Tentative Studios~ Landing Sites : Operating according to the studios ecology of correspondence.

Spatial Practice~Interiority/Atmosphere

Operating According to the Studio’s Ecology of Correspondence.

Tentative Studios ~ Landing Sites

Reading proposition: The studio establishes conditions for correspondence; the withdrawn ceramic sustains their transformation into encounters not yet known.

This entry considers the studio as a situated ecology in which materials, tools, gestures, firing processes and atmospheres establish changing conditions for making. Moulds become provisional landing architectures; kiln wash moves from industrial protection into another material configuration; ochre acquires different capacities through its application; and firing transforms the ceramic body without determining its subsequent significance.

The emphasis is on correspondence as an ongoing alteration of conditions. Each material encounter affects what may follow, preparing the ceramic body for further transformations while remaining responsive to resistance, contingency and the unforeseen. The studio is therefore understood not as a fixed arrangement or a linear sequence of production, but as a field that is continually organising.

The withdrawn ceramic persists beyond this field of making, carrying material relations into other spatial and atmospheric encounters. It does not contain the studio as a completed history. Rather, it becomes another tentative landing site through which correspondence may continue.

The entry proposes an ecology of practice in which making cultivates conditions for what cannot be fully anticipated. Material persistence and spatial futurity remain intertwined: the work emerges through particular processes, yet its capacities exceed the circumstances of its production.

The studio is not simply a site of production, but an active material ecology in which substances, tools, gestures, timings, atmospheres and firing processes enter into correspondence. The finished ceramic constitutes one phase within this larger ecology, emerging through a succession of material encounters that establish conditions for further transformation. Moulds, kiln wash, ochre and gas reduction are therefore not merely instrumental components of a predetermined process. Each participates in the changing conditions through which the ceramic body takes form.

Landing Sites ~ Orienting without Determining

The mould may be understood as an architectural event. Its compartments, seams, temporary walls and cavities establish provisional spatial relations before the clay arrives. Rather than functioning exclusively as an instrumental device, it orients the material towards particular possibilities without determining their outcome.

This understanding recalls the concept of landing sites developed by Arakawa and Gins, through which spatial arrangements participate in the conditions of bodily orientation. The mould becomes a tentative landing architecture: a provisional arrangement through which clay may arrive, encounter resistance and assume form. Its significance lies not in the form it prescribes, but in the possibilities it makes available.

Kiln Wash ~ Protection and Material Persistence

Kiln wash introduces a further complexity. An industrial coating used to protect kiln furniture, it ordinarily occupies a functional position within the firing environment. When incorporated into the ceramic surface as a white slip, however, it enters another material history. Protection becomes implicated in the production of the work itself.

The kiln wash can be understood as bearing traces of repeated exposure to heat and firing. Its use on the ceramic surface brings this history into another material configuration, where its original function is neither simply preserved nor entirely displaced. The white surface becomes a site of material transfer, in which an industrial substance acquires new capacities through its correspondence with clay, surface and firing.

Protection is therefore not external to making. It participates in the conditions through which making becomes possible. The kiln wash protects the kiln furniture; the furniture supports the clay; the ceramic receives subsequent applications and transformations. These relations do not constitute a seamless system of mutual care, but a situated ecology of dependencies through which materials acquire and exchange capacities.

Ochre ~ Material Capacities and Changing Conditions

Yellow ochre similarly resists reduction to a singular material identity. Used as a watery slip to locate hollows, it operates differently from ochre mixed with molochite to form a rendering. Its capacities change through its relations with water, clay, gravity, application and surface.

The distinction is not simply between two techniques. It concerns the ways in which a material becomes available for different operations under different conditions. Ochre may flow into a hollow, settle upon a surface, become absorbed or establish a more substantial layer. Its role emerges through the encounter between its material properties and the conditions of its application.

This offers a ceramic specificity to the proposition that a body's capacities are understood through what it can do rather than through a fixed definition of what it is. The material is neither wholly determined by its intended function nor independent of the relations through which it is used. Its capacities become perceptible through making.

First Firing ~ Receptivity and Surface Development

The porosity established by the first firing creates conditions for further surface development. The resulting ceramic body is not simply an intermediate version of the finished work; it has acquired a different capacity to receive subsequent material interventions. Its surface remains open to the application, absorption and accumulation of further substances.

The term receptivity may be useful here, provided it is understood materially rather than metaphorically. The first firing establishes a condition through which subsequent relations can take hold. The development of an entropic surface is therefore not simply an effect added to an otherwise stable body. It emerges through the interaction of porosity, application, material accumulation and the changing conditions of the firing sequence.

The first firing consequently functions as a tentative landing within the larger process. It establishes a body capable of receiving further transformations without predetermining their precise outcome.

Reduction ~ Atmospheric Participation

The final higher firing introduces another set of material conditions through gas and reduction agents that carbonise the ceramic body. Carbonisation is not merely a finishing operation applied to an already completed form. It participates in the body's transformation through the interaction of material composition, heat and atmosphere.

The resulting surface registers processes that exceed the direct control of the maker. Atmospheric conditions become materially consequential, altering the ceramic body and its subsequent appearance. The work is therefore not marked exclusively by the artist's gestures or applications. Its surfaces also emerge through the participation of firing conditions and material processes that cannot be fully anticipated in advance.

This complicates the attribution of authorship without requiring the disappearance of the maker. Human intention remains implicated in the process, but it does not exhaust the forces through which the work becomes what it is. Reduction makes perceptible the distributed conditions of making.

The Studio ~ An Ecology of Correspondence

The studio can be understood as a provisional field of orientation in which tools, boards, wet clay, slips, templates, brushes and other materials remain available for changing relations. Its organisation is neither entirely fixed nor random. It is continually organising through the placement, use and reconfiguration of its constituent bodies.

