Working Title/Encountering's : Barad, Zornberg, Lingis~Troubling Bodies~Murmuring Depths

Troubling Bodies of Inquiry ~ Barad / Zornberg / Lingis

This inquiry considers the encounter as an elemental touching through which bodies become implicated in relations that exceed their own boundaries. Drawing on the shared horizons of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Murmuring Deep, Karen Barad’s queer inhuman~transmaterialities, and Alphonso Lingis’s phenomenology of primary communication, it approaches touching not as the transmission of settled meanings, but as an acknowledgement of an otherness related to our own. Earth, light, air, photographic traces, material surfaces, and bodily remains become situated participants in an indeterminate field of correspondence. Through these troubling bodies, the relations between interiority and exposure, hospitality and alienation, human and inhuman are brought into play.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere names an emergent spatial matrix through which these encounters can be sensed and reconsidered without resolving their differences. Making becomes a way of remaining attentive to what persists, what withdraws, and what cannot be fully known: a tentative transmaterial practice in which bodies touch, alter one another, and open towards further relations.

Alphonso Lingis’s philosophy of the elemental register grounds this encounter in raw, bodily exposure, finding a profound echo in Zornberg's concept of the unconscious murmur. As Lingis demonstrates, light, earth, air, and warmth are not simply environmental conditions surrounding human experience. They are what bodies share, encounter, and communicate through their situated existence. We orient one another within these physical elements before, or beyond, any exchange of clearly defined linguistic meanings.

Barad's Trans/Matter/Realities: Queer Political Imaginings introduces a more troubling implication to this physical matrix. The inhuman is not safely located outside the human, as an external other that can be observed, classified, or accommodated. It is already implicated in what we are and how we become. The insensible, irrational, unfathomable, and incalculable are not merely limits to be overcome in the production of knowledge. They trouble the fantasy that we could ever become fully self-contained, transparent, or in control.

Read together, these three perspectives allow us to reconsider the earlier spatial gatherings as more than provisional arrangements of objects, images, and architectural elements. They become situations of elemental touching in which the boundaries between bodies remain deeply consequential but cannot be secured in advance.

The connection is particularly strong with your 2018 research situation at Open Studios Norfolk: leper graves, meadow grasses and cyanotype contact paper. Here, contact is not only an idea. It is materially enacted. Grasses touch the photosensitive surface; light participates in the exposure; the resulting image bears traces of a meeting between bodies that do not share the same material condition or agency. The image is indexical, but it does not transmit the encounter in its entirety. It carries a trace of an event whose relations exceed what the image can disclose.

This is where Making~Transmaterialities becomes more than a description of work across materials. It names a condition in which touching is simultaneously intimate and alienating: an encounter with what is related to us without being reducible to us.

Spatial Practice.

Interiority/Atmosphere.

Making~Transmaterialities : An infinite touching alterity that lives  in, around, and through us.

Waking us up to the inhuman that therefore we are, to a recognition that it may well be to the inhuman, the insensible, the irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will help us face the depths of what responsibility entails.

A cacophony of whispered screams, gasps, and cries, an infinite multitude of indeterminate beings, diffracted through different spacetimes.

The nothingness is always already within us, it lives through us, we cannot shut it out, we cannot control it. We cannot block out the irrationality, the perversity, the madness we fear in the hopes of a more orderly world.

But this does not mitigate our responsibility, on the contrary it is what  makes it possible. Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an affirmation, a celebration of the plenitude of nothingness.    

Karen Barad.

The Encounter : A touching that rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own.

The encounter does not live on or transmit clear meanings. Rather it rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own. 

We do not relate to the light, the earth, the air, and the warmth only with our individual sensibility and sensuality. We communicate to one another the light our eyes know. The ground that sustains our postures, and the air and warmth with which we speak. We face one another as condensations of earth, light, air and water, and orient one another in the elemental in a (its) primary communication.

The Murmuring Deep.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

Barad, The Queer Inhuman~Transmaterialities

Trans/Matter/Realities

Queer Political Imaginings. 2015

Research situation, open studios Norfolk 2018. Lever graves, indexical bodies with meadow grasses on cyanotype contact paper.

Interested in these gatherings of Moretons spatial matrix, as a troubling that is also becoming a tentative transmaterialities a queering of relations and of bodies around the inhuman (Barad). 

What interests me in these two gatherings is that they make the spatial matrix appear less as a set of concepts applied to objects and more as a materially assembled field in which bodies, spaces and relations become uncertain together. 

The troubling is not simply a subject represented by the work. It is something the work performs: a disturbance of the distinctions through which we ordinarily recognise bodies, organise interiors and decide what belongs.

The two images seem to offer different but corresponding conditions for this.

