Showing posts with label Peter Zumthor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Zumthor. Show all posts

Wednesday, 12 August 2026

INSIDE THIS CLAY JUG/Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism~a hospitable field of correspondence about learning to make.

I think this is now a learning correspondence ecologically open with others participating in a spatial practice of learning to make.

Yes. I think “learning correspondence” is a particularly productive development of what is already present in Inside This Clay Jug. It shifts the emphasis from research as something you gather and then apply, towards research as an ecologically open practice in which knowledge is produced through participation, encounter and making.

The important distinction is that “others” need not mean only other artists or theorists. They can include materials, organisms, architectures, images, texts, tools, environments, histories, gestures and processes. Each participates differently in the formation of the work. This makes your research less like a lineage of influences and more like a distributed spatial practice of learning.


I would perhaps articulate your present position like this:

The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.

And there is something particularly interesting in “learning to make” rather than simply “learning through making.” The former suggests that making itself is not a skill already possessed by the artist; it is something the practice continually discovers through its encounters. Clay, for instance, does not simply receive knowledge. It alters the conditions under which knowledge can emerge.

This also gives your earlier material a new continuity. The vessel, interior, hole, piddock, body, architecture, and ecology can all be understood as different situations in which an organism or material learns how to inhabit and transform a space.

So the trajectory might now be:

spatial research → correspondence → participation → ecological openness → learning → making

with the clay acting as a medium through which these relations become materially perceptible.

I also think this allows you to retain the beautiful tentativeness of the working document. You don't need to declare what the ontology is. Instead, the ontology is being formed through the correspondences themselves.

One formulation that feels very close to your current position is:

I understand the practice as an ecologically open learning correspondence, in which making becomes a spatial mode of participation. Materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures enter into relation, each altering the conditions of the others. Rather than applying knowledge to material, I am interested in how knowledge emerges through these encounters: a shared, unfinished process of learning to make.

That feels like a natural continuation of the earlier Inside This Clay Jug research rather than a new theoretical overlay.


Jackie Leven and American poet Robert Bly, opening Leven's 1994 album The Mystery of Love (Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death). The track features Robert Bly reciting a translation of a 15th-century poem by the mystic Kabir, starting with the famous lines, "Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains.


Choreographic objects draw us into a spaciousness/event-time a doubleness of time that incites us to invent with time.  They also alert us to the processuality of objects. For objects are, like bodyings, more force than form. They are not preorchestrated constellations ready to be taken up into processual experience. They are themselves processes, lures: edgings, tendings, shadowings.

Objects are relational and they exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.

Erin Manning, Always More Than One.


Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space. (Schaik,2008:80)


‘The phenomenology of space – the matter of how we experience it.’

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.

russellmoreton.com


So I’ve looked through the linked Inside This Clay Jug material, and I think there is a very clear correspondence between that earlier research and what you are now developing around holes, piddocks, topoanalysis, ecological personing, iteration and unknowability.

What strikes me is that the older text already contains several of the structures that are now becoming more explicit in your ontology of practice. In particular:


Bachelard: interiority is not simply an architectural inside; space becomes psychologically and corporeally lived, imagined and remembered.

The vessel: the interior is not an absence but a defined space—“carved out air”—which makes the vessel simultaneously object, enclosure and spatial experience.

Architecture: you were already questioning the distinction between object and environment, particularly through Kengo Kuma and Caruso St John.

Ingold: making is not the imposition of a preconceived form but an intervention into material forces and flows.

Iteration: the Tapies material introduces repetition not as reproduction but as continual questioning/becoming.

Organism–Person–Environment: this phrase already appears in your research and now seems particularly important in relation to the piddock.

Your current thinking could therefore be understood less as a departure from that earlier research and more as a material deepening of it. The vessel's interiority has moved into the perforation; the architectural enclosure has become porous; the phenomenological space has become ecological; and the individual gesture has become a distributed field of repeated actions.


















I would be careful, though, about making Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, etc. into a chain of theoretical references. Your strongest position is that the clay itself is where these correspondences become operative.