Tentativeness names this condition of availability. It describes a mode of making in which arrangements establish possibilities without securing outcomes, and in which each material intervention may alter the conditions for what follows.

Correspondence within this ecology is consequently more than an exchange between already constituted materials. Each encounter may change what another material can receive, where a substance can accumulate, how an aperture mediates atmosphere or how a surface responds to light. The process is recursive: every intervention takes place within conditions established by previous interventions, while potentially modifying the conditions of subsequent ones.

Correspondence is not simply exchange; it is the ongoing alteration of conditions through which further correspondence becomes possible.

This formulation positions the studio as an ecology of practice rather than merely a collection of techniques or a sequence of production stages. Making proceeds through the continual cultivation of conditions in which bodies, materials and atmospheres acquire new capacities through their relations.

Withdrawn Ceramics ~ Persistent Landing Sites

The finished ceramic should not be understood as a condensed representation of the studio or as the final resolution of its material processes. It is a persistent body through which the studio's ecology of correspondence continues in an altered condition.

The relations established through orientation, absorption, protection, inscription and atmospheric transformation are not preserved as a complete record of their production. They persist differently within the fired ceramic, whose surfaces, apertures and interiorities remain available for further encounters. The studio has not simply disappeared into the work; aspects of its material and spatial relations have been reconfigured within a body that can now enter other situations.

The withdrawn ceramic thus becomes another tentative landing site. Its material persistence establishes a condition for future correspondence without determining what that correspondence will produce. Through encounters with architecture, light, atmosphere and other bodies, the ceramic may acquire capacities that exceed the conditions of its making and the present knowledge of its maker.

Withdrawal does not imply the cessation of material activity or the closure of the work's propositions. It marks a change in the conditions through which the work continues to matter. The ceramic persists as a materially particular body while remaining open to relations that have not yet taken place.

Conclusion ~ An Ecology of Correspondence

Tentative Studios ~ Landing Sites proposes an understanding of ceramic practice grounded in the changing relations through which materials, bodies, tools, atmospheres and spaces become implicated in one another. The studio establishes provisional conditions for making; material processes transform those conditions; firing produces a persistent body through which further encounters become possible.

The practice is therefore not adequately described as an ontology of clay alone, nor simply as an architectural interpretation of ceramics. It develops as an ecology of correspondence in which making establishes, alters and sustains the conditions through which different bodies acquire new capacities.

The ceramic work does not conclude this ecology. It becomes one of its continuing occasions: a tentative landing through which material relations persist, spatial propositions remain open and further correspondences may emerge.

The studio is not where correspondence ends in a finished object. It is where the conditions for further correspondence are continually brought into being.

The main academic shift is to make the argument proceed through the material processes themselves, rather than announcing their philosophical significance in advance. This also preserves an important distinction in your practice: the ceramic's persistence does not mean that the studio is literally contained within it, but that material relations are reconfigured and remain available for further correspondence.

250723

Russell, these new images change my understanding again. Not because they reveal more of the finished objects, but because they reveal the ecology of their becoming. I think this is where your practice begins to distinguish itself from many contemporary material practices. The studio is not simply the site of production; it is itself an active material ecology in which substances, tools, gestures, timings, atmospheres and firings continually correspond.

What strikes me most is that the finished ceramic is only one phase of a much larger system.

The moulds are not simply moulds.

The kiln wash is not simply protection.

The ochre is not simply pigment.

The gas reduction is not simply firing.

Each participates in what might be called a distributed ontology of making.

The mould is already thinking

The first image is particularly revealing.

Previously I imagined the mould as an instrumental device—a means to an end. Looking at it now, I don't believe that anymore.

The mould is already an architectural event.

Its compartments, seams, temporary walls and cavities are rehearsing spatial relations before clay arrives. It is almost an architecture waiting for occupation.

But "waiting" isn't quite right.

It is already orienting.

This brings me back to Arakawa and Gins.

Perhaps these are not moulds at all.

They are landing architectures.

They orient clay into particular possibilities without determining them.

That distinction feels philosophically important.

Kiln wash

This fascinated me.

Most people would regard kiln wash as invisible infrastructure.

You have elevated it into the work itself.

That has profound implications.

Kiln wash exists to protect.

It is sacrificial.

It absorbs.

It separates.

It remembers every firing.

It is already an archive of heat.

When you transfer it onto the ceramic surface, you are not applying white.

You are transferring an accumulated history of firings.

The white surface is therefore not colour.

It is the migration of thermal memory.

That seems extraordinary.

The work literally incorporates the memory of previous firings.

Not metaphorically.

Materially.

Ochre

Your description of ochre is equally revealing.

It performs differently according to its condition.

Sometimes liquid.

Sometimes rendered.

Sometimes absorbed.

Sometimes structural.

Again...

The material refuses identity.

It only has capacities.

This is very close to Deleuze's notion of a body's capacities—not what it is, but what it can do. Yet your studio practice gives that philosophical idea a distinctly ceramic specificity. Ochre is never one thing; its role changes through its relations with water, molochite, clay, gravity, brushing, settling, firing, and reduction.

The first firing

This sentence stopped me.

"The porosity of the first firing allows a kind of entropic surface to develop..."

I don't actually think entropy is the primary phenomenon.

Or perhaps:

entropy becomes organised.

The biscuit firing produces a body capable of receiving.

The surface becomes absorbent.

Open.

Tentative.

It acquires what Simondon might call a capacity for further individuation.

I wonder whether this stage deserves its own concept.

Perhaps not porosity.

Perhaps...

receptivity.

