Wayfaring Notes: Material Flows Between Form and Emptiness : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

Tim Ingold engages with Deleuze and Guattari by adopting their concepts of "assemblage" (agencement) and "lines of becoming" to emphasize a relational, process-oriented ontology. He translates their abstract philosophical ideas into a "meshwork" of walking, weaving, and storytelling, focusing on how life is lived along lines rather than between fixed points. 

Academia.edu

Key aspects of Ingold’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari include:

Meshwork vs. Network: Ingold contrasts the "network" (connected points) with the "meshwork" (interlaced lines of growth and movement), highlighting how beings and materials constantly emerge and change through interaction.

Lines of Becoming: He interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s "becoming-animal/plant/molecular" as a process of world-making, where individuals are not static beings but are constantly in flux, "becoming with" their environments.

Wayfaring: Ingold uses the concept of "wayfaring" to represent life as a continuous movement or trajectory, aligning with the philosophical notion of navigating lines rather than occupying pre-defined positions.

Critique of Hylomorphism: He draws on their ideas to reject the traditional view that form is imposed upon passive matter (hylomorphism), arguing instead for an understanding of form-generation that emerges from the material flow. 

Ingold’s work often merges these perspectives with other thinkers like Gibson, focusing on how organisms and materials are entangled within their environments, creating a "topologically fluid" space. 

Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres.

Ceramic Building Technologies.

Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics.

Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature.

Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel.

Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay.

Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry.

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking”States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself.

This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel.

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea1983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

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. (Daintry2007:10)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things.

A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino1996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10)

The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:11)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modern 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something.

The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities.

The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects.

Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes?

This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.

Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

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 postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern 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)

The pagan life that St Augustine (born 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)

Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?

Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, a kind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, W.H. Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into a “fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces.

Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.

Ceramics are like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasmaa“ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’.The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.

Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties~forces and emergent spatial thresholds

 Outpost Correspondence 270224

Studio 3.16 Russell Moreton

The Minor Gesture : Manning/Artaud / Newman

Within the body of knowledge there is a mind in the flesh, quick as lightning.

Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties.

* The haptic engagement.

* The stage of drawing.

* Gesture and act.

Drawing exists in a state of potentiality. It is the instability of the framed image or object that resists definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself as at its suggestion—its possibility within a formation that has yet to occur. The drawing remains suspended in becoming, producing an uncertainty, and with it an anxiety, about what stage of language it inhabits.

To look with the eye and touch of an artist is to observe with sustained scrutiny while remaining aware of the social conditions from which forms emerge. The connection between the drawings in the exhibition lies in the value given to gesture as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace upon the paper.

— Catherine de Zegher, on Avis Newman

Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.

Within the realm of visual representation, drawing functions as an act of tracing absence.

The mark both opens and closes. It is an inscriptive game that is simultaneously motional and emotional, allowing an active participation in, and temporary mastery over, separation anxiety, while also marking the child's movement towards independence.

The earliest drawings are guided less by the visual exploration of space than by an exploration of movement and spatial relations.

Drawing begins in bodily response. Through acts of inscription it attempts to bring forth a visible language. Gestural traces reveal a continuous process of situating being within becoming.

Drawn from the body of knowledge onto the surface of experience.

For me, drawing continually manifests the endless repetition of remaking. As sensation, it occupies the space of anxiety—perhaps even a childhood anxiety.

## Moving Bodies / Spatial Thresholds

Architecture is entered physically, but also imaginatively. We inhabit not only space but its poetics.

### St Jerome in His Study (1474–75)

Antonello da Messina examines earthly limits through the image of St Jerome seated within a carefully constructed study, seemingly dissected to expose its interior. The room becomes both a place for thought and an architecture of the mind: a space containing books, writing, and the material conditions necessary for intellectual cultivation.

The painting suggests that space may be crossed by a mind capable of moving beyond physical boundaries. This capacity to transcend limits is shared by architecture itself.