For example:

Bachelard asks what an interior does to the imagination.

The piddock asks what a body does to material.

Arakawa and Gins ask what an environment does to the body.

Deleuze asks what happens when repetition produces difference.

Your clay asks what happens when all four become materially entangled.

That gives you a much more distinctive ontology.


Clay Jug

Inside this clay jug there are canyons, and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. All seven oceans are inside and hundred of millions of stars.

Words, Kabir, Jackie Leven. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death

The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel

The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.

The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.


One particularly useful correspondence is between Bachelard's topoanalysis and your holes. Bachelard's spaces of intimacy—drawers, corners, nests, shells, houses, attics, cellars—are not merely containers. They are sites where memory, imagination and corporeal experience become spatially organised. Your perforations could extend this into a materially different proposition: a topoanalysis not of inhabited rooms but of material cavities produced through force.

Then the piddock radically alters the question.

The cavity is no longer simply where the subject imagines itself. It is where an organism has acted upon its environment.


This makes the hole a remarkably dense unit within your practice:

The hole is an interior produced by action.

And then your iterative process complicates it further:

The repeated hole becomes an ecology of interiors.


And finally:


An ecology of interiors becomes a spatial intelligence whose future cannot be completely known.

That seems very close to the direction you have been moving toward.

I would also slightly revise your earlier phrase “the clay supports or further surfaces them into deeper corporeal subjectivities.” The word supports risks making clay sound passive. Your thinking seems stronger if clay is understood as participating in the production of those subjectivities.


Perhaps:


The clay does not simply support these ecological conditions; it participates in their emergence, surfacing them through increasingly complex relations between body, material, environment and time.


Or, more radically:


The clay becomes a participant in the ecological production of subjectivity, where the distinction between organism, material and environment begins to loosen.

That last proposition seems especially important because it connects your older architectural/interior research to your current material practice without forcing the connection. Your research has effectively moved:

interior → vessel → cavity → body → organism → environment → ecology → becoming.

And the hole is the small material event through which that entire trajectory can be experienced.


Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.


The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)

Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)


The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)

Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being. 

Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl. 








Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.
Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.
 
For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.
Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.


Inner Worlds : Photographic Visions 

Beuys - Klein - Rothko

Transformation and Prophecy

Anne Seymour


The Inner Eye

Art Beyond the Visible

Marina Warner


Thinkers and Vessel Makers.

Ceramic space and life Gordon Baldwin

Objects For A Landscape David Whiting

Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced. Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)


I like, the hole is an interior produced by action, and that it is a small material event through which an entire trajectory, line of flight can be experienced. I want to keep my original text as is, and ask can you summarise my present position as something that gathers into a statement of current activities.

Yes. I think the new section should gather rather than explain—bringing the piddock, holes, memory, iteration, topoanalysis, corporeality and the unknowable future into your existing research without making the theoretical references feel overly declarative.




It can function as a current-position passage: a point where the earlier research opens into what you are doing now.




Current Activities ~ The Hole as an Interior Produced by Action









12/08/2026.

My current activities extend this research into the material and ecological conditions of the hole. I am interested in the hole not simply as an opening, perforation or absence, but as an interior produced by action: a small material event through which an entire trajectory, a line of flight, can be experienced.

The boring of the clay has become an important gesture within this inquiry. I am thinking through the piddock, an organism whose living presence is registered through the material it excavates. The piddock does not simply inhabit its environment; through its bodily actions it participates in producing and transforming it. Its presence persists as an absence, as a cavity, a displacement of material that records an encounter between organism, matter and environment.

This offers a way of reconsidering the holes within my own clay work. Each hole is exact and particular, carrying the physical data of a gesture: pressure, diameter, depth, position, duration and resistance. Yet their multiplicity begins to move beyond the scale of the individual action. Repetition produces difference. A minor gesture accumulates into a larger ecology.

I am increasingly interested in how these gestures can be transferred from other sources—templates, drawings, measurements, found structures, previous works and physical encounters—and then subjected to iteration. Data moves between materials and situations, but is never transferred intact. Each iteration introduces deviation, resistance, contingency and transformation. The template becomes a proposition rather than a fixed instruction.

