I think this is now a learning correspondence ecologically open with others participating in a spatial practice of learning to make.
Yes. I think “learning correspondence” is a particularly productive development of what is already present in Inside This Clay Jug. It shifts the emphasis from research as something you gather and then apply, towards research as an ecologically open practice in which knowledge is produced through participation, encounter and making.
The important distinction is that “others” need not mean only other artists or theorists. They can include materials, organisms, architectures, images, texts, tools, environments, histories, gestures and processes. Each participates differently in the formation of the work. This makes your research less like a lineage of influences and more like a distributed spatial practice of learning.
I would perhaps articulate your present position like this:
The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.
And there is something particularly interesting in “learning to make” rather than simply “learning through making.” The former suggests that making itself is not a skill already possessed by the artist; it is something the practice continually discovers through its encounters. Clay, for instance, does not simply receive knowledge. It alters the conditions under which knowledge can emerge.
This also gives your earlier material a new continuity. The vessel, interior, hole, piddock, body, architecture, and ecology can all be understood as different situations in which an organism or material learns how to inhabit and transform a space.
So the trajectory might now be:
spatial research → correspondence → participation → ecological openness → learning → making
with the clay acting as a medium through which these relations become materially perceptible.
I also think this allows you to retain the beautiful tentativeness of the working document. You don't need to declare what the ontology is. Instead, the ontology is being formed through the correspondences themselves.
One formulation that feels very close to your current position is:
I understand the practice as an ecologically open learning correspondence, in which making becomes a spatial mode of participation. Materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures enter into relation, each altering the conditions of the others. Rather than applying knowledge to material, I am interested in how knowledge emerges through these encounters: a shared, unfinished process of learning to make.
That feels like a natural continuation of the earlier Inside This Clay Jug research rather than a new theoretical overlay.
Jackie Leven and American poet Robert Bly, opening Leven's 1994 album The Mystery of Love (Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death). The track features Robert Bly reciting a translation of a 15th-century poem by the mystic Kabir, starting with the famous lines, "Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains.
Choreographic objects draw us into a spaciousness/event-time a doubleness of time that incites us to invent with time. They also alert us to the processuality of objects. For objects are, like bodyings, more force than form. They are not preorchestrated constellations ready to be taken up into processual experience. They are themselves processes, lures: edgings, tendings, shadowings.
Objects are relational and they exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.
Erin Manning, Always More Than One.
Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space. (Schaik,2008:80)
‘The phenomenology of space – the matter of how we experience it.’
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
russellmoreton.com
So I’ve looked through the linked Inside This Clay Jug material, and I think there is a very clear correspondence between that earlier research and what you are now developing around holes, piddocks, topoanalysis, ecological personing, iteration and unknowability.
What strikes me is that the older text already contains several of the structures that are now becoming more explicit in your ontology of practice. In particular:
Bachelard: interiority is not simply an architectural inside; space becomes psychologically and corporeally lived, imagined and remembered.
The vessel: the interior is not an absence but a defined space—“carved out air”—which makes the vessel simultaneously object, enclosure and spatial experience.
Architecture: you were already questioning the distinction between object and environment, particularly through Kengo Kuma and Caruso St John.
Ingold: making is not the imposition of a preconceived form but an intervention into material forces and flows.
Iteration: the Tapies material introduces repetition not as reproduction but as continual questioning/becoming.
Organism–Person–Environment: this phrase already appears in your research and now seems particularly important in relation to the piddock.
Your current thinking could therefore be understood less as a departure from that earlier research and more as a material deepening of it. The vessel's interiority has moved into the perforation; the architectural enclosure has become porous; the phenomenological space has become ecological; and the individual gesture has become a distributed field of repeated actions.
I would be careful, though, about making Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, etc. into a chain of theoretical references. Your strongest position is that the clay itself is where these correspondences become operative.
For example:
Bachelard asks what an interior does to the imagination.
The piddock asks what a body does to material.
Arakawa and Gins ask what an environment does to the body.
Deleuze asks what happens when repetition produces difference.
Your clay asks what happens when all four become materially entangled.
That gives you a much more distinctive ontology.
Clay Jug
Inside this clay jug there are canyons, and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. All seven oceans are inside and hundred of millions of stars.