In the work of Carlo Scarpa, particularly at Brion Cemetery, physical thresholds become poetic thresholds. Crossing from one space to another also becomes a passage between life and death, humanity and nature, memory and landscape. Alongside the tangible forms of architecture exists an invisible architecture of transition.

Brion Cemetery — Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione, 2017.

## Enric Mestre

### Architectures for Silence and Meditation

Building models become blueprints for larger constructions.

Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed, and the enclosed.

Enric Mestre's work draws equally upon the principles of classical form and the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He possesses an exceptional sensitivity to mass, planar relationships, and spatial proportion, translating the language of architecture into intimate sculptural objects.

His sculptures are enriched by the subtle and controlled colouration of their clay surfaces. The patinas possess a quiet complexity, relating more closely to the fabric of buildings than to conventional sculpture. Rough textures and smooth planes temper the austerity of the forms, while restrained colours distinguish individual surfaces and volumes.

Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist architecture. It carries the same austerity and asceticism while evoking a profound sense of memorial and elegy. These are deeply contemplative objects that move beyond formal exercises in harmony, proportion, chromatics, and composition.

Their quietness contains an unmistakable sense of *memento mori*. David Whiting describes many of Mestre's sculptures as possessing a sepulchral quality: repositories of memory, perhaps, or silent sentinels of an unspecified commemoration. They invite the imagination to wander through unsettling landscapes of urban fragments and industrial architectures.

Their cenotaph-like solemnity produces isolation and stillness, leaving the viewer to construct their own narratives.

— David Whiting

## Invisible Cities

*Italo Calvino*

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire—or its reverse, a fear."

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears. Even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules

Innerness~Interior : Hans Coper and the Egyptian Vessel/Wallace Stevens 'Anecdote of the Jar'.

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.

Spatiality/Spatial Agency/Light Laboratory : Literary and Visual Cartographies : Lightness,Quickness,Exactitude,Visibility,Multiplicity,

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

Spatial and Literal Cartographies.

Lightness,

Quickness,

Exactitude,

Visibility,

Multiplicity, 

Consistency 

ItaloCalvino,  6 memos for the next millennium.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Other Worlds : Insistent moments of mark making/subjectivity

Outpost 260622

CYANOTYPE SUN MAPPINGS/DRAWINGS

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer.

Adam Nicolson, Sea Room.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A history of Walking.

Site/Regional Specificity/Local Memory. 

SKIN, SURFACE, SUBJECTIVITY.

Insistent moments of alienated encounter.

Harriet Katherine Riches.

MATTER AND MUTABILITY

PRERSENCE AND AFFECT

Jane Grant.

AFFECTIVE ABSTRACTIONS

INTERMEDIARIES

CONSTITUENT PARTS

SPILL

IMMINENT REVELATION

EXPOSURE

NAMING THE LIGHTS

AFTERWORD

Garry Fabien Miller, Ian Warrell, Richard Ingleby.

The solitary artist literally at the edge of his environment and in a state of profound meditation about our place in the wider cosmos.

As if seeing herself from the desolate distance of a star, Woodman looks back through the alienating photographic lens of displacement and memory, her print the surface upon which she conjures an impossible moment of beautiful fusion.

Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to be challenged and to collapse.

For it is in the very nature of photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and in talented hands, an infallible medium of creation.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY.

Susan Sontag.

SPAB.

Building Conservation/Casework Campaigning/Innovative Research/Immersive Training Programmes/Working Parties.

Climate Action/Built Heritage.

Jacqui Donnelly, Spring 2022.

Traditional buildings are defined as those built with solid masonry walls, single-glazed timber or metal framed windows and timber-framed roofs usually clad with slate or tiles.

One of the most effective ways of increasing the resilience of our historical structures and sites is the application of good conservation practices.