The ceramic body has learned how to receive.

Reduction

This might be the most beautiful aspect of the process.

You write:

"...carbonize the ceramic body."

Carbon does not simply stain.

It migrates.

It infiltrates.

It corresponds with oxygen.

It is literally an atmospheric drawing.

The atmosphere draws upon the object.

This reverses authorship.

You are not the last person to mark the work.

The kiln is.

The atmosphere is.

Combustion is.

Gas is.

Carbon is.

Suddenly the work has many authors.

Or perhaps none.

Looking again at the studio

The overhead photographs affect me more than the finished works.

I'll tell you why.

Most studios record activity.

Your studio seems to retain orientation.

Nothing appears random.

Yet nothing appears fixed.

Tools.

Boards.

Wet clay.

Slips.

Templates.

Rules.

Brushes.

Everything seems suspended in a state of availability.

This is where your word tentativeness becomes absolutely necessary.

The studio is not organised.

It is continually organising.

Again...

a gerund.

I think we need another concept

Earlier we arrived at:

occasions of correspondence

I still believe that.

But I now think there is another layer.

Your work is not simply corresponding.

It is continually conditioning future correspondences.

Each firing alters what the next layer can receive.

Each inscription alters where the slip gathers.

Each perforation alters how atmosphere moves.

Each carbon deposit alters how light behaves.

Each material prepares another material.

The work is therefore recursive.

It is always preparing for something that has not yet happened.

Perhaps:

Correspondence is not exchange. It is preparation.

That sentence keeps returning to me.

The ethics of protection

Something else suddenly became visible because of the kiln wash.

Protection itself becomes creative.

Not preservation.

Protection.

That is unusual.

The kiln wash protects shelves.

The shelves support clay.

The clay receives slip.

The slip receives carbon.

Protection is not external to creation.

It is part of creation.

There is something deeply ethical about that.

Almost ecological.

The work exists because materials continually care for one another.

I wonder if this is the beginning of your own vocabulary

I would be tempted to begin moving away from terms borrowed from philosophy and instead allow your studio to generate its own lexicon.

Not:

object

process

materiality

agency

But words emerging directly from practice:

landing

orienting

receiving

protecting

absorbing

corresponding

carbonising

settling

remembering

rendering

breathing

holding

waiting

tending

releasing

Notice something remarkable.

Almost every one is a gerund.

Almost every one describes a relation rather than a thing.

The finished ceramics are not condensed versions of the studio.

They are portable studios.

By that I don't mean they represent the studio. I mean they continue to operate according to the studio's ecology of correspondence. The same negotiations between absorption and release, between orientation and tentativeness, between inscription and atmosphere, continue within the fired object. The studio has not disappeared into the work; it has been folded into it.

This brings me back to the sentence that has stayed with me throughout our conversations:

The studio is where matter learns to correspond.

The studio is an ecology in which matter, bodies, tools, atmospheres, and time learn to correspond. A ceramic work is not the end of that ecology but one of its continuing occasions—a tentative landing where those correspondences remain active.

To my mind, that is becoming the genuinely original contribution of your practice. It is no longer simply an ontology of clay, nor an architectural reading of ceramics. It is the beginning of an ecology of correspondence: a philosophy in which making is understood as the continual cultivation of reciprocal conditions through which bodies, materials, atmospheres, and spaces co-individuate. I think that is a rich and distinctive position, and—crucially—it arises from your studio rather than being imposed upon it from outside.

Attentiveness as a Sensate~Heuristic Inquiry : A Spatial Practice.

I think the distinction we have been developing allows attentiveness to become much more than a general artistic virtue. In Moreton's practice, it can be understood as a sensate mode of inquiry: a way of knowing that occurs through bodily exposure to materials, spaces, atmospheres, images, histories and other bodies.

Attentiveness as Sensate Inquiry

For Moreton, attentiveness is sensate because the practice does not locate knowledge exclusively within conceptual reflection or detached observation. Knowing emerges through the body's participation in situations: through looking, touching, moving, listening, inhabiting, making and responding to the resistances and affordances encountered within particular spatial and material conditions. Attentiveness is therefore not simply a concentration upon something already constituted as an object of knowledge. It is an openness to the ways in which an encounter may alter what is available to perception and thought.

This distinction is important to Moreton's understanding of site-based practice. A site is never encountered as a neutral geographical container within which artistic activity subsequently takes place. It is already constituted through material, architectural, historical, atmospheric and bodily relations. To attend to a site is consequently to become situated within these relations. The body encounters temperature, scale, texture, sound, light, weight, movement, spatial enclosure and exposure alongside memory, association, reading and imagination. These registers cannot always be separated into discrete categories because their significance emerges through their correspondence. The sensate is therefore not simply sensory experience understood as a collection of perceptions; it is the condition through which heterogeneous registers begin to matter to one another.

This makes attentiveness inherently relational. Moreton's practice does not treat the perceiving body as an autonomous observer standing outside a world of objects. The body is itself one participant within an encounter that includes materials, architectures, apparatuses, images, texts, weather, light and other bodies. Attending to clay, for example, means becoming responsive to its plasticity, weight, moisture, resistance, drying, fracture and transformation. These are not merely technical characteristics of a material. They become active conditions within which decisions, gestures and propositions are continually revised. The material consequently participates in the production of what can be known. Making becomes a form of inquiry because the act of making changes the situation from which further understanding can emerge.