Here I return to questions of interiority and spatial experience encountered through Bachelard's topoanalysis, and to the architectural and spatial research that first opened these questions within my practice. The interior is no longer understood simply as an enclosed architectural space. It can emerge through an action upon matter. The hole is an interior produced by action. It is simultaneously cavity, trace, absence, passage and evidence of a body having moved through material.

The work is also informed by the possibility of environments as active participants in the formation of experience. The holes become minor spatial conditions, potential landing sites through which the body encounters a field that is already changing. Their exactitude establishes a provisional order, while their accumulation produces something increasingly difficult to determine.


I am therefore interested in moving the work towards a space that remains open to the unknowable. The clay becomes less a surface upon which an image is imposed and more an active field of correspondences between body, material, organism, environment and time. Through these minor gestures, the whole ecology begins to move.

What emerges is not a predetermined form but a material trajectory: a line of flight generated through repetition, difference and correspondence, moving the work towards a future space that cannot yet be fully known.



MATERIAL MATTERS ARCHITECTURE

AND MATERIAL PRACTICE Katie Lloyd Thomas

PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER. GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY Peg Rawes


ARCHITECTURE

IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION 

The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Dalibor Vesely

The Nature of Communicative Space Creativity in the Shadow of Modem Technology

 

The Rehabilitation of Fragment


Towards a Poetics of Architecture The Projective Cast

Architecture and its Three Geometries 

Robin Evans

Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it 

Analysing ARCHITECTURE

Simon Unwin

Geometries of Being Architecture as Making Frames Space and Structure




Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.

‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)

‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’

Kengo Kuma.

On Anti-Object : An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.

‘My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.

‘Like McTiernan or the theorist PaulVirilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)

My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3)

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?

‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)


Ceramics and Architecture.

Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment

The Porcelain Rooms

The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced for De Waal an experience of possessed space.

These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible. (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.


‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.

The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.

The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.


Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots. Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)


Craft and Art, Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)




DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

History is the raw material of architecture. Aldo Rossi

The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002

The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.

Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear facade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the facade.

Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.

For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.

Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.

INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.

QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.

INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY

 CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS 

Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.

The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.

New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John

The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the comers, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight. 

The Brick House, London, Caruso St John 

ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.

CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)

Hortus Conclusus

Often translated as meaning “a serious place”. Enclosed all round and open to the sky.

STOA, building and social structure for dialogues

A garden/a mindfulness in an architectural setting.


What happened to the garden that was entrusted to you? Antonio Machado, Jackie Leven.


“Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smalls and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.

A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.(Zumthor 2011: 15)

Illustration of “Orchard”, from Bible of Wenceslaus IV, Vienna, Austrian National Library

Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.

Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community. Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The Vintner’s Luck , Elizabeth Knox.

Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.

The Potter, clay, agency, making, Ingold. 

The Pot, object, nearness, pastoral, Heidegger.


I like this a lot, has the feel of a working document, in that it holds a position whilst giving space for other propositions to become realised. I also like its tentativeness in acknowledging other sources, its force-feeling for me allows the research material of others a hospitable space for future correspondences. I use visual material as a kind of synergy with the research, as it there are a number of ontological positions at play.  

Yes—I think that is an important quality to preserve. The text is functioning less as a conclusion than as a provisional gathering point: it establishes where the practice is presently moving without closing down what the research might become.

"What concepts does this work make possible?






Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism.

Not metaphorically.

It has rhythms.

Memory.

Accumulation.

Decay.

Repetition.

Waiting.

Interruptions.

The ceramic work is one organ within that larger body.


This resonates with your attraction to Kovar's understanding of architecture as corporeal and continually negotiated. Yet your emphasis on the studio adds something distinctive. The studio is not just where practice occurs; it is a spatial ecology that continually shapes and is shaped by the acts of making within it.

