ones surroundings through the playfulness of material and others.


Brockwood Park Library.

Hidden Curriculum.

Assemblage in the library for the re-imagining of architectural thinking and spaces for learning.

Architecture without architects.



Throwing Sticks.


The energies of the work,come from the gathering of materials and the gesture that animates them. For Goldsworthy the strength of the work lies precisely in the energies emanating from materials in their movement, growth and decay, and in the fleeting moments when they come together as one. Throwing as Goldsworthy shows us is not so much the outward effect of an embodied agency as the propulsion of animate being as it pulls, spills out into the world, it is the propulsion of life itself. 

Ingold/Goldsworthy



Relationscapes/Erin Manning




Making.

The Propulsion Of Animate Being.

Tim Ingold.


The Clay-The Potter-The Wheel.

The potter's feeling flows in and out in a correspondence with the clay.


You do not need clay to 'interact' with the wheel, but you do need a wheel to 'correspond' with the clay. In pottery the mindful or attentive bodily movement of the practitioner, on the one hand and the flows and resistances of the material on the other, respond/correspond to one another in counterpoint of affective resonances, sentient awareness, and the  flows/currents of animate life.


The distinction between interaction and correspondence if that, interaction is the dance of agency between definable points and objects, whilst correspondence can be seen as the dance of animacy weaving between all things and their phenomenal flux in the world.



In the dance of animacy bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing morphogenetic field of forces.


The flow of air, the wind, the breath of life are all the very antithesis of embodied agency.


For Ingold the very idea of agency and agents is the corollary of a logic for a closed system of embodiment, a system of closing things up in themselves.  


Making/Intuition In Action.

Beyond mere human embodiment and objects and into a world full of correspondences/animacies that propel things and phenomena into the world. 

World Without Objects, Tim Ingold.


The choreographic diagram/proposition generates less the stability of a complex of form, than the foregrounding of a field of resonance that defines a certain quality of activity. It speaks/seeks to create a drawing/diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the very qualities of movements and their expressibility such that their force of form can be felt.

Erin Manning.



Drawing, seeing made visible, through the pencil as transducer, not a vector of projection or a bridge between the architects imagining mind and the image on the paper.


The mark on paper leads as much as it is led.



Tim Ingold 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.



Individuation's Dance, pushing your consciousness deep into every atom and cell.

Atom and Cell, Nine Horses, David Sylvian.




Correspondences.

The Material of Life.

Drawing into the animacy of things and feelings.


The drawing that tells is a correspondence of kinaesthetic awareness and the line of flight, it is a correspondence that is alternatively sewing the line into the mind and the mind into the line in a suturing action that grows tighter as the drawing proceeds.

The Stage of Drawing, A Walk for Walks Sake, Bryson.


Instead of dictating a thought, the thinking process turns into an act of waiting-listening-collaborating-dialogue in which one gradually learns the skill of co-operating with one's own work. This thinking, this imagining goes on as much in the hands and fingers as in the head, it is strung out in the lines of practice.

Pallasmaa/Ingold.


Thinking Through Drawing.

Barry Phipps.


Drawing is a gathering and a co-operating with one,s own work, a pulling together closer of the lines of inquiry. 


Drawing The Line.

Making/Transduction and Perdurance.


Tim Ingold suggests colour saturates consciousness, line leads it. Thus if the line traces a process of thought then colour is its temperament. Both line and colour are modalities of feeling, but where line is haptic, colour is atmospheric. 



All Buildings are Drawings.

Simon Unwin.


Only in the eyes of the architect is the trowel a bridge between the initial design and the final construction. For the builder it allows him to navigate the treacherous waters that flow beneath.

Tim Ingold.


When one is young and narrow minded, one wants the text and the drawing to concretise a preconceived idea, to give the idea an instant and precise shape.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Friday, 12 June 2026

Making Processual Paths Of Volatility : Ceramics/Sinopis Red/Palette from Antiquity.

Outpost 171225

Early palette from Antiquity:

White, yellow ochre, sinopis red (earth red), black (bluish).

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art. 2007


Intricate Local Behaviours : Conversations/Correspondences between unrelated entities.

Lines. (Making/Thinking/Matter/Material)

Tim Ingold











What Is Art ?

Joseph Beuys.


I find it interesting that you say that this stool or box speaks to you, whereas this floor, as you said, doesn't. A similar thing happens to me, and I ask myself: What is this due to, the fact that it doesn't speak to me, or only a little? It makes me think that these ready-made things, this precision, actually compels me to behave in a particular way, not just these things here, but also a certain window, or a specific type of architecture that is very fixed very straight, that derives from something very thought out; this compels me to live or behave in a similar way,

Volker Harlan.


Beuys: Yes, right, exactly; in other words, this lives (points to the box) while the other (points to the floor) is dead. The first doesn't force itself on you, the other continually forces itself on you.