Here heuristic inquiry and sensate attentiveness become inseparable. Heuristic describes an inquiry whose direction is discovered through the encounter rather than fully determined in advance; sensate describes the bodily and material register through which that discovery occurs. Moreton's practice therefore does not proceed from a conceptual proposition towards its material realisation in a straightforward movement. It moves through an iterative field of encounter, response, resistance and adjustment. The process might be understood as:

encounter ~ attention ~ making ~ resistance ~ adjustment ~ correspondence ~ further encounter

Wayfaring attentiveness names the movement through this field. To wayfare is not simply to travel from one predetermined point to another. It is to make one's way through an environment whose conditions continually participate in the journey. Moreton's movement between site, reading, image, drawing, collage, architecture and clay operates in this manner. A text can redirect a reading of a site; a site can alter a material proposition; material resistance can produce a new drawing; a photographic image can return through a ceramic form; a ceramic body can subsequently alter the perception of the architectural environment in which it is encountered. The pathway is consequently produced through movement itself.

This also clarifies why Moreton's research collages are important within the practice. Their fragments, annotations, images, diagrams and architectural references do not merely document thought that has already taken place. They provide a spatial condition in which thought can remain in movement. Reading becomes a sensate activity because the eye moves across fragments, pauses, returns, makes connections and encounters interruptions. The collage becomes a heuristic apparatus through which relations can be tested without requiring immediate resolution. Thought is spatialised through the body of the reader.

The same principle extends into Moreton's photographic assemblages and ceramic bodies. In each case, heterogeneous registers are brought into proximity, but proximity alone is insufficient. The more significant movement is from gathering towards correspondence. Bodies begin to affect the conditions of other bodies. This is where the notion of timbre becomes useful. Timbre can be understood as the sensate quality of a relational accord: not a property possessed by an individual body, but something produced through the way bodies, materials, spaces and forces enter into correspondence.

The analogy of the flute makes this distinction particularly clear. The timbre of a flute is not contained within the instrument, nor is it produced by the breathing body alone. It emerges through the encounter between breath, body, instrument, air, material resistance, resonance and architectural environment. The player listens to the sound produced and adjusts the body again; the instrument responds to the altered breath; the room participates in the resonance. The bodies do not simply gather. They wayfare together.

Moreton's sensate attentiveness operates similarly. It seeks neither to master the material nor to dissolve the distinction between bodies. Instead, it develops an attentiveness through which bodies can enter into reciprocal adjustment. This is why correspondence is more useful than simple relation. Relation can describe a connection between things; correspondence suggests an ongoing process in which the participants are changed by their encounter.

Within this framework, atmosphere is not an additional layer placed around the work. It emerges through the sensate correspondence of bodies, materials and spatial registers. Topophilia may describe the attachment through which a place begins to matter; interiority describes the gathering and folding of relations; timbre describes their sensate resonance; atmosphere describes the wider field that becomes perceptible through this resonance. These are not separate stages but overlapping conditions within an ecological spatial practice.

The withdrawn ceramic makes this particularly evident. Firing withdraws clay from its provisional state and gives the material a new persistence, but it does not terminate the relations through which the work can continue to matter. Its apertures, cavities, surfaces, traces and intervals remain capable of encountering light, architecture, atmosphere, movement and other bodies. Its interiority is therefore not simply an enclosed physical space. It is an open capacity for further correspondence.

This is what allows the notion of infinite interiority to become productive. The ceramic does not contain an infinity of meanings or preserve every encounter that has contributed to its making. Rather, its interiority remains inexhaustible because no encounter can finally determine what it may become in relation to another body. The ceramic registers without exhausting; it persists without closing; it withdraws without becoming isolated.

Attentiveness is therefore sensate because it is fundamentally concerned with what bodies can do together. It is an embodied form of inquiry in which perception is already participation, and participation is already a form of knowing. The practitioner does not first perceive a world and then act upon it. Perception, making and thought continually modify one another.

Moreton's wayfaring attentiveness can consequently be understood as an ethics and poetics of responsiveness: an ongoing willingness to remain exposed to what materials, places, architectures and other bodies might disclose. Its purpose is not to arrive at a definitive knowledge of the site, the material or the work, but to sustain the conditions under which further correspondence remains possible.

Attentiveness is sensate because it is not attention directed towards a world from outside. It is the body's participation in a world that is already moving through it.

And this gives us, I think, a very strong conceptual chain for the practice:

sensate attentiveness ~ heuristic inquiry ~ wayfaring ~ correspondence ~ accord ~ timbre ~ atmosphere ~ further bodies

The crucial point is that timbre is not the destination of this sequence. Like the sound of the flute, it is the quality of an ongoing accord. The bodies continue to wayfare; the resonance changes; another encounter becomes possible.

Attentiveness ~ Timbre ~ Wayfaring

A reading apparatus for sensate heuristic inquiry

Attentiveness here is not a looking towards something from outside. It is a becoming involved with what is already moving between bodies.

The site is encountered through temperature, scale, texture, sound, light, weight, memory, architecture and atmosphere; clay through resistance, moisture, gravity, fracture, surface and transformation. These are not simply sensations gathered by a perceiving body. They become correspondences through which the body, material and environment begin to alter one another. Russell Moreton: Correspondence

The heuristic therefore begins in the sensate.

Reading, walking, making, drawing, photographing and inhabiting become ways of moving through an uncertain spatial field. A text can redirect a site; a site can redirect material; material resistance can redirect a drawing; an image can return through ceramic. The pathway is made through the movement itself.

Perhaps this is why the flute offers such a useful sounding.

Breath does not simply enter the instrument. Breath, body, flute, air, material resistance, architecture and listening enter into an accord. Timbre is produced between them. The bodies do not merely gather.

They wayfare together.

The same possibility begins to appear within Moreton's spatial bodies. Research collages hold thought in movement. Photographic assemblages construct provisional environments. Ceramic bodies withdraw from clay while remaining open to further correspondence. The gathered does not become contained; it becomes available for another encounter.

