The Body and Spatial Boundaries~A Spatial Inquiry into Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Outpost 280122

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries.

russellmoreton.com

Tim Ingold.

From science to art and back again: The pendulum of an anthropologist.

https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/2237/2055

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing, entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.

Enchantment/Embodied Knowledge : The Intertwining of Vision and Movement.

The Embodied Image.

Imagination and Imagery in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa. 2011

Drawing Studio/Life Room

Outpost 280122

Assemblage : Wire, Fabric, Fired Clay, Glass on drawing.

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries

A spatial inquiry, a means of exploring agential cuts/spatial agency.

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing,entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.

Immaterial Architectures : Organizing Structures/Making Metaphysical Space

Architectural Surface : Constructional Forms in Glass
Organizing Structures : Artist Notebook, Body/Landscape

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity
Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.


Slow Photography/Blue Transitions : Phenomenology of Visual Structures

Immaterial Architectures : Raveningham Pavilion and The Architecture of Natural Light

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Other Architecture

Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION

Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION

Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."

Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Speculative Drawings/Paintings/Projects : Choreography of Light /Becoming Spatial/Figural

Immateriality and Transparency

DSC_2038 Biomedical : Architectural Glass Design
2014 Stevens Competition
Cambridge University Hospitals
Biomedical Campus

Photography and Drawing
Marks and movements of precision and indeterminacy

Outpost 240222

Procession

Choreography of light for the moving eye.

Henry Plummer, 2009.

The Interplay of Light and Movement.

The visual attraction that can electrify space with strong perceptual and emotional forces.

Simulacrum, E.ON Munich, Andreas Horlitz, 2006.

'Art in construction' is a wall installation that describes a superimposition of different systems for interpreting the world. Astronomical motifs are superimposed on micro array structures, while lines of force from the world of electricity and imaged quotations from that of quantum physics are, in turn, superimposed on the astronomical images.

Andreas Horlitz no longer saw photographic images as images intended to reflect reality, but rather as raw material to be worked, a source of artistic creativity. Photography simply supplies the material that the artist then reorders and combines in order to establish another unexpected sensual context and thus provide insight into what we perceive as reality. For Horlitz the idea of the image detail, its meaning as part of a larger reality, and the idea of superimposition have been present in the artist's work from the very beginning.

Horlitz's pictures raise the question of whether photography is even capable of reproducing the complex structures of reality.

Barbel Tannert.

Primal Images, Gaston Bachelard's loss and then recovery of light in darkness.

Due to its power to seduce and attract, light has always played a pivotal role in successions of space  that are rewarding and memorable.

Immateriality and Transparency.

Technique and Expression in Glass Architecture.

Pallasmaa, 2003.

Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich.

Ferini Gallery, Lowestoft. 

Gas Reduction Firing.

Architectural Ceramics.

Re-Installation of 20 cubic foot kiln surrounded by building materials.

 

Forming Inside Spaces

Propositions on Architectural Objects/Spaces : Hand-built slab ceramics.

Raw clay slips/oxides/glazes, paper stencils and other intermediary materials.

Post reduction, wood chippings, wire inclusions and wrappings/layerings.

Studio Thinking/Sensory and Sensate : The body in contact with its mattering.

Collage explorations between the division of things.

Immaterial and concrete materials in contact with the corporeal human/social body.

Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals, 1996.

Beyond the symbolic depictions of diagram/map or chart and their mappings/relationships.

Further Study : Working Title

Transitions : Intervals in visual thinking.

Passive/Kinetic Fields : Spatial surfaces of agency between Fine Art, Performance and Architecture.

Capacitance as a working condition/spatial agency of a diffractive art based inquiry/practice.

Definition/Physical Phenomena/Concepts used to attach feelings to things.

Displacements/Situatedness/Patterning/Redundancy.

Capacitance and its relationships, movements between space, surface, volume and subjectivity.