The first gathering: a provisional apparatus of bodies.

Making~Transmaterialities : An infinite touching alterity that lives  in, around, and through us.

This image stages an interior through a collection of supports, rods, timber, metal, a suspended or angled form, and a photographic image of human bodies. These elements do not settle into a single architectural or sculptural identity. They make an arrangement that seems at once constructed, provisional and bodily.

Spatial gathering: supports, image, material elements and an unstable field of relations.

The rods are especially interesting. They cross, lean, meet and distribute weight. Their lines are not simply drawn upon a space; they actively organise the space through their material presence. The photographic image introduces another bodily register, but not a body physically present in the same way as the timber, metal or floor. 

The photographed bodies are present through an image that is itself caught within the arrangement.

This is already a troubling of presence and absence, human and nonhuman, image and material, structure and gesture. 

The photograph does not merely represent a body for the installation. It becomes another body within the apparatus, entering relations with materials that neither share its substance nor submit to the same mode of presence.

The gathering is therefore not unified by a common identity. Its elements become spatially consequential through their differences.

A tentative proposition: the apparatus does not contain a pre-existing spatial relation; it makes relations perceptible by assembling bodies that cannot be reduced to one another.

The second gathering: interiority as a relation in formation.

The Encounter : A touching that rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own.

This second image produces a different spatial condition. A large blue work occupies the wall; chairs, cushions, a small table, papers and a container of material gather in front of it. An open doorway admits daylight and exposes the room to an exterior beyond its immediate boundaries.

Here, the room seems to be both an interior for inhabitation and a provisional apparatus for thinking. The table and chairs suggest gathering, conversation or study, but the space is not fully prescribed by these functions. The large blue surface changes the room's atmosphere, while its dark, irregular lines establish a movement that exceeds the furniture's arrangement. The doorway makes the interior porous to another spatial and atmospheric condition.

What matters is the mutual disturbance of these elements. The blue work is not simply a backdrop; the furniture is not simply functional; the doorway is not merely an exit. Each changes how the others can be encountered.

The room becomes a tentative interiority: gathered sufficiently to sustain an encounter, but not resolved into a final arrangement.

There is also a significant difference between the two images. In the first, lines of support appear to construct a provisional spatial apparatus in the room. In the second, the large blue surface seems to reorganise an already inhabitable interior. One gathers through crossing and bracing; the other through a field of colour, a diagrammatic movement and the coexistence of inside and outside.

These are different spatial operations, but both unsettle the idea that architecture is simply a container within which objects and bodies are placed.

Queering relations: troubling the distribution of bodies.

I think queering becomes useful here if it names more than an aesthetic quality or a reference to identity. It can describe an operation through which established relations are made less certain: the distinction between artwork and apparatus, architecture and furniture, human and nonhuman, interior and exterior, presence and absence.

The images do not necessarily abolish these distinctions. Their interest lies in making them provisional.

In the first gathering, the photographed human body enters an arrangement with timber, metal and architectural supports. In the second, the room becomes an active participant in the encounter between a painted surface, furniture, papers, light and the exterior. Neither gathering requires the human subject to disappear. 

Rather, the human is no longer the sole measure through which the space becomes intelligible.

This is where your interest in Barad's inhuman becomes productive. The inhuman need not be understood as the opposite of the human. It directs attention towards material agencies and relations that do not originate in human intention, even when they become entangled with human activity. Weight, gravity, light, surface, support, resistance and spatial arrangement participate in what becomes possible.

The resulting queering is material and relational. It troubles the assumption that bodies arrive as already constituted entities and subsequently enter into relations. Instead, the gathering allows us to consider how bodies acquire their particular capacities and significance through the relations in which they participate.

Bodies do not merely meet within a space; their meeting helps produce what each body, and the space itself, can become.

Tentative transmaterialities.

I would place tentative transmaterialities at the hinge between these observations and your wider spatial matrix.

By transmateriality, I understand a movement across material differences without assuming that those differences disappear. Timber does not become metal, the photograph does not become a human body, and the painted surface does not become architecture in any literal sense. Yet each can alter the spatial capacities of the others.

The term tentative matters because these relations are not entirely predetermined. The apparatus may suggest a structure without becoming a stable architectural proposition. The room may offer a place for gathering without fixing the gathering's purpose. The materials make relations possible, but do not exhaust their possible outcomes.

This is also a useful point of correspondence with your clay~ceramic practice. Clay is not simply another material added to a pre-existing spatial arrangement. Its plasticity, resistance, drying, apertures and eventual firing change the conditions of the gathering. Once fired, the ceramic body persists, but the relations it makes possible remain open to further encounters.

The two installations can therefore be approached as earlier spatial propositions in which a central concern was already emerging: how might bodies gather without being gathered into a single, settled identity?