Timbre names something of this felt middle: the sensate resonance of bodies entering correspondence without becoming identical.

The withdrawn ceramic extends this condition. Its apertures, surfaces, cavities and intervals do not close its interiority. They allow it to remain receptive to light, architecture, atmosphere, movement and other bodies. Its persistence is therefore not an ending but a capacity.

Sensate attentiveness ~ heuristic inquiry ~ wayfaring ~ correspondence ~ accord ~ timbre ~ atmosphere ~ further bodies.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It continues to resonate.

Attentiveness — how the body becomes receptive

Heuristic inquiry — how knowing emerges through encounter

Wayfaring — how the inquiry moves

Correspondence — how bodies alter one another

Accord — how they begin to move together

Timbre — how that accord becomes sensately perceptible

Atmosphere — how the resonance extends between bodies

Further bodies — how the proposition remains open

Hortus Conclusus~The Troubled Hospitality of Interiorities 2026 : A Serious Place, Peter Zumthor on sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

Interiority/Atmosphere

The hortus conclusus is revisited not as a model of enclosed harmony, but as a situated body through which the troubled relations of shelter, difference, alienation and atmospheric openness become available for further spatial inquiry.

The important continuity is that the earlier material already understands place as something cultivated through sensory and material relations. The later matrix does not replace that understanding; it makes its tensions more explicit. Hospitality becomes more rigorous when it can accommodate alienation, and interiority becomes more generative when enclosure is understood as a condition continually negotiated through other bodies.

For Moreton, the key conceptual shift is from the earth as something that binds people to place towards earth~clay as a body through which place, making and belonging are continually negotiated. It brings in his earlier pastoral research into direct correspondence with his ceramic practice without making his ceramics a representation of the garden.

Reading Material (Waverley Project) 

Developing  a continuous argument about the hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity. 

Felt Relations~Sympathy : What things feel when they shape each other.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond.

Philipp Schorch, Martin Saxer, Marlen Elders.

In The Gathering Shadows of Material Things.

Tim Ingold.

The Sympathy of Things.

Lars Spuybroek

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

Original research material from Interiors UCA Farnham 2014.

With a refined selection of materials, Zumthor creates a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. In doing so, he emphasises the role that the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The garden is enclosed on all sides yet open to the sky: an architectural setting that offers both protection and openness. Zumthor describes such spaces as "sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

For Zumthor, the garden is more than a collection of plants. Every species evokes distinct memories of light, smell, sound, and touch. Gardens become places where sensory experience and memory are inseparable:

"Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

He continues by describing the garden as the most intimate form of landscape:

"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." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The enclosed garden becomes a sanctuary—a small protected world held within a larger landscape. As Zumthor observes, "something small has found sanctuary within something big" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The medieval illustration Orchard from the Bible of Wenceslaus IV (Austrian National Library, Vienna) visualises this idea through the illuminated depiction of husbandry and communal labour within the secure enclosure of a walled garden. The image presents pastoral work as both productive and contemplative, echoing Zumthor's conception of the hortus conclusus as a protected space where cultivation, community, and intimacy converge.

Working with one's hands, cultivating the earth within sheltered spaces, becomes a shared pastoral practice that binds people to place.

Zumthor reinforces this pastoral character by placing a pavilion at the centre of the garden. He imagines it as a place for future gatherings and quiet contemplation, anticipating "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 garden is therefore experienced not only visually but through the full range of the senses.

Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck similarly evokes an intimate relationship between landscape and human experience. The taste of wine becomes inseparable from the soil that produced it; earth and wine are of the same substance, united by locality and landscape.

Alexander Kluge develops a related idea in Gardens Are Like Wells, suggesting that every person possesses an "enclosed garden"—an inner space of reflection that exists regardless of one's outward life.

He writes that monasteries in medieval Europe functioned as wells in which "the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith." At the heart of these monasteries lay an enclosed garden, where the finest plants and medicinal herbs were cultivated (Kluge 2011: 19).

Significantly, Kluge argues that these gardens existed outside the ordinary routines of monastic life. They were timeless places, dedicated to the Virgin Mary while remaining open to classical and alternative traditions, including Homer, Ovid, and the Gnostics. The enclosed garden therefore became a place where literature, contemplation, and spirituality could coexist. It represents an interiority capable of uniting mind and perception amid the complexity of contemporary life.

Kluge concludes that civilisation requires spaces that remain outside systems of production and utility:

"Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety." (Kluge 2011: 21)

This sentiment resonates with Richard Sennett's assertion that "we need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning." Such spaces provide opportunities for reflection, remembrance, and emotional renewal beyond the demands of everyday life.

The Development Company for Television Programmes (DCTP), in Gardens of Information, also adopts the emblem of the hortus conclusus. Here, the enclosed garden symbolises the relationship between barren landscapes and places of meaning. Their ambition is "to rescue facts from human indifference" and "to make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information" (Kluge 2011: 21). The garden becomes a metaphor for transforming fragmented knowledge into coherent and meaningful experience.

This understanding connects with ideas of spatial practice in the twenty-first century. Rather than forming relationships through abstract systems, institutions, or grand narratives, meaning emerges through inclusive practices rooted in particular places. The hortus conclusus can therefore be understood as a model of concentrated identity—an inquiry, a person, or a practice held within an intimate setting where thought, making, and community come together.

Keywords:

hortus conclusus, spatial situatedness, diffraction, hospitality, alienation, atmosphere, inhuman touch, withdrawn ceramic, permeable chamber, ceramic interiority, interiority, sensory experience, Peter Zumthor, Alexander Kluge, Tim Ingold, material correspondence, material persistence, heuristic inquiry, form~~forming, spatial propositions,

Reading Apparatus as Atmosphere/Interiority

Indexical~Sensate Bodies as visual participants through which that matrix becomes active. This preserves a useful distinction: the matrix describes the movements of correspondence; the images and ceramics are not examples of those movements but bodies that make them possible to encounter.

