Showing posts with label Julian Stair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julian Stair. Show all posts

Wednesday, 3 June 2026

Studio Workings : Outpost/Drawing/Architectural Body~Bioscleave


Outpost 041024




Sensing Peripheries/Gestures and Acts. 

Trace Drawing

Body Outline/Material Flows.

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





A sudden quantum like jump between a thing and its parts, between its different scales, its ontological gap. In a way a whole is really another specific, not a generalization about a specific thing, this means that there is a 'weird gap' between the whole and the parts, an ontological gap.

Timothy Morton.








Architecture in the Space of Flows, 2012.

Andrew Ballantyne, Chris Smith explain that everything can be understood as functioning in terms of flows – flow of various kinds and scales make up architecture and connect it with the world. Here, a volatile mode of thought begins to proliferate architecture as a whole, rather than developing the thought in relation to the body or space in isolation.


The Extracorporeal Space.

Architecture in Abjection.


A visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject. 

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space that begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion).



The basic unit of study is body coupled with architectural surround. 

Arakawa and Gins.


You shouldn't force the memories. Just try to untangle them slowly.


I would suddenly have the feeling that a story was coming back to me and I would reach out instinctively to seize it. But there was nothing for me to hold. When I could no longer stand to stare at the blank page, I would type a, i, u, e, o, and then, imagining that I would now be able to write something, I would erase them again. But of course nothing came to me, and I would return to a, i, u, e, o. And the process would repeat itself. In the end, all that was left was a torn page, from the many times I'd erased what I'd written.


The Burning Library.


It may take a long time for every word to disappear, we held our breath as though fearful of disturbing this beautiful scene. 


The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.



Ceramic Objects/Monumental vessels that explore contemporary society's relationship to death and ritual.


Abstractive figurative forms invite the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.


Stair's exhibition explores humanity's reliance on art as a means to transcend the unknown.


Themes of Containment/Embodiment.

Julian Stair : Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, 2023.


Developing explorations in which material culture and artistic practice can engender 'a new , expressive language to both mediate loss and celebrate life, Julian Stair'.



Francesca Woodman.

Gagosian, 2024.


Putri Tan: In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that , as you said, is the body. I'm never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she's holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it.


Corey Keller: There's both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, you don't quite know whether they're trapped or liberated. I think what's interesting about the work is it's never quiet only about the space and it's never quite only about the body, but it's about the psychological spark (tension) that ignites when those things intersect.


Architectural Body

Arakawa and Gins.




The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.


A bioscleave is an event-fabric within which all exists only tentatively, within which all is perpetually shifting, and within which architectural bodies form and collapse, here distinctions between body and space, subject and object are diluted. This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another.


I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man's death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now.




But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.. But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man's death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.


The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different-as though I were trying to glue a pebble I'd found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.


Monday, 27 April 2026

What is a material? : Readings of Movement and Attention : Slow Philosophy/Clay/Ecology of Material Thinking

Land Forms/Architectures from marking movement.

Clay, Greenware. Studio Space.


Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021

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












A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy


Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010


The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve 


Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically 


Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010


Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010


New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay


The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object 


Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad


Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012


From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective


Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010


Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies


Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them


Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008


Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers


Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate



Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability


The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution


Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice


Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy


Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline


The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)


The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 


So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002


Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006


The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions


A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  


New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative


Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's


New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006


Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it


The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries


Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011


Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997


Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection


Expressing itself expressing 


Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions


Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact


The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement


Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 


A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside


Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce


Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside


The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017


Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice


'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey


Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005


With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 


Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence


Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994


The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler


The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world


Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen



Saturday, 7 February 2026

A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Outpost 310323


A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing








Matters of Concern/Fact.

Drawing/Contingency/Sensing/Seeing

Drawing away from descriptive depictions that illustrate preconceptions/aesthetics.


Julian Stair.

Quietus. 2012.

The Vessel.

Death and The Human Body.


There is an alchemy to making ceramics. We take an inert material, fashion it, dry it and expose it to heat and flame. The practice of cremation, of exposing the body to fire, going through an alchemical change, echoes and parallels the process of firing.