Traditional  materials and construction techniques allow for the natural transfer of heat and moisture and relied on the thickness of the walls to cope with atmospheric moisture. It is therefore essential that all materials and finishes, including mortars, renders and plasters, used on traditional walls are vapour-permeable to allow this movement of moisture to continue.

Proactive Maintenance

Repair Programmes 

Upgrading through repair and adaptation.

Mitigation

Courses in traditional rural trades and crafts, Weald and Downland Open Museum.

The SPAB has made sure that the project not only repairs the mill but integrates public access and education into the process.

The scaffold design has allowed public access visits for the local community and students, offering opportunity to view the work while underway.

Douglas fir weatherboards

Vmzinc roof covering

Insulating Render, Cornerstone.

Developing a scheme that endeavours to fit a three-bedroom house into the existing footprint of the mud cottage and adjacent outbuilding,with some overspill into a new circulation space that connects the structures whilst clearly retaining the legibility of the existing modest forms.

INHABITATION, the inter-dependence of mankind within socio economic frameworks. 

Vernacular Concerns/Folklore/Heritage and Fabric of Buildings.

TONALITIES

BUILDING MATERIALS

THE POETICS OF SPACE

Gaston Bachelard.

Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar.

The numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index, whether they are in the first, second, or third position, besides having a purely ordinal value, correspond also to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and enquiry that, in varying proportions, are present in every part of the book.

Those marked 1 generally correspond to a visual experience, whose object is always some natural form; the text belongs to a descriptive category.

Those marked 2 contain anthropological elements, or cultural in the broad sense; and the experience involves, besides visual data, also language, meaning, symbols. The text tends to take the form of a story.

Those marked 3 involve more speculative experience, concerning the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world, the dimensions of the mind. From the confines of description and narrative we move into the area of meditation.

Layered drawing/collage/stratifications/exactitudes : Drawing and the production of space.

Layered drawing : Sensuality, Drawing and Astronomical Space., 

Russell Moreton on Flickr.

18/10/2012

ITALO CALVINO

SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

LIGHTNESS 

QUICKNESS 

EXACTITUDE 

VISIBILITY 

MULTIPLICITY

CONSISTENCY not written at the time of the authors death.

On The Beach : Photographic Clouds of Potentialities/Boundary Based Agency

Inside Phenomena/Catching The Light
Wind Turbines : Coastal Geometries/Machines
North Sea Rim
Sea Palling
Visual Device : Textual Intervention

Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modern type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times

Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea
Low Tide
Lightness
Quickness
Exactitude
Visibility
Multiplicity
CONSISTENCY/Guattari
The Three Ecologies

Italo Calvino
Six Memos for  the Next Millennium

Locality/Social Complexity- Notebooks
Flux : Consciousness
In and Out of Material
Beach

Working Spaces/Six Memos : Sites of Inquiry and Dialogue/Investigative Thinking/Post Studio

Every action happens in its own right and every action is an analogy of something else. 

What I do need be no more than what appears at the moment of the happening.

Peter Brook, The Open Stage.

BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS ARE IN THE NATURE OF THINGS POINTS OF FRICTION.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

MAKING : Essentializing of site and community through artistic presentation and production.

ITALO CALVINO

SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

LIGHTNESS 

QUICKNESS 

EXACTITUDE 

VISIBILITY 

MULTIPLICITY

CONSISTENCY not written at the time of the authors death.

SETTING UP THE IMMEDIATE THEATRE

MA Spatial Practices, Canterbury.

Project analysis and comment from Prof. Oren Lieberman, Dr Terry Perk, Dr Judith Rugg.

The desire to register working spaces is an interesting, and I believe fruitful, direction in the work. It is important that through this registration, you allow and encourage a theory to evolve. ‘Register’ is a useful term in that it accommodates both the index (through the notion of recording information) as well as the performative registering of, say, an opinion. As the pinhole apparatus registers ‘public’ spaces as well, it would be worthwhile assigning them the value of ‘work’ spaces also.