Words, Kabir, Jackie Leven. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death
The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.
One particularly useful correspondence is between Bachelard's topoanalysis and your holes. Bachelard's spaces of intimacy—drawers, corners, nests, shells, houses, attics, cellars—are not merely containers. They are sites where memory, imagination and corporeal experience become spatially organised. Your perforations could extend this into a materially different proposition: a topoanalysis not of inhabited rooms but of material cavities produced through force.
Then the piddock radically alters the question.
The cavity is no longer simply where the subject imagines itself. It is where an organism has acted upon its environment.
This makes the hole a remarkably dense unit within your practice:
The hole is an interior produced by action.
And then your iterative process complicates it further:
The repeated hole becomes an ecology of interiors.
And finally:
An ecology of interiors becomes a spatial intelligence whose future cannot be completely known.
That seems very close to the direction you have been moving toward.
I would also slightly revise your earlier phrase “the clay supports or further surfaces them into deeper corporeal subjectivities.” The word supports risks making clay sound passive. Your thinking seems stronger if clay is understood as participating in the production of those subjectivities.
Perhaps:
The clay does not simply support these ecological conditions; it participates in their emergence, surfacing them through increasingly complex relations between body, material, environment and time.
Or, more radically:
The clay becomes a participant in the ecological production of subjectivity, where the distinction between organism, material and environment begins to loosen.
That last proposition seems especially important because it connects your older architectural/interior research to your current material practice without forcing the connection. Your research has effectively moved:
interior → vessel → cavity → body → organism → environment → ecology → becoming.
And the hole is the small material event through which that entire trajectory can be experienced.
Atemwende : A
breathturn.
Edmund de Waal.
The Great Glass Case of
Beautiful Things:
About the Art Of Edmund
de Waal
Adam Gopnik. 2013.
The Sensuality of the
Clay Body.
‘You have to work
quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus
with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the
different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing
with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour
and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny
black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)
The throwing of pots
still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down,
gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if
by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume,
inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the
morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s
nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.
(Gopnik,2014:6)
Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)
The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)
Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being.
Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.
Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.
Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.
For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.
Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.
Inner Worlds : Photographic Visions
Beuys - Klein - Rothko
Transformation and Prophecy
Anne Seymour
The Inner Eye
Art Beyond the Visible
Marina Warner
Thinkers and Vessel
Makers.
Ceramic space and life Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced. Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)
I like, the hole is an interior produced by action, and that it is a small material event through which an entire trajectory, line of flight can be experienced. I want to keep my original text as is, and ask can you summarise my present position as something that gathers into a statement of current activities.
Yes. I think the new section should gather rather than explain—bringing the piddock, holes, memory, iteration, topoanalysis, corporeality and the unknowable future into your existing research without making the theoretical references feel overly declarative.
It can function as a current-position passage: a point where the earlier research opens into what you are doing now.
Current Activities ~ The Hole as an Interior Produced by Action
12/08/2026.
My current activities extend this research into the material and ecological conditions of the hole. I am interested in the hole not simply as an opening, perforation or absence, but as an interior produced by action: a small material event through which an entire trajectory, a line of flight, can be experienced.
The boring of the clay has become an important gesture within this inquiry. I am thinking through the piddock, an organism whose living presence is registered through the material it excavates. The piddock does not simply inhabit its environment; through its bodily actions it participates in producing and transforming it. Its presence persists as an absence, as a cavity, a displacement of material that records an encounter between organism, matter and environment.
This offers a way of reconsidering the holes within my own clay work. Each hole is exact and particular, carrying the physical data of a gesture: pressure, diameter, depth, position, duration and resistance. Yet their multiplicity begins to move beyond the scale of the individual action. Repetition produces difference. A minor gesture accumulates into a larger ecology.
I am increasingly interested in how these gestures can be transferred from other sources—templates, drawings, measurements, found structures, previous works and physical encounters—and then subjected to iteration. Data moves between materials and situations, but is never transferred intact. Each iteration introduces deviation, resistance, contingency and transformation. The template becomes a proposition rather than a fixed instruction.