Bitumen Paintings/Pierced Membranes : Encapsulated Layering/Textile

Social noise cancelling art works derived from sound deadening pads.

Baffles/Filters : Spatial Intermediaries.

Richard Serra : Paint Stick Drawings.

Reading Matter and Rooms

The Lake of The Mind/Stochastic Thinking : Steven Holl.

Hortus Conclusus/A Return to Things : Substances, Materials, Making Drawings, Thinking Assemblages

 

Outpost 160222

Hortus Conclusus, a serious place in the midst of mattering local ecologies.

Studio/Garden of forked paths

Substances, Materials, Making Drawings, Thinking Assemblages.

A drawing can be silly or crude, but locked inside it might be a little idea that given enough care and attention can rise above the rest of the orchestra and be heard individually.

Art as a clear and synthetic understanding of structured relationships that reveal innovative space-time through hidden sources of line and light, that suggest what art might become.

Brian Clarke.

Spatial Agent : Camera Tin/Molecular Sieve 115

The theoretical apparatus that practices physical movements and theory.

Grisaille/Procedural/Performative Grounds and Scripts/Double Occupations.

Speculative inquires, creative agencies that move through material thinking.

Diffraction as a tool for analysis that attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge making practices have on the world.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process that uses utilises and explores on going differences between phenomena. Diffractions open up ways for greater sensitivity towards how we are part of the worlds continuous becoming. 

Barad.

Paintings/Discursive Drawings around capacitance, interval,patterning and redundancy.

Diagrams for the imagination

Social noise cancelling artworks/bitumen, felt,foil,ceramic and lead.

Filtered Light/Projections and Transitions

Procedural Architecture/Assemblages and Environments

The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air (1954), Marcel Minnaert.

Minnaert offers a basis for understanding how myriad phenomena are concretely produced in the ordinary world. As opposed to Goethe's subjectively written Theory of Colours (1810), whose conjectures were based on personal examination unhampered by physics, Minnaert blends careful observations of luminous effects with analysis of how those effects are generated by physical modulations of light.

His work not only helps to throw attention onto light's beauty and mystery in the daily environment, but also treats those phenomena as palpable qualities that can be consciously perceived and described, and to some extent causally understood according to how light is modified when interacting with material things. 

The Architecture of Natural Light.

The Re-discovery of Ephemeral Light.

A Return to Things.

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

James Turrell. 

On Phenomenology, a phenomenal way of thinking and seeing.

When one is filled with wonder, a method of examining phenomena through intensified seeing and sensing, as opposed to intellectual abstractions and constructions.

The broad import of phenomenology for architecture, and for understanding the role of light in places we care deeply about, has gained a poetic dimension in the writings of Gaston Bachelard. 

In his still astonishing book, The Poetics of Space (1958), and later in The Flame of a Candle (1961), Bachelard introduces the concept of a primal image, and locates the source of its imaginative power in simple archetypal places, ranging from nests and corners, to cellars and attics, and in metaphysical places such as the lamp that glows in a window, reveries of faint light, and spaces that participate in cosmic events.

The mesmerizing allure of images where light is fighting of darkness, argues Bachelard, originates in primordial memories that are only  accessible through poetic imagination, daydream and reverie, sublimations that lie below rational thought.

The Other Architecture/Constructing Metaphysical Space, Henry Plummer. 2009

 

The arts are the wilderness areas of the imagination surviving.

Claude Levi-Strauss.

The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder.

Cultures of wilderness live by the life and death lessons of subsistence economies.

The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.

Practice, meaning a deliberate sustained and conscious effort to be more finely tuned to ourselves and to the way the actual existing world is. 

A Place in Space, proposes that we must ground ourselves in the dark of our deepest selves, and that a good part of that grounding  takes place in communities, which exist whether we know it or not within the natural nations, shaped by mountain ranges, river courses, flatlands and wetlands.

The place-based stories the people tell, and the naming they've done, is their archaeology, architecture, and title to the land.