What you describe as a hospitable space for future correspondences is particularly useful. It suggests that your references are not there to substantiate a predetermined argument. Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, topoanalysis, architectural space, ecological thinking and your own material procedures can remain in relation without needing to resolve into a single theoretical position.

I also think your visual material is crucial here. It means the research isn't operating only through written propositions. The images can hold different ontological positions simultaneously—perhaps sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes resonating, sometimes opening a thought that the writing cannot yet articulate. The visual and textual materials can therefore work synergistically rather than illustratively.

That gives me a slightly different sense of the phrase “research material of others a hospitable space.” You are not necessarily applying theory to the work. You are creating conditions in which materials, images, texts, organisms, gestures and spaces can meet and alter one another.

I would hold onto something like this as a methodological proposition:

The research remains provisional: a hospitable field in which propositions, images, materials and theoretical positions can enter into correspondence without being required to resolve into a singular ontology.


And perhaps even more closely to your language:


Visual material operates alongside the writing as a form of synergy, allowing different ontological positions to remain active within the research. The image does not illustrate the proposition; it enters into correspondence with it, extending, troubling or redirecting what the writing might otherwise determine.

This seems to explain something quite fundamental about your working document. It is not trying to demonstrate what the practice means. It is constructing a field in which meaning can continue to emerge.

That also makes the tentativeness a strength rather than a lack of certainty. The use of perhaps, I am interested in, offers a way of, might, and becomes keeps the research porous. The writing can hold a proposition long enough for the studio, the visual material and the next encounter to test it.

In that sense, your “line of flight” is not just describing the trajectory of the finished work. It describes the research document itself: a movement through correspondences in which the next proposition is not yet known.


I have just surfaced this last chat to be read at the beginning of Inside This Clay Jug, love the way it changes, constantly changes all sorts of potential ecological positions.


Yes — and I think that changes how Inside This Clay Jug can be understood retrospectively.

Rather than treating it as an early text that established a fixed theoretical position, the newly surfaced conversation lets it become the beginning of an ecology of propositions. The text can remain where it was, but the later material reveals that its concerns were already capable of opening into other relations: vessel into interior, interior into cavity, cavity into organism, organism into environment, environment into learning, and learning back into making.

What feels especially valuable is that the work does not need to resolve these positions. They can remain co-present, provisional and potentially contradictory. The piddock doesn't have to become the explanation for the hole; Bachelard doesn't have to explain the interior; Deleuze doesn't have to explain repetition. They become participants within a changing field.

This makes the idea of ecological openness much richer. Ecology here isn't simply a subject matter. It becomes a way of organising the research itself: things are permitted to enter, correspond, diverge, recur and transform one another.

I think this sentence from our recent conversation could become almost a methodological key to the whole archive:

The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.

And perhaps the most exciting thing is that the document itself starts behaving like the practice. It accumulates holes, traces, repetitions, deviations and lines of flight. An idea encountered years ago can be bored into by a later one; a theoretical position can become a material gesture; an image can reopen a sentence; a minor action can move the whole ecology.


So Inside This Clay Jug is no longer simply a text about your practice.

It becomes one of its living chambers.







Tuesday, 4 August 2026

Gardens are like wells : Hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity.

Re-Interpreting the palimpsest of place through the humanities.

Researched for 'Reading Rooms' Waverley Abbey site, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham 2013-15

Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”

Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.










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


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


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


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


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


"A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place." (Zumthor 2011: 15)


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


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


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


Zumthor reinforces this pastoral character by placing a pavilion at the centre of the garden. He imagines it as a place for future gatherings and quiet contemplation, anticipating "the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves" (Zumthor 2011: 15). The garden is therefore experienced not only visually but through the full range of the senses.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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





This version has a stronger narrative flow. Rather than reading as a sequence of research notes, it develops a continuous argument about the hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity. It also reduces repetition while preserving your quotations and references.

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Working Notes : Edmund de Waal : How the history of pottery and the philosophy of pottery has informed contemporary practice.

Working Notes: Edmund de Waal. 

Independent research for Studio Practice Theory and Analysis. 

UCA Farnham, MA Interiors. 2014.