Julian Stair.


The materials he works, lead and clay are dense, both physically and emotionally. But Stair's use of these materials is not representational. These objects do not depict or illustrate, instead they enact and embody.


Stair's achievement in this cyclical exhibition is to have expressed both the universality and the specificity of death, each as an aspect of the other.


The great hand-thrown jars that stand at the heart of the exhibition exemplify this doubleness. Though completely abstract, they exist at the scale of the body. They invite a tactile response, visitors might stroke the ridges circumscribing the jars or tap them, or even give them a gentle hug.

Glenn Adamson.



Life drawing on the psychology of  nakedness and the human body in contemporary art.

Life-Class/Anatomy/Pathology.






The practical and theoretical problems of the confrontation with the human form.

Georg Eisler.


Herbert Boeckl.

His nudes speak a physical language, interpreting life and death in terms of human bodies, of functioning muscle and bone and the tactile aspects of flesh, and the knowledge of what lies beneath/behind it. 


Alfred Hrdlicka. 

A Group. 1973.

Proximity does not read as intimacy, the entangled naked bodies convey a sense of insecurity.

The Posed/Nakedness/Social Scrutiny.

The Life-Class.

Isabel Bradshaw/Michael Grimshaw


Drawings/Sculpted lines that bring sensations onto the surface of the paper.

Lines of Movement/Vectors

Lines of Static Forms/Boundaries


Mark-making, rendering the spatialities of the human form.

Form-Movement

Mass-Volume

Skin-Surface






Line is only the visual interpretation of an extremity of a volume. Mark-making on a drawing becomes a conduit for a sensation of seeing others.


The concept of anthropomorphism is central to the identity of pottery. We use bodily terms such as a neck, shoulder, hip and foot to describe the constituent parts of a pot. And the very nature of the vessel as a container, a holder of things, is analogous to the idea of the body as physical container for the soul or spirit.

Julian Stair.



Tuesday, 15 April 2025

Slow Philosophy/Discursive Attachments : Gathering Inquiry/Materials/Objects/Things

Slow Philosophy/Discursive Attachments : Gathering Materials/Objects/Things

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.

Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.


The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.


SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

The Enchantment of Modern Life.

Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett










Be not inhospitable to strangers

lest they be angels in disguise

Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate

David Childers, Heart In My Soul


Collage Works : Architectural Studies. Outpost Studios, Norwich.

Studio Works : Praxis between theory and practice. Outpost 2020.








Outpost Studios Norwich, collage, textual, intermedia, 

spatial practice, resource, project space, art practice, research, book works


Architectural Inquiry : Metaphysical Surfaces

Blue Spaces Of Everyday Enchantments : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal

Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce


In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'

Tim Ingold 2011


Materials, Tim Ingold, slow philosophy, studio works, textile, clay, painting, yellow ochre

New works around fired clay, painting, wrapping forms, metal, textiles and stones.

Architectural research for a library within a studio.


clay, textile, wrapping, painting, natural objects, 

photographic surface, asperity, poetics of process, studio


Palimpsest/Surface Sprays : Spaces Between Objects


Site based inquiry for sculpture trail at Raveningham








collage, research, spatiality, art practice, alternative photography, 

drawing, architectural, intervention, visual fine art, craft


studio, metaphysical space, collage, Palimpsest, Cristina Iglesias, Steven Holl, Jackie Leven, Tim Ingold, Julian Stair, drawing, sprays, Jane Bennett, Russell Moreton, Lucio Fontana,

Sunday, 13 April 2025

Drawing Towards an Ecology of Materiality/Embodiment/Emotion/Affect

Outpost 280623







Relation-In-The-Making.




Spaces between objects, Giorgio Morandi.

Emergent Evolutions.


These micro-perceptions are perceptions without objects, hallucinatory tendencies in the sense that they express nothing but the emphasis on the quality of becoming. They do not give us a body fully formed or an object-in-place, rather they fold perception into a becoming-body-of-movement, creating the emphasis of quasi formation that is relation-in-the-making.



