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

Transactive Spatial Gestures : Anticipation and Action/Affective Energies/Luminosity

12/10/2022

Reading with Deleuze and Spinoza~Radical Intuitions : Interacting with clay

Speculative and Exploratory Field Works.

Inscriptions, handwriting, cognitive connections across visual art materialisms. 

Gathered readings, walking across holloways and embodied dispositions, surfaces/inseparable cartographies of embodied experiences.

Undisciplined knowledge enables and sustains actions, gestures of a post disciplinary field.

Inseparable categories (containers and bodies) and their contents.

The Aesthetic,

The Economic,

The Political,

The Social,

Textures of Light : Vision and Touch in Irigarey, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty : Cathryn Vasseleu.

Bento's Sketchbooks : John Berger. 2015

Spinoza, practical philosophy : Gilles Deleuze. 2001

A concise and illuminating book about the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science.

Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and this reading of Spinoza by Gilles Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence."

Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, "Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount."

Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes.

Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.

Gilles Deleuze's Luminous Philosophy : Hanjo Berressem. 2021

'The plane of immanence is entirely made up of Light', Deleuze writes in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Engaging the whole body of Deleuze's work, including less rehearsed texts such as The Actual and the Virtual, Lucretius and the Simulacrum and his lectures on Spinoza, Hanjo Berressem traces the 'line of light' that runs through Deleuze's thought. The focus on the philosophical luminism that suffuses Deleuze's work delivers a novel reading of Deleuzian philosophy from the perspective of the complementarity of the photon. Berressem reveals a wealth of surprising and brilliant insights for anyone with an interest in Deleuze and in the implications of Deleuze's philosophical photonics for historiography, literary studies, painting and film.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781474450720

Enchantment and Sites of Sensual Engagement : Periphery/Boundaries and their limits.

Outpost 140323

Wonders On The Periphery Of living.

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

The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett.

The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind  that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.

The dialectical principle of the intertwining of the world and the self.

My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and confirms to itself.

The Intertwining-The Chiasm.

The Visible and the Invisible.

Merleau-Ponty.

The Concept Of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

Intervals/Sequences/Iterations : Between Drawings/Templates/Prototypes.

The Eyes Of The Skin.

Critics of Ocularcentrism.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ontology of the flesh as the ultimate conclusion of his initial phenomenology of perception. This ontology implies that meaning is both within and without, subjective and objective, spiritual and material.

Richard Kearney.

Sculptural Spacings/Bindings.

Creativity, materials/matters of concern caught around the creative act of a self amongst others.

Temporal Interrelations.

Adaptive Bridging Strategies.

Playing with materials, to bring forth the synergies of thinking/making/imagination.

Working so as to form or 'seed' gaps amongst the process of exploration.

The display of agency, of un-learning perspectives, discontents, alterity and literal landscapes.

Sites of sensual engagement through alternative forms of individual and social participation.

Energies, entropic to living things.

Natures/Intellectual Spaces.

Indexical Traces/Flows of Energy.

Artists/Makers on the process of material transformation, mobility, thought, body, through an embodied/subjective/multisensory experience. 

Raveningham, allows the thinking of the existential qualities of natures materials in an intimacy/nowness with the natural world. An enmeshed world, working on natures terms, of movement, change, life, growth, and decay.

For Olafur Eliasson, the practice sets out to examine the way an embodied sense of a place can be restructured as a function/site of a sculptural spacing that questions ideas around embodiment, perception, architectural programming. 

The landscape without objects/without hylomorphic thinking.

Tim Ingold.

The Periphery. 

Frontiers and their Disappearance.

Borders and Limits.

Wim Nijenhuis.

Individuation, the process of 'becoming something' and the 'being there' of 'something.'

Modern information theory claims that both the clay and the mould are engaged with matter and form. The clay is in a metastable state that possesses potential energy, unevenly distributed, but capable of effecting a metamorphosis. This quality of the clay is the source of its form. The mould places a limit on the expanding form of the molecular organisation of the clay as it fills the mould. The mould does not form the clay passively, but communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that alters the clay's molecular organisation.

Paul Virilio, distinguishes two orders around the frontier, that of place, characterised by a stability of form, and that of speed, characterised by the fading of form.