The matrix in operation.

The four movements of your matrix become particularly legible here.

Diffraction.

Different material and spatial registers alter one another. The photographic image, supports, painted surface, furniture and doorway do not simply add up; their differences change what becomes perceptible.

Hospitality.

The apparatus and room provide provisional conditions for encounter. They gather bodies and materials without fully determining how these relations will unfold.

Alienation.

The elements do not become entirely familiar or assimilated. The photograph remains an image, the structure retains its material resistance, and the interior remains exposed to what exceeds it.

Atmosphere.

The gathering acquires a sensate character through colour, light, shadow, texture, spacing and the felt organisation of the room. Atmosphere is produced through these relations, not added to them.

The matrix is not a sequence through which an artwork passes. Each movement is active in the others. Hospitality can expose a body to alienation; alienation can make difference perceptible; diffraction can alter the conditions of hospitality; atmosphere can make these relations felt before they are conceptually resolved.

This last point is important for your emphasis on sensate heuristic inquiry. The spatial proposition is not necessarily understood first and then experienced. Its relations may be encountered bodily—through an inclination to approach, a sense of obstruction, a pause, a shift of attention—before they become available as explicit thought.

A reading apparatus for these earlier works.

Troubling Gatherings ~ Tentative Transmaterialities ~ Queering the Spatial.

These spatial gatherings can be approached as provisional apparatuses through which bodies, materials and architectural relations become available for further encounter. Supports, photographic images, painted surfaces, furniture, apertures and light do not occupy a neutral space. 

They participate in its formation, altering the conditions through which bodies become perceptible to one another.

The gatherings trouble the distinction between a space that contains and the bodies it contains. In one arrangement, intersecting supports establish an unstable field of spatial relations in which the photographic body enters correspondence with timber, metal and architectural structure. In another, a large painted surface, furniture, working materials and an open doorway produce an interior whose boundaries remain sensate and provisional. 

Neither gathering resolves into a single architectural identity. Each allows different material registers to remain active within a shared spatial proposition.

A queering of relations emerges through this refusal of settled identities and functions. Artwork, apparatus, architecture and furniture remain distinguishable, but their capacities are altered through proximity. The human body is no longer the sole measure of spatial organisation; material forces, surfaces, supports, light and resistance participate in the production of the encounter. The inhuman is not external to the human, but implicated in the relations through which human and nonhuman bodies become capable of affecting one another.

Tentative transmaterialities name these movements across material differences without requiring their convergence. The gathering is hospitable because it makes encounter possible, yet troubling because encounter does not guarantee familiarity, belonging or agreement. Alienation remains active within hospitality. Diffraction allows these relations to be reconsidered through their differences, while atmosphere emerges as their sensate and spatial intensity.

These earlier works can therefore be encountered as persistent spatial propositions rather than preliminary stages in a settled practice. They gather relations without exhausting them, making available a mode of spatial inquiry in which bodies remain capable of becoming otherwise through their encounters with other bodies.

I would keep this reading close to the images rather than claim that they already articulate the whole of the later matrix. Their value is that they provide material situations through which the matrix can now be developed.

The continuity is not necessarily a consistent visual language. It is an operative concern: gathering without convergence, hospitality without guaranteed belonging, and material correspondence without the erasure of difference. The later ceramic bodies can be understood as another intensification of this concern, acquiring persistence through firing while remaining available to further spatial and sensate encounters.

The Encounter ~ Elemental Otherness ~ Queer Inhuman

The encounter rests on an acknowledgement of elemental otherness: a touching through which bodies become responsive to what is related to their own existence without becoming the same. As Zornberg suggests in The Murmuring Deep, we encounter and communicate through the light, earth, air and warmth that sustain our bodies. These elements are not simply external conditions of experience. They participate in the ways bodies orient one another, making encounter possible beyond the transmission of clear meanings.

This elemental correspondence offers a further reading of the spatial gatherings. Timber, metal, photographic images, painted surfaces, furniture, apertures and bodies do not simply occupy a common space. They participate in a material situation whose relations cannot be exhausted by identifying the elements or interpreting their arrangement. The gathering becomes a touching through which differences acquire spatial and sensate consequence.

Barad's queer inhuman intensifies this proposition. The inhuman is not a separate realm opposed to the human, but an unsettling of the boundaries through which the human is understood as autonomous, rational and self-contained. In Trans/Matter/Realities: Queer Political Imaginings (2015), indeterminacy becomes an affirmation rather than a lack: the incalculable and unfathomable are implicated in the conditions through which responsibility becomes possible. The encounter does not promise mastery over otherness. It demands an attentiveness to relations whose consequences cannot be completely known in advance.