An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling.

Momentum Wheel : Lucie Rie Installation.


We perceive/perception is the force for the worlds infinite unfolding, with objects catching the edges of their contours, participating in the relation they call forth.

Erin Manning.


The smooth paint of the background turns out to be made of many translucent layers, intended to cover over outlines that Giacometti rejected, always in favour of a smaller and smaller head.

John Berger.


Diffractive Thinking/Reading abstractions in the middle of things and both ways at the same time.

Karen Barad.


MAKING

Anthropology

Archaeology

Art and Architecture.






Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making. For Ingold instead of treating art and architecture as compendia of objects for anthropological or archaeological analysis, he advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.



Hungate Site Visit.

Water/Light/Architecture.

Ceramic Vessels/Lead Tray/Water/Mirror.

Cyanotype Solution, unexposed, unwashed.


White gesso on biscuit ware.

White lead glaze.


Ceramics and Architecture.

Ceramics for a reflective solitude, an architecture of silence.

Figural Jars/Abstracted Human Clay Vessels/Cinerary Pots.


Sainsbury Centre.

Julian Stair.

Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Mezzanine Gallery.


Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Materiality, Embodiment, Nonhumans, Hylomorphism, Things.


One of the peculiarities of material culture studies over recent decades has been its virtual divorce from the traditions of ecological anthropology. This is odd, given that both fields are broadly concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Students of material culture are interested in people's relations with things. Ecological anthropologists study how human beings relate to their biotic and abiotic environments. For the former, persons and things are bound in relational networks; for the latter, human beings and other organisms are bound in webs of life. Yet practitioners of these two fields are speaking past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. 

Tim Ingold.



Archaeology, Volume 41, 2012.

The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect.

Sarah Tarlow.


When David Sylvester asked Giacometti about the thinness of the sculptures he had made without a model, Giacometti said 'they get narrow despite myself'.But then added, 'from life, they do this less'. Models put up a resistance to the thinning gaze, as if they were resisting Giacometti's willingness to let them go.


Drawings That Shrink.

Drawings that are extremely tense, a sign that the object/model is resisting.

Relations on the figure and the rejected lines and their borders on the drawing.


And so Yanaihara tilted and shrank, and sank down towards the bottom of the frame. As he shrank down, he also shrank away, back in space, away in time and perhaps in imagination, away from firm memory and towards insecure recollection. At some point Giacometti abandoned the drawing and began another.


Giacometti was fastidious about the placement of the easel, the canvas, and Yanaihara's chair, and he put little red blocks of clay under the stretcher to keep the canvas at a precise angle. None of that helped him anchor the figure: still it kept shrinking. The principle of its shrinking is clear in the dozen preparatory drawings, because many of the rejected lines remain visible. What mattered was the relation between the head and the borders of the drawing. That's why the drawings have drawn borders with lines scattered like matchsticks inside them.






On Drawing/Seeing to abolish the principle of disappearance, but it never can, and instead it turns appearance and disappearance into a game.


The crucial sadness of drawing  is it is unsurpassably close to the object, but always separated from it. Drawing bends my thoughts towards the nearly indescribable distance between the model and the motions of my hand, or should I say between the movements of my eyes as they pass over the model, and the sweep of my hand as it moves across the paper. Or the feel of the model, as I imagine it, and the texture of the paper as it slides under my hand.


The game of drawing is intricate enough with its slant rhymes between the feel of the model in my mind and the feel of the paper. It is made more difficult because drawn lines have the power to remake my own imagination. Every line I draw reforms the figure on the paper, and at the same time it redraws the image in my mind. And what is more, the drawn line redraws the model, because it changes my capacity to perceive. 


As I draw, the model becomes defective. The image in my mind is marred by the marks I put on paper. And so because a drawing cannot quite be touched, because it shifts when I try to fix it on paper, because it does not simply transcribe something in the world, because it can never bring back what I once loved – because of all that, drawing is an intense expression of the defect of distance.

John Berger.   


Saturday, 22 February 2025

Ceramic Practice/Perception/Mind and Medium/The Jug/Things and Abstracts.