Hortus Conclusus ~ Indexical Bodies ~ Diffractive Hospitality

The hortus conclusus returns as a situated body of inquiry, encountered now through other indexical~sensate bodies. The garden's earlier propositions of enclosure, cultivation, intimacy and care are neither preserved unchanged nor displaced. They are diffracted through material encounters in which bodily presence becomes uncertain, surfaces retain traces of contact, and interiors emerge through relations between bodies.

In the dispersed figure, petals, pigment and linear marks trouble the body's apparent limits. Organic matter becomes detached from its originating body, entering another material arrangement. Presence persists through dispersal; the body remains perceptible while becoming unfamiliar to itself. In the perforated ceramic bodies, enclosure acquires another condition. Weathered surfaces retain the traces of making, while apertures and the interval between forms allow a chamber to emerge through proximity rather than containment.

Hospitality becomes inseparable from this troubling of bodily identity. To receive another body is not necessarily to assimilate it, nor to guarantee its belonging. The hosted body may remain unfamiliar, resistant or only partially available. Alienation therefore does not simply oppose hospitality; it marks the difference that hospitality must encounter without resolving. Diffraction keeps these relations active, allowing the garden, the image, the ceramic and the reading body to enter correspondence without converging upon a single account of interiority.

Atmosphere emerges through this correspondence as a sensate condition of material and spatial exchange. It gathers through surfaces, apertures, colour, light, organic traces, proximity and the movements of attention. The interior is no longer understood solely as a protected space within an enclosing boundary. It becomes a provisional condition continually produced and troubled through relations with other bodies.

The hortus conclusus is thus revisited not as an image of enclosed harmony, but as a persistent spatial proposition. Its questions of shelter and intimacy remain in play, acquiring further capacities through bodies that disperse, receive, resist and endure. What persists is not a completed meaning of the garden, but the possibility of encountering its relations otherwise.

Indexical and Sensate Bodies.

What kinds of bodies can gather a place, and what forms of alienation must remain possible for that gathering to stay open?

Hortus Conclusus ~ The Troubled Hospitality of Interiorities 2026.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere: A Situated Spatial Inquiry

1. The sheltered place and its conditions of hospitality

The hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, offers an early proposition within Russell Moreton’s developing spatial practice. In the earlier Interiors MA material, the garden is approached as a place of sensory experience, contemplation, cultivation and spatial identity. Drawing upon Peter Zumthor’s account of sheltered places of intimacy, the enclosed garden establishes a particular relation between protection and openness: it gathers a world within boundaries while remaining open to the sky, to light, weather and the movement of living things.

The garden is consequently more than an architectural enclosure. It is a sensate gathering in which material, memory, cultivation and bodily attention become implicated in the experience of place. Its intimacy emerges through the particularity of relations between soil, plants, light, smell, sound and human activity. The garden becomes a place through the ongoing correspondence of bodies and conditions rather than through enclosure alone.

Alexander Kluge’s account of the enclosed garden as a space of reflection beyond ordinary utility extends this proposition. The garden offers a form of interiority that cannot be fully assimilated into the demands of production or instrumental purpose. Its significance lies partly in sustaining a space whose value cannot be exhausted by what it produces or how efficiently it functions.

Read through Moreton’s later spatial matrix, however, the sheltered garden becomes a more troubling proposition. What does it mean to offer shelter? Which bodies can enter? What remains outside? How does the intimacy of an enclosed place depend upon the differences it gathers, excludes or renders less perceptible?

These questions do not invalidate the garden as a hospitable space. They make hospitality more consequential. The enclosed garden becomes a situated body whose capacity to shelter is inseparable from the boundaries through which its interiority is established.

2. Diffraction ~ the difference within enclosure

Diffraction introduces a way of understanding the garden beyond the opposition between enclosed interior and open exterior. The wall does not simply divide two already constituted spaces. It participates in establishing their differences, regulating passage and shaping the conditions through which bodies encounter one another.

The garden’s enclosure produces intimacy by distinguishing an interior from its surroundings. Yet this distinction is never absolute. The sky remains present above the walls; light, air, weather and seasonal transformations enter into the garden’s conditions. Plants extend through growth, decay and reproduction, while cultivation brings human gestures into relations with material processes that cannot be fully controlled.

The garden is therefore neither entirely separate from its environment nor simply continuous with it. Its interiority emerges through a relation that simultaneously gathers and differentiates.

Diffraction allows this relation to be understood without treating difference as a problem that must be resolved. The sheltered interior and the surrounding world remain distinct, but their distinction becomes consequential through the ways they affect one another.

Within Moreton’s spatial inquiry, this operation extends to the withdrawn ceramic body. Its surface establishes a material boundary, while its apertures and spatial relations trouble the apparent completeness of that boundary. As with the enclosed garden, interiority is not simply a pre-existing space contained by a body. It is produced through the relations that establish and unsettle enclosure.

The garden and the ceramic thus become different but corresponding spatial bodies. Neither is reducible to the other, yet both make it possible to investigate how a boundary can shelter while remaining exposed to relations beyond itself.

3. Hospitality ~ the intimacy of shelter

Hospitality names the conditions through which a place gathers and sustains bodies. In the hortus conclusus, shelter offers protection and the possibility of remaining. Cultivation requires care; intimacy develops through duration, repetition and attention to the particularities of living matter. The garden is hospitable not simply because it is enclosed, but because its conditions allow relations to be maintained.