The 2018 research situation at Open Studios Norfolk, involving lever graves, meadow grasses and cyanotype contact paper, offers a material instance of this troubling. Contact between grasses, photosensitive paper and light produces an indexical trace, but the image cannot contain the encounter from which it emerges. Its surface makes a relation perceptible while leaving much of that relation unresolved. The image persists as a body of contact, available to further encounters without becoming a transparent account of what took place.

Making~Transmaterialities therefore names an infinite touching of alterity that lives in, around and through bodies. It is not a claim that all matter becomes indistinguishable, nor that every encounter produces harmony. It is an acknowledgement that bodies are constituted and altered through relations with what they cannot wholly assimilate or know. Hospitality becomes a willingness to remain exposed to this otherness; alienation names the difference that persists within such intimacy; diffraction allows the encounter to generate further differences rather than converge upon a final meaning; and atmosphere becomes the sensate field through which these relations are felt.

The spatial proposition is consequently not a stable arrangement of bodies, nor a representation of their entanglement. It is an apparatus through which elemental, material and affective relations become available for encounter. The apparatus gathers, but cannot contain, the indeterminacy it makes perceptible. Its hospitality remains troubled; its boundaries remain consequential without being absolute.

To make, within this field, is to participate in relations whose outcomes are neither entirely given nor wholly controllable. The responsibility that follows does not arise from achieving complete knowledge of other bodies. It emerges from recognising that one's own existence is already implicated in relations with what remains unfamiliar, insensible or beyond calculation.

Spatial Practice, Karen Barad, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, Queer Inhuman, Transmaterialities, Elemental Touching, Troubling Bodies, Indexical Bodies, Sensate Inquiry, Diffraction, Hospitality, Alienation, Atmosphere, Interiority, Material Correspondence, Inhuman Correspondence, Negative Capability, Persistent Bodies, Making,

Permeable Chambers ~ Modular Outliers ~ Withdrawn Ceramics~Diffractive Hospitality

Spatial components and relational volumes.

The ceramic bodies in Russell Moreton's Permeable Chambers establish a relationship between dominant architectural volumes and smaller modular spatial components. The larger, vertically oriented forms establish a substantial presence, while the smaller hollow units gather around their bases. Their relationship is neither simply hierarchical nor one of repetition. The smaller components introduce a differentiated scale through which the larger bodies can be encountered as parts of a wider spatial proposition.

The distinction between the dominant volume and its outliers is important. The larger ceramic bodies establish an architectural presence through their height, mass, perforated surfaces and internal cavities. The smaller modules retain a more compact, component-like character. Their openings and rectilinear construction suggest a shared spatial vocabulary, but their differences prevent the ensemble from resolving into a single, uniform structure. Each component retains its own material and spatial specificity while participating in a larger field of correspondence.

The term outlier is therefore productive. It identifies a body that remains distinct from the dominant volume without becoming spatially unrelated to it. The smaller modules do not need to attach physically to the larger forms in order to affect how those forms are perceived. Their proximity establishes intervals, rhythms and shifts of scale. Space becomes perceptible through the relations between the components, rather than being understood as a neutral container in which separate objects happen to stand.

This arrangement extends Moreton's interest in permeable chambers. The ceramic body is not defined exclusively by its external silhouette or by the interior it encloses. Its spatial character emerges through the correspondence between surface, cavity, aperture and surrounding environment. Perforations establish passages between interior and exterior; the smaller modules introduce further spatial bodies into the vicinity of the larger chambers. The resulting ensemble can be understood as a differentiated field of interiorities, in which each body participates in a wider spatial condition without losing its particularity.

Making ~ Technical negotiation ~ Material persistence

The technical construction of these bodies is inseparable from their spatial proposition, although the two should not be conflated. Slab construction, structural support, perforation, internal divisions, drying and firing establish the material conditions through which the ceramic volumes can persist. These operations involve specific negotiations with weight, shrinkage, distortion, heat distribution and the behaviour of clay during transformation.

Such considerations are not external engineering problems subsequently resolved in the service of an artistic idea. They form part of the material inquiry through which the work becomes possible. The dimensions of a component, the position of an aperture or the arrangement of an internal support affect not only structural stability but also the relationships that the finished body can establish between its interior and exterior.

Firing introduces a decisive change in these relations. The provisional clay construction becomes a materially persistent ceramic body, retaining traces of its formation while acquiring a different capacity to encounter its surroundings. The finished form is no longer available for alteration in the same manner as wet clay, yet its spatial proposition remains open. Its surfaces, cavities and apertures continue to participate in changing conditions of light, atmosphere, proximity and inhabitation.