Thinking Processual.

Resistance/Viability : Mapping/Living

Meaning that it is not so much a matter of crossing boundaries, but rather a matter of open-endedness. A place where boundaries have become diluted and single figures are already coupled or heterogeneous figures (in the case of Bacon, man-animal).


Kovar/Deleuze.

The Architecture of Abjection.

The Logic of Sensation.


Working From Simple Things/Gestures/Materials.

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










Theoretical Movements in Clay+Ceramics.

The Circular/Elliptical Matter/Mattering of Things.

Gathering/Pouring/Manifolds : Forms of Thinking. 


Events.

Arte Povera.


The Way, without demarcation, rather a way of viability by which the continuum of life is renewed.


The Philosophy of Living.

Francois Jullien.


The Quiet Mind :  Silently without resistance

(Sound of barking) Do you listen to that dog? Wait, wait. Silently? Listen to it completely silently, which means without any resistance, without any irritation, just listen to it. When you listen quietly there is no resistance, there is no irritation, you do not identify yourself with the dog and the barking of it, your mind is quiet.

Meditation

The meaning of that word is to measure, basically (for oneself).

https://www.krishnamurti.org/transcript/in-meditation-there-is-no-direction/#:~:text=One%20must%20be%20wholly%20and,is%20vain,%20full%20of%20confidence


Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Kounellis/Opera, interventions, unscripted by workmen, bodies on trolleys. 

Penone, wooden frame, human body, empty frame installed in a stream.

Beuys, accumulator, clay balls, wires, simple sturdy wooden table.


Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.


The Enabling Constraint. 

Erin Manning.


Visual Art Practice. 2024


Whether abject(ion) issues forth from a human body, a space or any other entity, it sets the whole world in motion and instigates a chain of exchanges.


In 'becoming' for Deleuze and Guattari we form a multiplicitous assemblage where individual elements are blurred, and together begin to act as a kind of whole. But a whole that is not fixed, as the assemblage also has a side facing a BwO which is continually dismantling the organism.


Through abject(ion) the smells, textures and physical forms of our body space and this excrement leaking out, become fused together. We become part of the space: the space becomes a part of us.


Abject(ion) re-configure the body and space physically through the transference of matter.


Architecture Without Organs (BwO)


The BwO is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts. A whole that does not unify or totalize them. But that is added to them like a new, really distinct part.

Deleuze and Guattari.


BwO plays a role in the notion of an open subjectivity. Kovar asks, are or how are abject(ion) and BwO related, and how might this relation be played out in architecture?


The BwO for Deleuze and Guattari is a concept that uses the virtual dimensions of the body as a set of potentialities that may be activated through becoming, importantly it is a body, understood as process that is continually constructing and deconstructing connections. 


To speak of process and the continual construction and deconstruction of connections is to implicate numerous entities between which these connections are made and therefore speak of heterogeneity.



Open Subjectivities.

Unmaking The Human Body/Subject.

Blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.


Translucent assemblages are all that are left from the transparency/clarity of the morning that will soon dissipate.


Reliquaries of Light and Darkness.

Bodies, spatial and human in transitional movements. 

The Sacred and The Medical Body.


The Hospital Room.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Cronos.


 


Clay/Working/Learning/Making.

Working in Clay and Fire /Mapping Resistance and Viability.


City of Orion, ceramic objects in the landscape.

Raveningham Sculpture Trail. 2024


Ceramic works investigating the relationship of water to the human body and the architectural body of interior spaces.

Water at The Hungate, Norwich. 2023


Exhibitions with Anglian Potters.

Ferini Gallery, Lowestoft. 5

Undercroft, Norwich. 4

All Saints, Cambridge. 2

2019-2024.


Revisited Contemporary Ceramics

Things of Beauty Growing.

The Fitzwilliam Museum. 2018


Anglian Potters. 2018



Teaching Sessions, throwing/handbuilding.

Brockwood Park School. 2012-2015


Speculative Clay Workshop/Walking in the Landscape.

Teaching Academy, Brockwood Park School. 2011


Raku Firings.

St Ninian's Cave.

Scotland. 2013


Bodyscapes, raw clay installations.

Chapel Arts Studios, Andover. 2010

The Yard, Winchester. 2009 


Contemporary Craft Ceramics. 2004-2006 

Life Drawing/Sculpture, figurative/abstractions in clay. 1996-2002


Dexterity Crafts.

Potter throwing domestic pottery.

Walton on the Hill. 1985


Ceramics, architecturally influenced vessels in slab and thrown processes.

Epsom College of Art and Design. 1981-1984


Industrial Pottery experience.

Grayshott Pottery. 1979-1981


Studio Pottery experience. 

The Hop Kiln Pottery. 1978


A Level Ceramics.

Farnham Sixth Form. 1976-1978