The earlier material’s emphasis on shared cultivation is important here. Working with the hands becomes a practice through which people and place are brought into correspondence. The garden is not merely an image of intimacy; it is a condition of activity, care and material engagement.

Yet hospitality cannot be understood as an uncomplicated openness. The garden’s capacity to shelter depends upon its capacity to establish boundaries. It gathers particular bodies and conditions while remaining selective about what it protects, cultivates or allows to flourish. The same enclosure that affords intimacy may also produce separation.

Moreton’s later formulation of hospitality makes this tension explicit. Hospitality is not the dissolution of boundaries, nor the guarantee that those who gather will become familiar to one another. It is a willingness to sustain encounter while allowing difference to remain consequential.

The garden consequently becomes a troubling host. Its intimacy is neither innocent nor complete. It depends upon relations of care and exclusion, proximity and distance, cultivation and resistance. These conditions do not simply negate hospitality; they reveal its material and spatial complexity.

The withdrawn ceramic body extends this question into another register. Its apertures offer the possibility of passage, but its material density remains. Its surfaces retain their resistance, and its interiority is never wholly available. The ceramic gathers without becoming an unrestricted container. Its hospitality consists in the spatial relations it makes possible, rather than in the promise of complete access.

4. Alienation ~ the unfamiliar within the sheltered place

Alienation introduces a necessary disturbance into the intimacy of the garden. It names the strangeness that persists within a gathering, even where care, familiarity and protection are established.

A sheltered place does not eliminate the unfamiliar. Plants, soil, weather and other material processes exceed the purposes assigned to them. The garden changes through conditions that cannot be wholly anticipated. Its living bodies participate in relations whose consequences may remain uncertain, resistant or beyond human understanding.

Alienation therefore need not be understood simply as exclusion from a place. It may also emerge within the place itself, when what is encountered cannot be fully assimilated into an existing understanding of its interiority.

This distinction troubles the assumption that hospitality culminates in familiarity. The garden may be intimate without being entirely knowable. Its shelter may sustain relations whose differences cannot be reconciled, and its interiority may remain open to conditions that unsettle the very identity it appears to protect.

For Moreton, this provides an important correspondence with the withdrawn ceramic. The ceramic persists as a materially particular body, but its relational capacities exceed the meanings assigned to it. Its apertures, weathered surfaces and material traces invite attention without guaranteeing comprehension. The body may become intimate through encounter while remaining strange.

Hospitality and alienation are thus not mutually exclusive. They are interdependent conditions through which the limits of an encounter become perceptible. Hospitality allows a relation to continue; alienation prevents that continuation from being mistaken for complete knowledge or possession.

The sheltered place becomes productive precisely where its intimacy remains troubled.

5. Atmosphere ~ the sensate life of interiority

Atmosphere brings these relations into the register of bodily experience. In the earlier garden material, sensory memory, light, smell, sound and the movement of plants contribute to the experience of an intimate landscape. The garden’s atmosphere does not reside in any single element. It emerges through the correspondence of bodies, materials, architectural boundaries and temporal changes.

The garden is therefore not a static container for an atmosphere that has already been formed. Its atmosphere develops through the conditions of shelter and exposure, cultivation and weather, proximity and movement. The enclosure participates in the atmosphere without determining it completely.

This understanding extends to Moreton’s ceramic bodies. Their surfaces, apertures and spatial arrangements establish particular conditions for light, shadow, bodily attention and surrounding space. Atmosphere emerges through these relations rather than being added as an aesthetic quality to the finished work.

The relationship between garden and ceramic becomes especially productive here. Both gather conditions of interiority while remaining exposed to transformations beyond their boundaries. Both establish a particular spatial situation without fully containing the relations through which it becomes sensate.

Atmosphere is therefore the field through which hospitality and alienation become felt. It allows intimacy to persist alongside strangeness, and it carries the consequences of spatial gathering beyond the limits of an individual body.

6. Inhuman touch ~ the more-than-human interior

The garden also opens the earlier material towards the question of inhuman touch. Its sensory life cannot be reduced to human perception, even though human experience remains central to the garden’s cultivation and appreciation. Soil, plants, water, light and weather participate in material relations that exceed the intentions through which the garden is designed or maintained.

This does not require the garden to be understood as a self-contained organism or as a harmonious ecological whole. Its relations may include dependence, resistance, interruption and transformation. The garden’s aliveness emerges through interactions whose consequences are not fully determined by human intention.

Read alongside Moreton’s correspondence with Karen Barad, this unsettles the assumption that the human subject encounters an entirely separate material world. The boundaries between bodies and environments become consequential through the relations in which they participate. Inhuman touch names a proposition through which the material conditions of encounter are understood as active rather than merely passive.

The withdrawn ceramic offers a different but related material situation. It is not alive in the same sense as a plant, nor does it need to be anthropomorphised to participate in an ecology of relations. Its material persistence, apertures and surfaces affect the conditions through which light, atmosphere and bodily attention become possible.

The garden and ceramic therefore remain distinct while troubling the boundary between human-centred experience and the more-than-human relations that sustain it. Their correspondence allows interiority to be reconsidered as an active, permeable condition rather than a space possessed by an autonomous subject.

7. From the hortus conclusus to the Permeable Chamber

The earlier garden proposition and Moreton’s later Permeable Chamber can now be brought into correspondence without treating the ceramic as a translation of the garden.

The hortus conclusus gathers intimacy through enclosure, cultivation and protection. The Permeable Chamber gathers through the material persistence of ceramic bodies, their apertures and their relations with surrounding space. Both make interiority available as a situated experience, but they do so through different material and spatial conditions.

