Innerness~Interior~Thresholds~Hans Coper : The ceramic propels us into becoming-with without surrendering its withdrawal.

Hans Coper and the Egyptian Vessel/Wallace Stevens 'Anecdote of the Jar'.

Studio As A Becoming Apparatus~Threshold

Clay~Fire~Ceramic. 

Sensual Object~Allure~Withdrawel

The ceramic inhabits the liminal territory not by mediating certainty, but by becoming an intercessor between what can be sensed and what remains unknowable.

Other Bodies : Investigating the transition from responsive weather~world clay to fired ceramic as a radical ontological, spatial and material threshold.

Re-reading ~ 2026

The ceramic remembers the relations that made it, but does not belong to them.

The fired ceramic allows an interiority of making to be read in two temporal directions. Its surfaces, cavities, folds and asperities carry traces backwards towards the plastic field from which they emerged, while its autonomy simultaneously projects forwards into propositions that cannot yet be known. The ceramic becomes a temporal intercessor: memory and propulsion held within the same sensate body.

Clay ~ making ~ ceramic ~ withdrawal ~ propulsion

What remains unknowable is not empty. It is a force-field of possible correspondence.

The older Moreton is still there, but the present research has passed through him and returned him to us differently. Your original proposition about the vessel as an interior space is now encountered through withdrawal, propulsion, surfacing and intercession. The earlier writing becomes a different body through which the present can think.

The ceramic becomes a quiet source of propulsion, activating the wondrous wayfaring through which we encounter the withdrawn art-object. It draws us towards its sensual presence while withholding the real object from complete access. We move through its surfaces, apertures, chambers, shadows and spatial relations, and in doing so the encounter becomes reciprocal. We are not simply looking at the ceramic; we are becoming with it.

The ceramic body remains withdrawn, yet its withdrawal is not closure. It generates a field of movement in which perception, memory, bodily attention and spatial imagination can begin to correspond. Its allure lies in this strange reciprocity: the object remains other, but its otherness becomes a condition through which we ourselves are altered.

The work therefore becomes neither a fixed form nor a message to be decoded, but a quiet propulsion into correspondence—a body with which we can become, without ever fully knowing what it is.

Russell Moreton. 

Sensing Outposts with Totem. 2025

Studio Spaces : Whitewashed with Breathing Forces. 2025

Held Together an exhibition of 70 small works to celebrate ncas 70th anniversary. 

Anteros Art Foundation, Norwich. 2026

Innerness and Interior : Surface Pleasures

In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?

Theory and Analysis. Russell Moreton

Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. 2015

This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.

In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?

Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is 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 Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.

This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)

A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.

Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.

There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.

‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson, 2009:36)

Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)

Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)

The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?

Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.

I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)

Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.

‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.

Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.

Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.

The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.

Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.

His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.

Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)

Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)

In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)

His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it helps us to gather in our surroundings.

‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson, 2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves, 2009:8)

This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.

His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?

Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.

Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

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 innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.

INSIDE THIS CLAY JUG/Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism~a hospitable field of correspondence about learning to make.

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.

Huts/Follies/Pavilions : Experimental Lives/Reworking Subjectivity.

Outpost 241024

It seems that the significance of an aesthetic event is in its future.

Timothy Morton, Realist Magic : Objects, Ontology, Causality.

Reworking Subjectivity.

Actualizing Traces.

Vectors/Inscriptions and Field Conditions.

Theory and Things.

The Intuitive Practices of the Untutored Maker.

Experimental Lives.

On Simple Huts.

On Exercising Experience.

Huts, as Folly or Pavilion, serving a deeper impulse of curiosity, pleasure, experimentation, discipline. While the primitive hut belongs equally to 'what architecture is' and to 'what architecture is not' ironically its greatest significance may derive from the many non architectural ideas it engages.

Anne Cline.

Giving way to the nature of materials, new sensitivity, new subjectivity.

Ceramic objects of open intervals, intersections, inner places, and places in-between. 

These primal images give us back houses in which the human beings certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life. A life that would be our own that would belong to us, in our very depths.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Ann Cline.