Primarily the city is formed and informed by heterogeneous speeds, by the difference between inertia and traffic, the form of the city is thus finally an unstable effect. The city exists through traffic in all its forms.

Keywords : Vectorisation, Distinctive Oppositions, Hylomorphic Schema, Form-Matter-Model,  Place, Speed, Inertia, Traffic, 

New Figure/Grounds.

Geometric marks, vectors across a surface that might suggest some opaque system of musical notation, of points/notes connected forming a constellation of lines and angles. Workings on and between that are synonymous with the field/environ of the canvas, in such a way as it is no longer possible to speak of the classical figure ground relationship.

The Luminescence of Space.

Towards a more delimited spatial conception, a loss of centre.

Charles Maussion.

Rethinking, gestural, expressionistic, lyrical abstractions, atmospheric figuration. 

Keywords : Colour Field Painting, Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Orhon Mubin, Spatial Conception, 

Making Bodies~Experiential Clay : An emotional rootedness in our primal self, Beuys.

Sensory Corporeality

Intrinsic to how we gain consciousness of our world.

Abject(ion) Explorations, something instinctive, innately human, visceral, an organ exploring a strange situation.

Joseph Beuys.

Clay as process : Moving~Eruptive~Living~Experiential

Beuys understood that creativity is central to human existence. Making-works-with-matter that makes the mind~body~move through change and transformation as well as emotional rootedness in a primal self.

Tactile experience adheres to the surface of our body, we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quiet becomes an object, correspondingly as the subject of touch. I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere. I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go in the world and tactile experience occurs 'ahead of me' and is not centred in me.

Maurice Merleau Ponty.

Phenomenology of Perception. 1945

Drawing as Diffractive Research : Mind/Hand/Media/Wayfaring, all in the thick of material existence.

Diffractive Research.

Tim Ingold's concept of "diffractive research" emphasizes a dynamic and iterative approach to inquiry, where researchers move between different lenses and perspectives, exploring the interplay between diverse elements. This method, rather than seeking a definitive conclusion, aims to enrich understanding by embracing the "emergent difference" and "variation in commoning" found within the research object. 

Elaboration:

"Diffractive" as a Metaphor:

Ingold's use of "diffraction" draws an analogy to the physical process of light being bent and spread when it encounters an obstacle. This process reveals the nature of the obstacle and the light itself, highlighting the complexity of their interaction. 

Iterative and Relational:

Diffractive research is not a one-time process but a continuous engagement with the research subject, moving between different perspectives and interpretations. This iterative approach emphasizes the relational nature of knowledge, recognizing that understanding emerges from the interplay between the researcher and the object of study. 

Embracing "Emergent Difference" and "Variation in Commoning":

Instead of seeking to define or reduce difference, diffractive research celebrates the "emergent difference" that arises from the interactions between diverse elements. It also emphasizes "variation in commoning," recognizing that individuals and things can contribute to a shared understanding even when they have nothing in common. 

"Wayfaring" as a Method:

Ingold's concept of "wayfaring" (a way of traversing the world, constantly engaging with its details) is closely linked to diffractive research. Wayfaring involves actively engaging with the world, paying attention to the details and nuances that emerge along the way. 

Examples in Practice:

This approach can be seen in research that explores:

Materiality and Agency: How materials shape human action and how humans, in turn, reshape materials. 

Knowledge and Memory: How knowledge is not simply transmitted but actively generated and shaped through experience and interaction. 

Social and Cultural Practices: How social and cultural practices are constantly being re-interpreted and re-created through interaction. 

Beyond Objectivity:

Diffractive research challenges traditional notions of objectivity by embracing the inherent subjectivity of research. It recognizes that knowledge is always produced within specific contexts and through particular relations. 

In essence, Tim Ingold's concept of diffractive research offers a powerful framework for understanding how knowledge is generated and how we can engage with the world in a more dynamic and nuanced way. 

AI Overview/Google

Outpost 180424

The Body of Drawing/Butades.

Thinking Matter : Cosmologies/Constellations/Assemblages/Apparatuses. 

Matter (as interlacing interplay that is dynamic and mutually defining) has its own nature.

In the thick of material existence.

Merleau-Ponty.