Ceramic Practice and Perception

Mind and Medium

Heuristic Material : Collage 

1. encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method.

2. serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.

abstracts : The Ruins of Cinema/Waverley Abbey Construction.












Flux/Fusion with nothingness and absorption 

Symbiotic relationship, feeding life, breath, energy, immanence


The visceral dark pots, meditations on existential feelings, volumes for thoughts, voids for imagination and fear, ecologies for living. 


The “New Ceramic Presence” a metamorphosis of meanings rather than in the eternity of symbols.


As always, the artist is led, not by patron, not by populace, certainly not by the critic, artist is led by artist. The artist is his/her own culture.

Rose Slivka. The New Ceramic Presence. 1961


The Garden Of Forking Paths

Chieko Mori, Spiral Wave

James Blackshaw, The Broken Hourglass

Helena Espuall, Home of Shadows and Whirlwinds

Jozef Van Wissem, The Mirror of Eternal Light

Chieko Mori, Tokyo Light



The very materiality forces its very form.

Pots invite us to consider the world that is gathered around them and through them. 


Loss of Relativity and the Forgetting of Air

Ceramics of immediacy/sensate in its own implicit space


And into the Fire

Post Studio Ceramics in Britain

Glenn Anderson. 2010


The politics of place rather than the nature of objects.

Clare Twomey most defines the post studio moment in British Ceramics.


Potters are making pots to be 'expressively photographed'.

Paintings have lost their 'relativity' becoming images rather can things. 


Rawson's ideal pot would die quietly in a glossy photograph, but comes to life in the hands.


Clay and mind works with the tactility formed and found from the voids of inside/outside divisions.


For Heidegger, the potter's medium is not clay, but space itself.

The thing of his essay is not a particular jug, but the essence of one.


The thrown walls of a jug may address that space. But the content or purpose of the object remains the voids within it and around it, which it brings into a sort of communion with one another.


Raku as an ideology


A philosophy must be arrived at through a direct involvement with the materials and the process.


Clay,The Body, Breath.


Ceramics, Fire,Energy.



The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds it


The potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not strictly speaking make the jug, he only shapes the clay, no, he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form. From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as a container in the shape of a containing vessel.

Heidegger. Poetry Language Thought 1971. The Thing 1950.


Pots always inhabit espace-milieu for the pots own space is continuous with the space around it, into which it extends and which makes it perceptable.


Anecdote of The Jar.

Wallace Stevens. 1919.


The pot/jar/jug does very little to dictate what happens around it. But it nonetheless conditions that reality, takes dominion.


The Vessel

Death and The Human Body


Each object has palpable weight, stands its ground, each has a definite thickness. A thick wall that reciprocally shields the darkness within, from the light without.

Glenn Adamson. Matters of Fact.



The containment of the body in death.


Existential

Clay Jug as an emblematic object full of billions of stars

Jackie Leven


There is something about clay that is elemental, prebiotic. Many creation myths refer to the forming of man from clay, its the stuff of the world we live in, its what we walk on. Taking that material which symbolises our origins and then making vessels to house the body, creates a wonderful kind of circularity.

Julian Stair. Quietus 2012.


Paul Soldner on Raku as a state of mind, a way of thinking, a way to continue to create with the pot after firing. Raku for me creates a way of living, not a technique but an attitude for life. 

The intrinsic nature of the intimate contact with the pot continues to stimulate the potters response, the pot in its becoming is both a beginning and an end.


A distinguished Japanese potter, Mr Kawai of Kyoto, when asked how people are to recognize good work, answered simply, “with their bodies”. 


Bernard Leach

A Potter's Book


Symbiotic Relationships


Atmospheres and Surrounding Objects

Peter Zumthor 





Unknown Craftsman

Soetsu Yanagi


Put aside the desire to judge immediately, acquire the habit of just looking.


Do not treat the object as an object for the intellect.


Just be ready to receive passively without interposing yourself.


Friday, 21 July 2023

Crafting the mind : Human Inhumation/Containment







Human Vessel/Leper Grave.