It would seem then that the search for the primitive hut begins in play. A deconstructing process in which children seem to examine what is given them, intent upon taking it apart. While Rykwert's primitive is founded in the expression of origins, collectively imagined and believed. Bachelard's primitive is founded in the expressions of youth, not as vulgar nostalgia (as he emphatically warns) but in images as we should have imagined them during the 'original impulse' of youth.

In other times of cultural transition, the primitive hut, as invention or as a construct of experience, has brought humans to the edge of their normative existence and from there allowed perspective and experimentation.

The more 'primitive' the hut the more its creators recognized the arbitrariness of their own culture.

Within the inhabited hut, cultural issues and practices readily converge with an agility larger structures can never match. Huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and lifestyle. The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

Divertissements and spectacles cover over the most basic human aspiration, to know what it is to have a human life.

Earth-House-Hold.

Gary Snyder. 1969

AM1.

Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion, History, Photography.

The Production of Space.

The Poetics of Space.

A Species of Spaces.

Space is not 'a priori' but rather a matter of relations between objects (things/phenomena).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Spatial Practices/Making Agency.

Circulation Diagram/Body/Space/Living/Activities/Production.

Movements/Interactions/Spaces/Volumes.

Tentative/Procedural Architecture (existential experiencing of built spaces).

Arakawa and Gins.

Body/Bodies as vector of movements/interactions/overlapping/navigating through interlocking/disparate spatial volumes.

Making and Meaning.

Andrew Higgott.

Peter Salter: Building Projects.

Architectural Association School.

Work created in design units such as that of Mike Gold, starting with the human figure as generator, or of Peter Wilson, prioritized sensibility over articulated theory, the evocative over the concrete: but the approach came to be evident in many student projects beyond these units. Much of this work was concerned with creating new forms of an architecture of meaning, and generating this meaning through a variety of intuitive devices.

As Peter Salter's own work developed, his interest in structural ingenuity gave way to a new sensitivity and subjectivity. A sensitivity to site and to the nature of materials, subjectivity in terms of making the personal and particular response. Seeing precedent in the practice of the Smithsons and other recent architects, but also in the practice of the untutored maker of things.

Grounding his work in the realization of the transformation of materials from natural form to the making of space: actualizing traces of context and echoes of history in its making. Rather than the more obvious and simple course of collaging fragments of pre-existing forms, it understands such devices and has an intuitive resonance of them. 

Architecture in Abjection.

What Greg Lynn in the 1990s is laying out here, following Deleuze and Guattari, is a relational understanding of the world, as opposed to an understanding based on things. For Deleuze and Guattari, relations occur not only between things but within the things themselves, such that the world is a vibrating field of potential, never in a moment of stasis or being but always changing. It is therefore very much about the in-between, and it is this in-between, this field of relations, that is a multiplicity.

Although Lynn's reference to and adoption of philosophical concepts has no doubt been productive not only for his own practice but for the architectural discipline as a whole, the simplification of that philosophy serves to overlook many further-reaching implications, such as the reworking of subjectivity.

Simplification of borrowed thought is thus one key criticism in this respect. The other, which applies not only to Lynn but also to architects engaging with the concept of emergence, rests in the application of that thought as an organisational and form-generating strategy.

Influenced by the emergent behaviours within networks, swarms, flocks and so on, the key thing to point out with the uptake of a processional or relational mode of thought within architecture is the shift in emphasis from the end product – the building – to the process through which the  building is conceived – the design process. The important aspect is how a form is generated, and how its parts interact and are organised, rather than the form itself.

Flows of various kinds and scales, make up architecture and connect it with the world.

Event (Deleuze/Guattari) as defined by Movement in terms of vectors and field relations, of Time or the idea that all things change, and Scale an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales become pertinent.

Arakawa and Gins explore a house with a client that at appears at first to be a pile of material. But that upon occupation, it expands into a habitable series of rooms whose volume shifts in relation to the movement of bodies within them.