On The Hospitality/Intertwining of Lines

Making/Moving Matter/Theoretical Objects for Spatial Practises.

In and Out of Material/Matter/Matters of Concern/Sculpture

Tony Cragg.

Situated Practices/Architectures of Care/Concern.

Oren Lieberman.

The searching line proposes/launches visual observations/haptic responses, and conversely what is seen determines how the next line is to continue in a perpetual and recursive interaction that unfolds in ongoing time. 

Relationscapes of/with/for Drawing.

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?

Un-Learning Drawing.

The drawn line is raw, on permanent view of its emergence into the world, an open zone that operates in real time. Corrections to the line, challenge perceptions and build intimate relationscapes with the mind, body, media and surface.

'In drawing' we are perceiving the evolving process of thought and perception.

Avis Newman.

Praesentia, being present, a presence that is close at hand to the present moment or time.

The phenomena and its nowness/nearness in the light of day. 

Drawing is driven from the outside.

The agent/agency of drawing admits that the process leads, the mind follows.

First the material signifier, marks on paper, then afterwards the signified, the depicted scene and its nominal referent. For Cozens the random application of splashes and patches of ink would at first appear a chaos, yet with a little skill, out of that chaos forms could be encouraged to appear. Blots might become clouds or the silhouette of hills. For Bryson, Cozens 'anti method' clarifies what the official ideology of drawing-as-transparency habitually mystifies. That the relation between subject matter and line is not at all a question of before or after.

Though far from being a work of philosophy Cozen's method/manual anticipates the broad outlines of Merleau-Ponty's description of the intending consciousness as always already in the world, in the thick of material existence.

Drawing the line involves an interlacing of outside and inside, a permanent cross-over between interior (the artist's mind, sensations,sensibilities) and exterior (paper, pigment,stylus).

A Walk For Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Studio Silences of  Space-Time Phenomena/Phenomenology.

Existential becomings in the thick of our material existence.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Primal Scene of Drawing/The Trace of Butades.

Is all about preserving loss/the blankness of paper and a hand that is about to make its first trace on the surface. Drawing enacts the very moments of trepidation when a new image is about to enter the world. 

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency of phenomena unfolding, a fusion between the artist's mind, the artist's hand, and the beholder's gaze.

On Drawing.

The work of observation is necessarily shaped by the line it leaves behind.

The drawn line conditions or models the selections from the field of observation. It launches observation along a particular direction or path.

Sunlight enters into architecture and sensations of bodily presence/perception.

Vessels unfolding through durations of light and dark.

Flesh/Sensation/Paint/Francis Bacon.

An Unconditional Body from Social Objectivity to the Extremes of Subjectivity.

Acts of both presence and transparency.

Mapping Subjectivity/Gathering Matter.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Architectural Body.

Art works and artists, all manifests themselves at the social interaction and reading/rendering of subjectivity.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Acts.

Like the drawings themselves, the exhibitions loyalty is to the immediate experience of the individual image rather than to the totalizing logic of art history complete with its grand narratives of social and cultural change. The exhibition reveals the convergence of real time operations (realities) the artist's visual idea in the time of its coming into the world, and the always ongoing work of viewing.

Pathways of difference, of the brush and pencil as they move through their respective spaces.

For The Brush.

Before it can touch the surface of the canvas, the bush has to orient itself according to the four sides of the frame, and then according to the total sum of the marks that have already appeared on the surface of the picture. It has to hover, to hesitate, to sense as though by dowsing where a channel in space may now open up, a groove in the total surface that the brush may now enter.

For The Pencil.

In drawing the presence of the 'reserve' frees the pencil from this complex calculus of the totality, reducing the scope to an area that can be taken in at once. A local area, that lies where the hand is now in praesentia. For Bryson this introduces the possibility that the drawn line, maybe closer to the immediacy of the artist's thought and perception than the line made on canvas. 

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

A Body Of Relations : Knowledge Production/Creative-Embodied-Practices

GILDENGATE HOUSE

*STUDIOS UPDATE*

Due to redevelopment of the area, OUTPOST Studios will be closing in February 2025. Founded in 2010, we are thankful for 15 years in this fantastic space! Home to 90+ artists at any one time, hundreds of artists have benefited from studio space over this timeframe.