The withdrawn ceramic is therefore not simply a completed object. It is a body whose material formation has reached a different state, while its capacity to enter relations continues. Its persistence depends upon the transformation of its material condition; its openness depends upon the fact that this transformation does not determine every subsequent encounter.

Modular outliers ~ Correspondence without convergence

The smaller ceramic components extend this proposition by introducing further bodies into the spatial field of the larger chambers. Their significance does not depend upon their being interpreted as miniature versions of the dominant structures. Rather, they establish a differentiated correspondence in which scale, repetition, spacing and material resemblance become perceptible through proximity.

The ensemble consequently operates through correspondence without convergence. The components share a vocabulary of construction and surface, but they do not become interchangeable. Their differences contribute to the spatial organisation of the whole. The larger volumes provide a dominant architectural presence; the smaller modules qualify that presence through their distribution and their capacity to establish additional intervals.

This relationship offers a way of understanding the modular outlier as a persistent spatial body. It remains materially distinct while participating in an arrangement that exceeds its individual dimensions. Its significance is not exhausted by its function within the ensemble, nor does the larger chamber contain the complete meaning of the smaller components. Each body alters the conditions through which the others can be encountered.

The spatial proposition therefore resides neither in the dominant ceramic alone nor in the modular components considered separately. It emerges through their arrangement, their differences and the intervals they establish. The ensemble makes space perceptible as an active relation between bodies.

Ceramic volume ~ Modular outlier ~ Aperture ~ Interval ~ Correspondence ~ Spatial persistence

Moreton's Permeable Chambers can thus be understood as an assemblage of materially persistent but propositionally open bodies. Their construction establishes the conditions for their endurance, while their spatial relations remain available for further encounters. The ceramics persist as distinct bodies, yet continue to participate in the production of a shared and changing spatial field.

The photograph makes the relationship between the large ceramic bodies and their smaller modular counterparts particularly interesting. They appear to share a material vocabulary of perforation, incision, weathered colour and geometric construction, but they do not simply repeat one another at different scales. The smaller components establish another register of spatial activity around the larger volumes.

I would bring this into the academic framework we have been developing, while keeping the technical decisions distinct from their conceptual interpretation. The earlier account makes some strong claims about kiln behaviour and firing outcomes that would need to be verified against the actual firing records before being treated as technical conclusions.

The point I would carry forward is that the modular outliers do not merely support the larger chamber conceptually; they help produce its spatiality. Their placement establishes relations that would not exist through the dominant volume alone.

This also gives you a useful distinction for future work: technical construction determines what can physically persist, while spatial arrangement determines some of the relations through which that persistence becomes perceptible. The two inform one another, but neither completely determines the other.

Reading Interiority : Drying Rooms~Spaces and Intervals in Clay.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/55470909114/in/dateposted-public/

Interiority / Atmosphere

This foregrounds the drying room as a spatial and atmospheric condition, rather than treating the post primarily as a theoretical text.

The drying room becomes a spatial condition of reading: clay is still changing, neither fully provisional nor materially settled. The reading body encounters this condition through touch, while Barad's writing opens that touch towards responsibility, otherness and a futurity that cannot yet be fully inhabited.

Clay as a troubling interiority of reading and as an material interval that becomes available for a developing spatial inquiry.

Clay allows us to reach out, as it touches us, touchings~bodies reaching out into the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never touch. Their touching is to respond~In~correspondence.

For Karen Barad.

Living compassionately requires recognizing  and facing (touch~ing) our responsibility to the infinite of the other (that we are) welcoming the stranger whose very existence is the possibility of touching and being touched. 

The stranger who gifts us with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come (a futurity perhaps of the withdrawn ceramic that was touching compassionately the bodies of stranger~in~clay.

Reading Interiority ~ Drying Rooms, Spaces and Intervals in Clay

A drying room is neither simply an interior nor a space of waiting. Clay occupies a changing condition, gathering the traces of its making while moving towards another material state. Its persistence is not yet secured; its possibilities have not disappeared.

Reading enters this interval as another form of touching. Words, materials and bodies encounter one another without becoming the same. Through Barad, touching becomes a question of correspondence and responsibility: how bodies reach towards an otherness they cannot fully know, and how this encounter changes what it means to respond.

The clay body is already situated within a weather~~world, exposed to forces through which its condition continues to alter. Reading does not stand apart from these movements. It becomes another body within them, carrying soundings that may surface through making or withdraw into the material relations of the ceramic.

Perhaps the drying room is a space of such ambiguous inhabitation: where the provisional persists, where the withdrawn remains available, and where the stranger is not simply encountered but helps to make another encounter possible.

Reading~clay~ceramic. Touching~being touched. Persistent bodies, still~in~~play.