Morn Hill, Winchester.

Liquid light emulsion, charcoal, wax on paper, 2.1 x 1.5m.

Russell Moreton.


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


Discursive Thinking/Substance and Display.


Julian Stair

Quietus/The Body Politic


Morality

Jonathan Sacks


Co-Existing with the Virus


Jozef Van Wissem

Grand Central Confessional


Nature Boy

He said that in the end it is beauty

That is going to save the world, now

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

 

Monday, 12 June 2023

Exhibition/Intervention/Civilizing Rituals : The Sensitivities of The Physical Self/Architectural Body

 Outpost Studio 130423












The Changing Culture of Display.

How things work in museums.


Body/Mind/Movement/Material/Craft

Dynamics of Display inside The White Cube.


Liminality of glass display cabinets, spatialities of object narratives, forms and materials.


Artist as 'interventionist' in specific settings, such as collections and places of distinctive architecture. 


The more 'aesthetic' the installations, the fewer the objects and the emptier the surrounding walls, the more sacralized the museum space.


A new generation of complex narratives and juxtapositions in museum displays has evolved as a challenge to the minimal installation.


Civilizing Rituals.

Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan. 1995.


The formal qualities of the 'objects' and their haptic qualities directly speak to the visitor.

Julian Stair.


Giving 'Pots' universal aims and characteristics/utilities.

Ceramics.

Philip Rawson.









In this land we placed baptismal fonts

And an infinite number were baptized

Americo. 

Patti Smith.


Refraction phenomena produce a particular magic in architecture that is adjacent to or incorporates water.

Parallax.

Steven Holl.








Site specific artworks/research responding to themes initiated by Water.


To explore 'water' as both a spiritual and corporeal source and vessel for artworks.


Gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter Hungate.


To further develop exploratory working ideas through site specific research using drawing, cyanotype printing, leaded glass, clay.


Hungate, Norwich. 2023











A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Existence-Space and Architecture.

Christian Norberg-Schulz.



Architectural Body.

Organism/Person/Environment

Gins and Arakawa.


'Lever' 1989-92

Antony Gormley.


Indios Verdes No 4 1980

Manuel Neri.


Figure 2. Upright human body, space and time. Space projected from the body is biased toward the front and right. The future is ahead and 'up.' The past is behind and 'below.'


These objects are moving through time and space.

The temporal enactment/kinaesthetic relationship with how things operate/work through the body 


Key Words: Profane, Sacred, Past, Left, Right, Front, Back, Horizon, Future. Upright Human Body, Space, Time,


Experiential Values.

Responding to Quietus and the liminality that is created. 

The passage from life to death and the stillness and presence of the objects as generative of a particular kind of haptic and visual experience.


Making art that is the pivot for human behaviour.

Pots operate on so many levels.


When we appreciate/apprehend objects, touch them, hold them in our hand, somehow its a material reinforcement of our physical selves as we negotiate our way through life, both physically and intellectually. 


Pots can become invisible, so familiar that they disappear. 

My interest in pots is in making an art that one engages with, an idea of art operating in a social context, in which the experience of the everyday is important. I have come to realise is that I want to make art that shapes human actions, and is also like an active narrative through the body.


The Presence of Unglazed Clay.

Seeing Raw Material.

Working Vessels.


Quietus, 12 years in the making.

A 'Well Conceived Idea' an exhibition about pots and death.


In the mechanics of appreciation there is both the optic and the haptic.


I wanted to see if I could keep hold of that idea of a single stand-alone object that existed on its own, in its own space, form and surface colour, but on a larger architectural scale. So it was not just about holding a body, but about holding architectural space including outside areas.


I didn't even have an idea of what I was going to make. The making process is absolutely central to the evolution of the idea. If you sit down to work, in six months you can be in a totally different place, so that decisions are made in an incremental way.


Critical thinking/theory is really empowering to me, equipping myself with knowledge has enabled me to chart my way through the present.


Archaeology of an Exhibition.

Quietus-Reviewed. 2013

Julian Stair.