OUTPOST STUDIO 181121

Organism-Person-Environment/Architectural Body, Arakawa and Gins.

Haptic slippages between subject and object, between what is alive and what is animate.

Drawing/Anamorphic Perceptions, apprehended and felt, more than seen.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Glass/Skin/Permeable/Translucent, Diaphanous and Wondrous.

The Sensation of Flesh/Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Material Thinking and the Agency of Matter.

Barbara Bolt. 2007.

Things and Bodies/Shifting Signs

The haptic image/indexical/involuntary markings and the present instant, a body at the limit of its moment when it is most definitely intensely alive and in the present.

Beyond the body's blurred contours and indexical markers, to see through, to see sense challenged.

Time is persistently liminal, a suspended, extended present.

Mattering/Mutability, Accident, Flux

Experience/Existence/Presence 

Life Drawing/Staging Oneself/Others

Body in Space/Resilience, Endures

An ecological view of cognition, knowledge of the world comes from engagement with things.

Rather than studying the world as an object, we  correspond with it in its own movement of growth or becoming. This correspondence sets up a relation with the world which opens up our perception to what is going on so that we can respond to it.

Tim Ingold. 2013.

Making as a process of thinking.

Making involves the socialised, skilled artist body labouring with materials, responding constantly to tactile, visual and emotional feedback from the emerging form. 

I am exploring emergent objects as landscapes, inhabiting them and of making sense through them.

Barbara Bolt. 2007.

Creative 'practice' and the embodiment of the 'social'.

The Life Class/The Artist's Studio.

Knowledge is emergent as the artist engages with the environments and processes of practice.

Adopting a conception of cognition as ecological assumes thinking and perceiving occur as an organism moves through its environment.

The artwork and the work of art produce a knowledge that is performed in the moving interactions of body, material, and social actors in space and time of which the artwork is a trace.

Tim Ingold. 2000.

Event Spaces, as an experience of distributed artistic subjectivity and shared art-of-inquiry. 

A Body Of Relations

Reconfiguring The Life Class

Yuen Fong Ling. 2016.

Intermediaries and happenings between my body and other bodies and their technologies, where their performativity is revealed offering new perspectives on the roles within the life class.

In my fixed physical position as the life model, the notion of the 'pose' reflects a union of the conscious and unconscious, instilled by the act of being looked at, and the ways to record this through optical devices and machines.

Modelling Subjectivities

Life Drawing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Art Education.

Margaret Mayhew. 2010.

Drawing is important because it delineates between elements in the physical, visual, psychological and cultural field, it also delineates between bodies and spaces, art and fashion, and present uncertainty verses timeless tradition.

The act of drawing itself involves considerable self control on behalf of the drawers, not only in mastering hand-eye coordination, but in concentrating on the present moment, the present action and in the immense discipline of looking at a naked body, culturally marked as sexually available, and not displaying sexual interest.

Margaret Mayhew. 2010.

The body is never isolated in its activity but always already engaged with the world. 

Merleau Ponty. 1999.

Through the configuration of the body as potentially transparent, against which the human being can only push with her hands at the limits physical and psychic geographies that are between inside and outside. 

Photography and the permeability of time evoking a physical experience of observing and examining other worlds.

Aesthetics of intimacy, photography and bodies of desire, the gaze of the passionate camera.

The intimacy and equivalences created through the photographic experience.

Her inert body both inside and outside the vitrine.

Potentially something dangerous about the  experiments with her body, with and into its layering and embodiment within speculative spacetime dimensions.

Here the viewer has the sensation of seeing through a double protective layer of glass and skin.

Art Practice/Building Distant Realities/Wonder

Like glass and within the glass, with the skin that separates the body from outer/other space as well as inner geographies and selves.

Written on the body, maps and navigations of interior spaces. Winterson/Woodman.

Her poetic image of a space that presses psychically on her from the outside.

The earthbound, partial female body, transgressions of the everyday limitations on the body.

The psychic geography manifested within frames of spatiality that becomes an inner space that flips outwards and defies limits.

Through and beyond the drawn/sculpted and painted body.

Site for psychic inner explorations, a corporeality for others rooted in the body's present moment of experience.