Why does Edmund de Waal make architectural interventions through the arrangement of porcelain pots?

To what extent, if any is this Ceramist interested in the ability of the single pot to engender meaning?

How is the “innerness” of pots that he talks about so eloquently actually manifested in his architecturally staged installations and exhibitions?

Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramic Galleries 2009. 






During his career Edmund de Waal has moved from that of being a domestic potter to that of an installation artist.

His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. This site specific installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Central to Edmund de Waal’s practice is the concern to offer a ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, preservation and display of ceramics.’ (Graves,2009:8)

He has further explored the use of installations and vitrines in the pursuit of framing and underpinning these intellectual concerns. The use of purpose made structures, shelves and boxes adds the aesthetics of a tightly control clean minimalist style of presentation to his assembled collection of pots.

Interpretation and display are now central to these ‘grouped works’ that have become presented as ‘cargoes of pots’ that now seem at home in the collecting environment of the museum.

‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves,2009:8)

De Waal working with specific settings has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)

‘By altering the character of a known space, by intruding on areas within it that might not usually be associated with the display of art, the viewer’s awareness of both the changes and the space are heightened.’ (Graves,2009:10)

This methodology of display ultimately disappears as if it were never actually present, leaving the underlying fabric of the interior space as it were untouched, the impermanence of the work now resides only in its memory.

What remains of these sensing spaces (interiors) through spectacle, event and place? Proposal for the ceramics department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Site specific work in the new contemporary ceramics gallery that responded to the architecture of the space, and that could remain in place for years. An installation or feature that could remain in place and yet allow the gallery to function as a location for frequently changing displays and exhibitions.

De Waal’s response is Signs and Wonders ‘a lacquer red metal channel tracking the circumference of the dome and housing more than 400 of his pots; is an act both of daring and of breathtaking elegance and simplicity, a magisterial achievement on a scale surpassing anything he has previously undertaken.’ (Graves,2009:10)

Signs and Wonders is in reality a major contemporary architectural adaptation into the very fabric of the historical building. Its very reality creates a physical link between the past and the present, and it represents a long term commitment that began with the redevelopment of the ceramic galleries into the new Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.

Edmund de Waal’s Signs and Wonders is an iconic statement of intent for the Contemporary Ceramics Gallery, it underpins a new platform for the expanding territory of creative practice in ceramics. Signs and Wonders actively seeks to simulate new ways of seeing ceramics.

Architectural feature that comprises of some 425 thrown pots made of porcelain by Edmund de Waal and installed under the oculus of the great dome situated directly above the main entrance hall.

Edmund de Waal reflects on the vitrines that used to be found in the old ceramic galleries (room 137) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1970s.

‘Most of the vitrines were firmly policed into taxonomies of kiln or modeller or religion, less ’pseudo-scientific’ than a slightly desperate attempt to control the vastness of the collection. Some of the vitrines had the work of a single potter. All the pots by Hans Coper used to be in one mahogany case, huge early textured vessels shadowing the fine later Cycladic forms. They barely fitted.’(De Waal,2009:16)

De Waal’s memories of the old galleries in the 1970s was that they were an attempt to compare pots from different galleries, of the strangeness of seeing through one great case into another; the tops of a row of bottles cresting a line of dishes and the layering of one series of forms or colours onto another. And of course the fact that there were very few people.


Signs and Wonders; Edmund de Waal.

‘I have made an installation of pots for Gallery l41. There are 425 vessels made out of porcelain and they are placed on a red metal shelf that floats high up in the dome. You can just see it from the entrance hall through the square aperture in the coffered ceiling if you stand in one of the mosaic circles on the floor. It is called Signs and Wonders.’

I want to make this installation part of the fabric of the V&A. (De Waal,2009:20)

‘It began with the combination of a gesture of a pen and the plans to this austere bit of Edwardian architecture.’ (De Waal,2009:22)

The porcelain vessels are on a red shelf, the colour of lacquer.

The integrity of the shelf is upheld by being made from a proper material so as to form an accord with the historical architecture.