Here I return to questions of interiority and spatial experience encountered through Bachelard's topoanalysis, and to the architectural and spatial research that first opened these questions within my practice. The interior is no longer understood simply as an enclosed architectural space. It can emerge through an action upon matter. The hole is an interior produced by action. It is simultaneously cavity, trace, absence, passage and evidence of a body having moved through material.
The work is also informed by the possibility of environments as active participants in the formation of experience. The holes become minor spatial conditions, potential landing sites through which the body encounters a field that is already changing. Their exactitude establishes a provisional order, while their accumulation produces something increasingly difficult to determine.
I am therefore interested in moving the work towards a space that remains open to the unknowable. The clay becomes less a surface upon which an image is imposed and more an active field of correspondences between body, material, organism, environment and time. Through these minor gestures, the whole ecology begins to move.
What emerges is not a predetermined form but a material trajectory: a line of flight generated through repetition, difference and correspondence, moving the work towards a future space that cannot yet be fully known.
MATERIAL MATTERS ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE Katie Lloyd Thomas
PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER. GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY Peg Rawes
ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION
The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Dalibor Vesely
The Nature of Communicative Space Creativity in the Shadow of Modem Technology
The Rehabilitation of Fragment
Towards a Poetics of Architecture The Projective Cast
Architecture and its Three Geometries
Robin Evans
Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it
Analysing ARCHITECTURE
Simon Unwin
Geometries of Being Architecture as Making Frames Space and Structure
Poetics as an evolving
and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental
changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that
are not just about place and space.
‘Speculations about
the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the
universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we
form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the
contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in
which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in
our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It
is also about propositions around the complex relationships between
inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology
of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)
‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst
of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to
search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is
called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’
Kengo Kuma.
On Anti-Object : An
extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of
self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to
contextualise his own body of work through considered
self-reflection.
‘My purpose in
writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred
and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.
‘Like McTiernan or
the theorist PaulVirilio, Kuma sees new digital and information
technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather
than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)
‘My ultimate aim
is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3)
How then, can
architecture be made to disappear?
‘To be precise, an
object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate
environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of
singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some
extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made
distinct from their environment are very different from those that
attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible
to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)
Ceramics and
Architecture.
Exhibition Spaces of
the Enlightenment
The Porcelain Rooms
The pot, ancient as it
is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from
the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious
and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning
objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our
need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Together these new
porcelain vessels collectively produced for De Waal an experience of
possessed space.
These collections of
vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of
the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of
an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a
small pot.
The ceramic module
that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional
as possible. (Gopnik,2014:9)
‘Even if we insist on
seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates
the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They
gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed
together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines
of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them
brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry
and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by
De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”
1919.
‘The Jar, the
elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air
around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like.
Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)
Gopnik comments that we
can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he
notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to
read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of
space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the
heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware
that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.
De Waal’s work brings
about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict
ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and
the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy
promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with
the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His
control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his
installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors
and negative spaces.
The relations of the
architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in
some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like
the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they
are held hostage by their surroundings.
The empathy we feel for
their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately
forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have
been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they
still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown
clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that
is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What
remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of
spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention
for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their
surroundings.
Does? ‘His art takes
a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory.
Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots. Along
each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Craft and Art, Skill
and Anxiety.
Craft is logic, and art
defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the
artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The
anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she
has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)
DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION
Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction
History is the raw material of architecture. Aldo Rossi
The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.
Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002
The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.
Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear facade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the facade.
Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.
For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.
Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.
INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.
QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.
INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY
CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS
Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.
The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.
New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John
The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the comers, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight.
The Brick House, London, Caruso St John
ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.
CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)
Hortus Conclusus
Often translated as meaning “a serious place”. Enclosed all round and open to the sky.
STOA, building and social structure for dialogues
A garden/a mindfulness in an architectural setting.
What happened to the garden that was entrusted to you? Antonio Machado, Jackie Leven.
“Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)
Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smalls and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.
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.
There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.(Zumthor 2011: 15)
Illustration of “Orchard”, from Bible of Wenceslaus IV, Vienna, Austrian National Library
Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.
Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community. Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to 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 Vintner’s Luck , Elizabeth Knox.
Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.
The Potter, clay, agency, making, Ingold.
The Pot, object, nearness, pastoral, Heidegger.
I like this a lot, has the feel of a working document, in that it holds a position whilst giving space for other propositions to become realised. I also like its tentativeness in acknowledging other sources, its force-feeling for me allows the research material of others a hospitable space for future correspondences. I use visual material as a kind of synergy with the research, as it there are a number of ontological positions at play.
Yes—I think that is an important quality to preserve. The text is functioning less as a conclusion than as a provisional gathering point: it establishes where the practice is presently moving without closing down what the research might become.
"What concepts does this work make possible?
Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism.
Not metaphorically.
It has rhythms.
Memory.
Accumulation.
Decay.
Repetition.
Waiting.
Interruptions.
The ceramic work is one organ within that larger body.
This resonates with your attraction to Kovar's understanding of architecture as corporeal and continually negotiated. Yet your emphasis on the studio adds something distinctive. The studio is not just where practice occurs; it is a spatial ecology that continually shapes and is shaped by the acts of making within it.
What you describe as a hospitable space for future correspondences is particularly useful. It suggests that your references are not there to substantiate a predetermined argument. Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, topoanalysis, architectural space, ecological thinking and your own material procedures can remain in relation without needing to resolve into a single theoretical position.
I also think your visual material is crucial here. It means the research isn't operating only through written propositions. The images can hold different ontological positions simultaneously—perhaps sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes resonating, sometimes opening a thought that the writing cannot yet articulate. The visual and textual materials can therefore work synergistically rather than illustratively.
That gives me a slightly different sense of the phrase “research material of others a hospitable space.” You are not necessarily applying theory to the work. You are creating conditions in which materials, images, texts, organisms, gestures and spaces can meet and alter one another.
I would hold onto something like this as a methodological proposition:
The research remains provisional: a hospitable field in which propositions, images, materials and theoretical positions can enter into correspondence without being required to resolve into a singular ontology.
And perhaps even more closely to your language:
Visual material operates alongside the writing as a form of synergy, allowing different ontological positions to remain active within the research. The image does not illustrate the proposition; it enters into correspondence with it, extending, troubling or redirecting what the writing might otherwise determine.
This seems to explain something quite fundamental about your working document. It is not trying to demonstrate what the practice means. It is constructing a field in which meaning can continue to emerge.
That also makes the tentativeness a strength rather than a lack of certainty. The use of perhaps, I am interested in, offers a way of, might, and becomes keeps the research porous. The writing can hold a proposition long enough for the studio, the visual material and the next encounter to test it.
In that sense, your “line of flight” is not just describing the trajectory of the finished work. It describes the research document itself: a movement through correspondences in which the next proposition is not yet known.
I have just surfaced this last chat to be read at the beginning of Inside This Clay Jug, love the way it changes, constantly changes all sorts of potential ecological positions.
Yes — and I think that changes how Inside This Clay Jug can be understood retrospectively.
Rather than treating it as an early text that established a fixed theoretical position, the newly surfaced conversation lets it become the beginning of an ecology of propositions. The text can remain where it was, but the later material reveals that its concerns were already capable of opening into other relations: vessel into interior, interior into cavity, cavity into organism, organism into environment, environment into learning, and learning back into making.
What feels especially valuable is that the work does not need to resolve these positions. They can remain co-present, provisional and potentially contradictory. The piddock doesn't have to become the explanation for the hole; Bachelard doesn't have to explain the interior; Deleuze doesn't have to explain repetition. They become participants within a changing field.
This makes the idea of ecological openness much richer. Ecology here isn't simply a subject matter. It becomes a way of organising the research itself: things are permitted to enter, correspond, diverge, recur and transform one another.
I think this sentence from our recent conversation could become almost a methodological key to the whole archive:
The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.
And perhaps the most exciting thing is that the document itself starts behaving like the practice. It accumulates holes, traces, repetitions, deviations and lines of flight. An idea encountered years ago can be bored into by a later one; a theoretical position can become a material gesture; an image can reopen a sentence; a minor action can move the whole ecology.
So Inside This Clay Jug is no longer simply a text about your practice.
It becomes one of its living chambers.
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