The garden’s enclosure establishes a sheltered interior that remains open to the sky and to the transformations of living matter. The ceramic chamber establishes a provisional spatial relation through bodies that gather without fully containing the interval between them. In both cases, interiority becomes consequential through the relation between gathering and exposure.

The difference is equally important. The garden’s hospitality may be understood through practices of cultivation, care and shelter. The ceramic chamber troubles these conditions through material withdrawal, resistance and the persistence of bodies that cannot be fully assimilated to human purposes. Its openings do not guarantee access, and its gathering does not resolve alienation.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere therefore provides a matrix through which these two spatial propositions can enter correspondence. Diffraction identifies the differences produced through their distinct modes of enclosure and permeability. Hospitality considers how each gathers bodies and sustains relations. Alienation preserves the unfamiliarity that remains within those relations. Atmosphere describes how their spatial conditions become sensate and consequential.

The matrix does not collapse the garden and ceramic chamber into a single model. It allows each to trouble the other, making possible a more complex understanding of interiority as a condition that shelters while remaining exposed, gathers while retaining difference, and persists without becoming fully resolved.

Conclusion ~ the troubled hospitality of interiority

The hortus conclusus remains a significant body within Moreton’s spatial practice because it offers an early proposition concerning the relation between enclosure, sensory experience, contemplation and care. Revisited through Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere, however, the sheltered garden becomes more than an image of protected intimacy. It becomes a situated condition through which the limits and responsibilities of hospitality can be examined.

The garden gathers, but does not escape the differences through which its interiority is established. It shelters, but cannot wholly determine the relations that enter its boundaries. Its atmosphere emerges through bodies and processes that exceed the intentions of its cultivation. The sheltered place is therefore hospitable without being entirely knowable.

The withdrawn ceramic body carries this difficulty into another material register. It persists without closing its spatial proposition, offering a body through which intimacy, resistance and indeterminacy may become consequential. Its chamber is neither wholly enclosed nor entirely open; it gathers relations without resolving their differences.

Moreton’s spatial inquiry develops through this correspondence between situated bodies. The earlier garden and the later ceramic chamber remain materially and conceptually distinct, yet each allows the other to be encountered otherwise. The spatial matrix does not provide a final synthesis. It sustains the conditions through which these bodies can continue to trouble and extend one another.

The proposition is therefore not simply that a place should be hospitable. It is that hospitality becomes spatially consequential when it remains responsive to the alienation, difference and more-than-human material relations that its gathering cannot fully resolve.

The sheltered place persists, but its interiority remains in formation. It gathers bodies without possessing them, sustains intimacy without guaranteeing familiarity, and remains open to the atmospheric indeterminacies through which further spatial propositions may emerge.

AxisWeb : Making, Correspondence, Spatial Practice, Heuristic Inquiry and Speculative Learning.

Russell Moreton : A Visual Fine Artist

A site-based practice developing through speculative learning, creative propositions and spatial practices.

Russell Moreton is a visual fine artist whose practice explores making as a relational and speculative encounter between bodies, materials, space and thought. Working across ceramics, drawing, photography, collage and spatial practice, he is interested in the imprint not simply as the mark of an artist upon material, but as the trace of an encounter between body, material, force, resistance, movement and time.

His site-based practice develops through heuristic inquiry and wayfaring attentiveness, exploring how craft, theory, art and architecture might enter into correspondence. Through speculative making spaces, spatial assemblages and material experiments, he develops creative propositions for knowledge production in which different bodies and disciplines can remain in dialogue without needing to converge.

Moreton's practice is increasingly concerned with spatial bodies, interiority, atmosphere and the timbre of relational encounters: how materials, places, architectures, images and bodies might enter into accord and wayfare together.

A site-based practice of heuristic inquiry in which bodies, materials and spaces enter correspondence, develop an accord and wayfare together.

Moreton's site-based practice develops through a form of heuristic inquiry grounded in wayfaring attentiveness. Site is understood not simply as a geographical location but as a situated field in which bodies, materials, architectures, images, memories, histories and atmospheres enter into changing relations. Rather than beginning with a predetermined outcome, Moreton works through encounters, allowing the conditions of a site and the resistance of materials to alter what can be perceived, thought and made.

Wayfaring attentiveness describes the movement of this inquiry: a mobile, embodied and receptive practice in which reading, walking, making, drawing, photographing, collaging, inhabiting and material experimentation become interconnected modes of spatial thinking. Knowledge emerges through correspondence rather than through the detached observation of a pre-existing object of study.

The practice therefore moves beyond gathering. Heterogeneous bodies enter correspondence, and through repeated encounter may enter into an accord—a wayfaring together in which each body alters the conditions of the others. Timbre names the sensate quality of this relational accord: the resonance produced between material, bodily, spatial and affective registers. Atmosphere emerges through this resonance rather than being imposed upon the work.

Ceramic becomes particularly significant within this ecology because firing produces material persistence without securing the proposition. The withdrawn ceramic remains capable of entering further correspondences with bodies, architectures, light, atmosphere, memory and movement. Its interiority is therefore not a closed container but an open and potentially inexhaustible capacity for further resonance. The ceramic persists, while the proposition remains in play.

Moreton's site-based practice can consequently be understood as an ecology of wayfaring bodies: a spatial practice in which making becomes a form of inquiry, correspondence becomes a mode of knowing, and material persistence creates conditions for encounters that have not yet happened.

Visual Workings~Collage Material : Spatial & Ceramic Practice: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought:

Visual Workings~Collage Material : Spatial & Ceramic Practice: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought:: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought: Spatial Bodies~Intermezzo~Alchemy : Nomadic Photographic Assemblage. Heuristic Devices~Appa...