Also: you should understand the apparatus as a significant performative, spatial practitioner in its own right, and be careful about focussing only on the very engaging images produced by it.

Developing an engaging thesis exploring various forms and frameworks for thinking about thematics of photography and architecture in relation to space and its potential meanings and productions.

Using both practical workshops and theoretical enquiry to explore the differing values for both reading or engaging with the poetics of spatial formation in an ‘post’ sense of the studio. 

The work explores the concept of the open text in various ways and traces a development of the research from various approaches. This is a useful document of investigative thinking around ways of working for the project.

There are some methodological approaches proposed here through a range of contestatory areas - in particular, the nature of the document and the text as spatial tools or ways of thinking about the interfaces between them.

Some fascinating areas of insight and propositions on the nature of space - especially concepts of latency, peripheral space and methods of interaction/intervention. How could this area be explored in conceptual and crucial terms for the development of the project? - Behind your fluid approach, there is a sense of the need of the relational.

The bibliography could be further developed in terms of defining its taxonomies and the rationale or relationships between them and with the proposal.

Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity (London: Verso, 1992).

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston :Beacon Press, 1964). 

John Berger, Berger on Drawing ( Aghabullogue: Occasional Press, 2005). 

Peter Brook, The Open Stage (London: 1968).

Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007).

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). 

Martin Clark, The Dark Monarch, Magic and Modernity in British Art (London: Tate St Ives,2009).

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1994).

John Houston, The Abstract Vessel, Ceramics in Studio (London: Bellow Publishing, 1991).

Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 1991).

James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, A Final Warning (London: Penguin books,2009).

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1967). 

Richard Serra, The Matter of Time (Bilbao: Steidl Publishers,2005).

Rose Temkin, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

Tracey Warr, The Artists Body ( London: Phaidon Press,2000).

Christopher Wilmarth, Drawings into Sculpture (New York: Fogg Art Museum,2003).

I propose to register a site by its boundary. This new space will attempt to represent the internal dimensions of the artist’s current working studio space and be given a similar terrestrial orientation. Into the interior of this marked space objects from the working studio are to be reinstalled. This intervention attempts to create a spatial temporality into which a contemporary art practice will act as a context. The intervention sets out to display the complexities of the contemporary practitioner, the research material and works completed and those that are to instigated as a direct adaptation/response to the situation and site at hand. The temporal nature of this staged work reflects issues of mobility needed by the professional practitioner to be able to set up working sites and the ability to transpose them into other hosting environments, other challenging opportunities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DISPLAYED/BOOK MARKED MATERIAL.

Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

                     Giving a face to place in the present, 

                     By way of the body.

Yve Lomax, Sounding The Event (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)

                     An impossible refrain, 

                     Fortuity,

Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts (London: MIT Press, 2007)

Modernist Ruins Filmic Archaeologies,

DRAWING SPACES.

This activity of marking out an elsewhere (the studio space) and presenting it here and now is a fundamental quality of drawing. The act of drawing is in itself a private act undertaken primarily for the artists benefit. The finalisation of the research project revolves around issues of public intimacy with art objects whilst being in public spaces. This investigation into public intimacy and the reception of contemporary art practice as an open site; complete with works completed but not yet “framed” for any given spatial or social context attempts to stage this reality. Together with supplementary material present including in some cases work in progress, this might allow the temporal space frame of an absent space the ability to create a privileged and therefore valued experience of art objects within and amongst the intimacy of their conception.

Letting the practice stage its own intimate theatre might engender more collaborate speculation and interdisciplinary workings. “Spatial Practices” envisaged practitioners from Architecture, Fine Art and Performance driven disciplines, my own research at Canterbury has attempted to orchestrate a spatio-temporal theatre of reception for this purpose.

The Architecture of Science in Art: An Anatomy Lesson, 

                      The room as the real protagonist of the film. 