Diffracting Drawing and Painting.

Mattering as a reconfiguration of its own making, understanding and encountering.

Atmospheres : Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. 

Peter Zumthor. 2010.

Manuel Neri, Studio, Benicia, 1980

Francesca Woodman, Untitled contact sheet, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Materials at the Hungate Norwich/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Outpost 050823

Dwelling/Reading with Intensity.

Hungate Medieval Art.

11 Princes Street.

Norwich.

NUA Degree Show, Interior Design/Architecture. 2023.

Boardman House.

Redwell Street.

Norwich.

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

Dwelling with Intensity.

In our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology  of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. There is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. The experience of home, like that of a large cradle, is essentially an experience of intimate warmth. Our houses, and their homecomings from snow-covered landscapes turn the pleasure of the skin into a singular sensation.

Gaston Bachelard.

Architecture in the flesh of the lived world not as a construction of an idealised vision.

An Architecture of Visual Images.

The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past 30 years, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated.

Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.

The current deluge of images has consequences on the architecture of our time, producing a retinal art for the eye. Instead of being a situational bodily encounter, architecture has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. 

As buildings lose their plasticity, and their connection with language and wisdom of the body, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision. With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body, and particularly for the hand, architectural structures have become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction.

The contemporary city is the city of the eye, one of distance and exteriority.

The haptic city is the city of interiority and nearness.

The Significance of the Shadow.

In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.

Take the use of enormous plate windows, they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.

Luis Barragan.

An architecture that addresses our sense of movement and touch.

Acoustic Intimacy.

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. The wide, open spaces of contemporary streets do not return sound, and in the interiors of today's buildings echoes are absorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shopping malls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acoustic volume of space. 

Sight is the sense of the solitary observer, whereas hearing creates a sense of connection and solidarity. Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of its streets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials.

On Skin-Architecture-Corpus-Corporeality-Matter-Sensuality

Architecture and its materials of patina and petrified silences.

The hollow smells of abandoned houses stimulated by the emptiness observed by the eye.

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a dramatic description of images of past life in an already demolished house, conveyed by traces imprinted on the wall of its neighbouring house. The retinal images of contemporary architecture certainly appear sterile and lifeless when compared with the emotional and associative power of the poet's olfactory imagery.

Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter-space-light. 

The most persistent memory of any space is often its smell.

Every dwelling has its individual smell of home and every city has its spectrum of tastes and odours.

The experience of home is essentially one of intimate warmth.

The Visible and the Invisible.

The Intertwining – The Chiasm.

The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand.

Spaces of Intimate Warmth.

The fireplace and its immaterial alcove, sensed by the skin, a warm cave carved into the room itself that is an intimate and personal space of warmth. Antonio Gaudi, Casa Batilo, Barcelona, 1904.

The bath with its heightened experiences of intimacy, home and protection are sensations of the naked skin. Pierre Bonnard, The Nude in the Bath, 1937.

The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition, through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us, the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome  and hospitality.

My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself.

Merleau-Ponty's sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the flesh of the world. Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them. Merleau-Ponty saw an osmotic relation between the self and the world - they interpenetrate and mutually define each other – and he emphasised the simultaneity and interaction of the senses. My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens; I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of a thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juhani Pallasmaa.

Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Here in the phenomenal realm we can no longer say that one is more real than the other. Consequently, this 'mark X' no longer rises out of ground as before, but remains an integral part of, and interacts with, its circumstances. To quote Merleau-Ponty on this point, 'Our visual field is not neatly cut out of our objective world, and is not a fragment with sharp edges like a landscape framed by a window. We see as far as our hold on things extends. Far beyond the zone of clear vision and even behind us.'

The Condition of Postmodernity

The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed (David Harvey uses the notion of 'time-space compression), and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions – a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

Silence-Time-Solitude.

A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude.

Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. Buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time. They enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life.

The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.

Power Of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Anne Dufourmantelle.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

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

The Embodied Image.

Imagination and Imagery in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa. 2011

Drawing Studio/Life Room

Outpost 280122

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

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries

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

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

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

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

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

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

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

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

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

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

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

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

Louis Kahn, 1959.

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

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

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

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

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

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

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

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