What might pass between bodies without becoming their possession?

interiority,

spatial practice,

reading body,

clay~ceramic,

correspondence,

touch,

material thinking,

Karen Barad,

threshold,

speculative learning,

Diffractive hospitality ~ Bodies learning with each other

Two bodies of thought occupy the same spatial register without being brought into agreement. Their proximity is hospitable, but not neutral: each troubles the other's boundaries, altering what can be perceived without determining what must be understood. Images become sites of correspondence; texts become bodies available for encounter. The reader enters this unsettled field, where curiosity arises through difference and learning remains reciprocal, provisional and unfinished.

Reading Interiority : Drying Rooms~Spaces and Intervals in Clay

Interiority / Atmosphere

This foregrounds the drying room as a spatial and atmospheric condition, rather than treating the post primarily as a theoretical text.

The drying room becomes a spatial condition of reading: clay is still changing, neither fully provisional nor materially settled. The reading body encounters this condition through touch, while Barad's writing opens that touch towards responsibility, otherness and a futurity that cannot yet be fully inhabited.

Clay as a troubling interiority of reading and as an material interval that becomes available for a developing spatial inquiry.

Clay allows us to reach out, as it touches us, touchings~bodies reaching out into the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never touch. Their touching is to respond~In~correspondence.

For Karen Barad.

Living compassionately requires recognizing and facing (touch~ing) our responsibility to the infinite of the other (that we are) welcoming the stranger whose very existence is the possibility of touching and being touched.

The stranger who gifts us with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come (a futurity perhaps of the withdrawn ceramic that was touching compassionately the bodies of stranger~in~clay.

 

Reading Interiority ~ Drying Rooms, Spaces and Intervals in Clay

A drying room is neither simply an interior nor a space of waiting. Clay occupies a changing condition, gathering the traces of its making while moving towards another material state. Its persistence is not yet secured; its possibilities have not disappeared.

Reading enters this interval as another form of touching. Words, materials and bodies encounter one another without becoming the same. Through Barad, touching becomes a question of correspondence and responsibility: how bodies reach towards an otherness they cannot fully know, and how this encounter changes what it means to respond.

The clay body is already situated within a weather~~world, exposed to forces through which its condition continues to alter. Reading does not stand apart from these movements. It becomes another body within them, carrying soundings that may surface through making or withdraw into the material relations of the ceramic.

Perhaps the drying room is a space of such ambiguous inhabitation: where the provisional persists, where the withdrawn remains available, and where the stranger is not simply encountered but helps to make another encounter possible.

Reading~clay~ceramic. Touching~being touched. Persistent bodies, still~in~~play.

What might pass between bodies without becoming their possession?

interiority,

spatial practice,

reading body,

clay~ceramic,

correspondence,

touch,

material thinking,

Karen Barad,

threshold,

speculative learning,

Capturing Forces~Material Events : Sites of Difference and Multiplicity that precede Identity.

 

Axis Web~Fellowship Proposal 2025.

My practice begins with making as a site of encounter: a way of thinking through materials, bodies and spaces rather than simply producing objects. I work primarily with clay and ceramics, using exploratory, research-driven processes in which material behaviour becomes an active participant in the work. Clay is not treated as a passive substance awaiting form, but as a material with its own tendencies, resistances, temporalities and capacities to transform intention.

Informed by materialist and process-based thinking, including the work of Tim Ingold, Erin Manning and Karen Barad, I understand making as an ecological and relational practice. My ceramic works emerge through an ongoing negotiation between human gesture and material agency. They register the minor actions of making—touching, folding, assembling, piercing, scoring, washing and marking— while retaining the instability of the processes through which they come into being.

I am interested in the point at which intention becomes entangled with material behaviour. Through this entanglement, surfaces, interiors and spatial propositions emerge. The resulting works are not simply objects, but material events: sites where bodies, gestures, histories and ideas meet. Making becomes a form of navigation through which thought is distributed across matter, space and time.

Alongside my studio practice, I am developing an ‘anarchive’ of research material gathered throughout my academic and professional studies. Rather than preserving this material as a fixed archive, I am interested in activating it through encounters between practitioners, ideas and materials. This could take the form of an institutional context, an online resource, or a non-disciplinary gathering of active practitioners.

My earlier studies in Spatial Practice at Canterbury and subsequent work at Farnham, where I proposed a ‘theatre of research’ within an interior design project, continue to inform this direction. The fellowship would enable me to develop a practice in which making, research and spatial encounter operate as mutually generative forms of inquiry: a process of making-with in which materials, ideas and bodies can meet and produce unforeseen relations.

Primordial Memory/Dreaming/Making/Corporeality : Antony Gormley/Francesca Woodman/Bodies/movements of becoming.

Concept of the Body : Merleau-Ponty

Fundamental assumption that the body was not an object, the body is the condition and context through which I am able to have relations with objects. 