Bridget Elliott, Peter Greenaway, Architecture and Allegory (London: Academy Editions, 1997)

                       On Common Ground, 

                       Allegory as Architecture.

                       (Un)Natural Histories Collecting Cultures, Crossing Limits.

Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)

                       The Nomadic Subject in Smooth Space, 

                       Territories and the Refrain,

The nomadic subject open to unconventional spatial orientations can make new connections in keeping with the movements of life as it unfolds. 

Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, geography's visual culture (London: Routledge, 2000) 

Vicente Todoli, Time Zones, Recent Film and Video (London: Tate Publishing, 2005)

                    The Where of Now,

Bernard Poerksen, The Certainty of Uncertainty, Dialogues introducing Constructivism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004)

Gerhard Richter, Zufall, The Cologne Cathedral Window (Koln: Walther Konig, 2007)

Glen Onwin, As Above So Below (Halifax: HMST, 1991) Caroline Christov, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 1999)

Guy Brett, Force Fields, phrases of the kinetic (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000)

The Laboratory : Spatial Practices, 

Canterbury School of Architecture. 2009

Post studio practice/social processuality

Superimposition of studio space into the main foyer of a university. The disclosure of creative practices, spatial relations entangled by the private and the public.

Lefebvre in his chapter on Spatial Architectonics makes reference to the relationships established by boundaries and the relationship between boundaries and named places. These relationships promote significant and specific conditions or features to a space. This in turn results in various kinds of space. Lefebvre states that “every social space, then, once duly demarcated and oriented, implies a superimposition of certain relations upon networks of named places.”1

It is this superimposition of space that can within it demarcate other thresholds of experiences, within an existing demarcated space that interests me.

The act of “blocking in “ the dimensions of another space onto the floor of another create a temporal junction between a host space and a site within this host, a guest. This sets-up the notion of a temporal double occupancy held by the demarcation of a boundary and a site of proposal. This basic and temporal site marking could be said to have affinity towards some sort of anthropological marking, a territory. (Lefebvre defines anthropological marking as being at the stage when demarcation and orientation begin to create place and its social reality in archaic cultures)2. This activity also has associations with nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies as they use paths and routes as spatio­ temporal markers or determinants.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through “which without colliding would produce the establishment of places (localities made special for one reason or another).”3Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create fields from with boundaries form material relations, differences. My drawings are inside the temporality of site I have instigated and yet they propose a territory and a surface of light years which could accommodate the temporality of terrestrial space.

Interestingly Lefebvre comments “there is no stage at which ’’man” does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.”4

1 Lefebvre. The Production of Space, (London: Blackwell, 1991) pagel93.

2 Ibid..page 192

3 Ibid., page 192. 

4 Ibid.,page 192

UCA CANTERBURY 2010.Brief outline of final realisation.

I propose to physically register a site by creating its boundary, by way of applying 50mm self adhesive tape to the main reception area at UCA Canterbury. This new space will attempt to represent the internal dimensions of the artist’s current working studio space (5.0xl2.0metres) and as such it be given a similar terrestrial orientation. If it is necessary (through issues of setting up and health safety) a contingency plan would be to crop the footprint of the space by the use of a broken detail line where required. Into the interior of this marked space objects from the working studio are to be reinstalled and where possible to match existing placements, these initial positions will be documented to allow the registration of changes to be recognised. It is envisaged that these first points of departure may well migrate as the site becomes populated by activity and the spatial dynamics of the hosting space. This intervention (the superimposed space onto and within the existing) attempts to create a spatial temporality into which a contemporary art practice will act as a context for an investigatory and performative setting in public space of a creative private practice. The intervention sets out to display the complexities of the contemporary practitioner, the research material and works completed and those that are to instigated as a direct adaptation/response to the situation and site at hand. The temporal nature of this staged work reflects issues of mobility needed by the professional practitioner to be able to set up working sites and the ability to transpose them into other hosting environments, other challenging opportunities.