The mind in its insertion in (creating/becoming) corporeality creates the ambiguous relation with our body, and correlatively with perceived things/superimpositions/entanglements.

Understanding the material/body image in discursive terms

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

The body generates and presumes interpretations, perspectives which serve its needs in the world, its will to power and its drive towards self expansion/self overcoming, the movement of becoming, vigorous, free, joyful activity. (Nietzsche)

 

Francesca Woodman explores the spatial relationship of the body in space and time.

These performative images and her relationship to the pictorial space, her body traces, are witnessed and further manipulated/annotated by drawn lines enclosing and creating other spaces.

Barad: Thinking with intra-action

There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as human  practices,  not simply  because we use nonhuman  elements in  our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain  knowledge by  standing  outside the world; we know because we are of the world.  We are part of the world  in  its differential becoming.  The separation  of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inher­ent difference between  human  and  nonhuman,  subject and  object,  mind  and  body, matter and discourse. Onto epistemology—the study of practices of knowing in being— is probably a better way to think about the kind of understanding that we need to come to terms with how specific interactions matter.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 141.

Antony Gormley, states, that one of his central concerns has been to recover a sense of being in the conditions of today's increasingly materialist and mediated social environment. He uses sculpture, via the intimate process of the body cast, to construct surrogate forms, derived from an almost sacrificial process. A rehearsal of death of an absent body, recorded as an enclosed volume of air, entombed in a lead sarcophagus of fragmented body sections, soldered to reconstruct a new wholeness. He creates, within this sculptural volume, an “infinity of space within the body.” His works are embodiments of the body. They are literally body cases. The use of lead with its own alchemical and historical contexts and its particular non­ aesthetic further adds to the tomb like qualities of the work. 

Each sculpture invites occupation; it is complete when the imagination or the mind inhabits them.

Gormley’s body cases are almost orphans, cast adrift from their symbolic maternal mother. They have become shells; empty humanoid spaces, awaiting an identity in the mind of the post-modern witness. In return their identification identifies the witness. The experience of metaphysical inhabiting this surrogate human space might allow us to lose all sense of the present and our identity with ourselves. Gormley’s sculptures, with this lack of identity or questioning of identity with the space they are placed in, prompt a different mode of questioning the purpose of their presence. The viewer becomes more interrogatory, more concerned, almost asking the sculpture to confirm its placement, not its actual identity. We see in them something of ourselves, externalised for scrutiny, a dialogue of intervention caused by a bodily proximity to something unknown, which can compound meaning, or conversely it can fragment it. 

An investigation into a disembodied physicality, inducing elements of fetishism and narcissism, with the search for an identification of the feminine, within the confines of spaces, loaded with tactility, dust, dilapidation and decay?

Some of  Francesca Woodman’s work involves herself and female characters in staged film, feminised melodrama. Stills with an unknown and possibly convoluted narrative, together with ambiguous relationships amongst the characters. The images are shot as straight documentary stills and seem to be searching for the identity of the partially hidden women, as seen through the response and body language of the other characters facing us. These works are full of conceptual ambiguities.

Photographs are indexical; they point to something else; a mirror with a memory; a stage for an inquiry.

Francesca Woodman’s use of the camera’s ability to witness and document, is subverted into a personal language of aggressive tactility and the notion of the body’s identification being partially hidden or even lost; just its trace remains recorded in the latency of the camera’s recorded time.

Her work seems to have an inherent almost codified, femininity, probably due the semiotics and symbolism of early surrealist influences. She performs, re-enacts and exposes her body for the witnessing of the camera. She seems to, fleetingly, seduce and then disappear, just leaving a trace of her being, her sexuality and its actions, entrusted to the fragility of the light sensitive gelatin.

 (extracts from The Body, Francesca Woodman and Antony Gormley, WSA Russell Moreton 2006)

Reading The Landscape

This Enchanted Isle : Peter Woodcock 2000

Radio On by Chris Petit.

The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear.

What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism (Woodcock,2000:55)

England Dreaming : Primordial Memory/Dreaming

The darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement. (Daniel Libeskind)

The Drought : J G Ballard

The Tempest : Alchemy, Prospero.

The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries. 

‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’

Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)

‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)

Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with  them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog. Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place.  

(Woodcock,2000:31)

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.

Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society. Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston, Psychoanalysis of fire, New York, Beacon press 1964 

Benjamin, George, Antony Gormley: critical mass, London, Royal Academy of the Arts 1998 

Curtis, Penelope, Sculpture in 20th Century Britain, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute 2003

Deneuve, Catherine, Bettina Rheims, Munchen, Schirmer-mosel, 1989 

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, London, Ark Paperbacks, 1984 

Gormley, Antony, European Field, Museum of Modem Art, 1994 

Greenaway, Peter, The Physical self, Rotterdam, Museum-Boymans, 1992 

Israel, Deborah Turbeville: Wallflower, London, Quartet, 1978 

Karabelnik, Marianne, Stripped Bare, London, Merrell, 2004

Krauss, Rosalind, L ’Amour fou, New York, Abbeyville, 1985 

Moszynska, Anna, Antony Gormley Drawing, London, British Museum, 2002

Sollers, Philippe, Francesca Woodman, Paris, Foundation Cartier, 1998 

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Francesca Woodman, Photographic work, New York, Hunter College, 1996

Thewelt, Kllaus, Antony Gormley, Germany, Kerber Verlag, 1999 

Articles

Riches, Harriet, A disappearing Act; Francesca Woodman’s portrait of a reputation, Oxford Art Journal, 27.1 2004 95-113, Oxford university press

Rus, Eva, Surrealism and self-representation in the photography of Francesca Woodman, www.palazzoesposizioni.it/schede/woodman, 2004

Slow Philosophy : Diffractive Over Layering/Accretions Of Making.

Diffractive Readings/Visual Material and Resources.

Over Layering/Accretions : Asperity~Inhabitation~Urbanism

Of interiors, constructions and abject deconstructions into and around the ruinous. White (bleached) and soot fumed stains, textures, patinas of process and time, usage and possible shelter. Urban vessels poetically conveying a visual, tactile complexity, that of built and lived in spaces.

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

Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021

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

Diffractive Surfaces/Visitors : Imaginative Cartographies/Spatialities/Fictions/Epistemologies

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

Outpost Studio : 03082021

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold

Visual Diffractions~Water~Abbey : Orthoclase, or orthoclase feldspar.

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

Google Lens.

The image displays a large black-and-white photograph of what appears to be an abstract or textured surface, potentially a wall or rock formation, mounted on a sheet of paper with various textual annotations and clippings. 

Textual elements in the background include references to the film "VISITORS" directed by Godfrey Reggio, and a quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: "We have art that we may not perish by the truth".

Other text fragments mention architecture and specific locations like Suchumi.

The primary image itself is a high-contrast, grainy depiction of a rough, dark surface with lighter, irregular patches.

The overall composition suggests an artistic or documentary presentation, possibly an exhibition piece or a study of texture and decay.

Discursive Reading (against linearity)/New Modalities of Inquiry

New Generative Boundaries/Situatedness

Wayfinding and Heuristic/Everyday Practices

Reading is also thinking through the body

Viscous Porosity/Flesh of the world

Enfleshed Materialism/Membranes that affect interactions

Words Become Material

Troubleyn Laboratorium/Jan Fabre

In this moment the words become a performative agent writing and acting on the body

Installing ourselves in the event, that emerges in our reading

Reading diffractively means that we try to fold these texts into one anther in a move that flattens out our relationship to the material. In so doing we install ourselves into its/our becoming

Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research/Barad Thinking with intra-action

Alecia Y. Jackson, Lisa A. Mazzei

Paintings/Art Works are boundary making apparatusses

The Diffractive Apparatus/Analysis of Intra-ventions/actively/entanglements

Phenomena and Thresholds from which to create new analytical questions/forms

An entangled state of agencies, that which exceed the traditional notion of how we conceive of agency, subjectivity, and the individual.

Agency is an enactment, not something that someone has. Such entanglements require an analysis that enables us to theorize the social and the natural together.

Barad

Diffraction

Two major authors write about the metaphor of diffraction, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.
They explain how diffraction is a method for reading and writing based upon the physical phenomena. Diffraction is a way of coping with epistemological problems of representation (invisible knowledge maker as a false sense of objectivity, self-vision of reflexivity as totalizing and undermining knowledge claims).

To paraphrase Haraway, from "Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse" diffraction is an attempt to make differences while recording interactions, interference, and reinforcement. It does not have an origin and has a heterogeneous history. In addition, the practice of diffractive reading and writing never sediments the relationship between signifier and signified. Van der Tuin explains, "Diffraction is meant to disrupt linear and fixed causalities, and to work toward ‘‘more promising interference patterns’’ (26). She also explains that this can be practiced by reading texts through one another, and rewriting.This disrupts the temporality of a piece of writing, transverses boundaries such as discipline, and can change meanings in different contexts opening up meaning.

https://newmaterialistscartographies.wikispaces.com/Diffraction

Diffracting Photography/Painting/Collage Works

Heuristic reconfigurations through making/understanding/encounters with material









Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?
— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005


Collage Works, A Hut of Ones Own

Jana Sterbak
Remote Control 1989

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.


A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline


Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines,

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