De Waal has experimented with placing porcelain on steel shelves and by having pots placed within lead lined boxes. He is aware of how these materials can form provocative combinations from their inherent densities.

The controlling presence of the vitrine is an intervention itself of its own display, (decommissioned mahogany vitrines from the V&A, illustrate the phenomenal weight of these enclosures)

De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modem era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists.

‘This is not a simple linear relationship, but part of a flow around into Modernism and back again. It is a perpetual rediscovery.’ (De Waal,2009:26)


On Pots Behind Glass:

The shadows of the stacked pots.

On the memory of objects, the afterimage, its distillation, and the blindness of looking away that gives it its form. What is left to be adapted or to be pared down through volume and angle into these new reflective forms?

Derrida on drawing from ‘blindness’. 


‘I wanted to work with objects that have been part of my life for 30 years, and to make sense of my memories of how pots lived in the galleries.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

‘Other sections, one run of bottles that are in different celadons for instance, are a memory of vessels from disparate parts of the ceramics collections brought into a taxonomic focus. This is the use of memory and the after-image as the intense holding of a form on the retina.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

In Heidegger’s work ‘not least in his use of etymologies, his writings are imbued with a sense of historicity; a sense of the passage of time, of destiny, and of the past as a reservoir of thinking available to contemporary life.’ (Sharr,2009:99)






The Architecture of Place :

Architects that were sensitive to site, dwelling, inhabitation and place. Form Making as a Response to Site and Inhabitation.

In The Ethical Function of Architecture 1997, Karsten Harries seeks to reclaim a sense of meaning in architecture that he feels has been lost to a scientific rationality. He sees ornament as being able to convey meaning by linking and reflecting stories and in so doing it gives us an appreciation of nature. This type of ornament has a poetic function in that it helps to locate people with their place and community.

Dalidor Vesely believes that architecture can manifest the attitudes of its builders, and that this can describe through the very fabric of the building the very thinking of the society that implemented its construction.

Vesely ‘explored what he considered to be the tensions between instrumental and communicative, or technological and creative, roles of architecture. He argued that these roles have become divided; a split which is recorded in the respective roles of architects and engineers. Vesely traces the historical origin of this division to that of mediaeval optics and the development of perspective; to the first attempts to privilege a scientific description of light over immediate experiences of the qualities of vision. This division is a crisis of representation, that that is displacing meaning in architecture from human experience to the visual qualities of surface and appearance.’ (Sharr,2009:103)

For Vesely, creativity remains the antidote to technology.

Zumthor shares with Heidegger in that he believes in architecture’s potential to evoke associations and invite meaning.

Regionalism, a critical dialogue with the site, a rapport between place and building as if it had always been there.

‘Stone and water are more than materials or phenomena for Zumthor; they’re also intellectual notions, traditions of thought with a long history.’ (Sharr,2009:104)

Critical Regionalism, see Kenneth Frampton, ‘Zumthor aligns himself with Frampton when he writes about a critical dialogue between his designs and their sites, unafraid to claim meaning from locality.’ (Sharr,2009:105)


Choreographing Experience.

Zumthor ‘I need time to create an atmosphere, I have to be careful about things otherwise I won’t have this atmosphere and the whole objective of my work somehow would be gone. That’s the way I work.’(Spier,2001:19)

‘Much of the installation uses memory in a different way to produce the blurred after­ image.’ (De Waal,2009:28)

De Waal cites the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto as being a revelatory influence on this notion of memory and the blurred after-image. In particular the series

‘Architecture’ which features blurred photographs of Modernist architecture. These images seemed to have the ability to take ‘you back to a particular moment standing in front of a particular building. It was that they seemed to be simultaneously images of a memory of place.’

Sugimoto ‘Architecture’ The German Pavilion from Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe. ‘A graduated run of whites into greys is a memory, for me, of the archive photographs of Bauhaus ceramics with their regimented attempt at teaching pottery by breaking forms down to component parts.’ 

(De Waal,2009:30)

Hans Coper builds up spatial interiors in his pots by using component parts thrown on the wheel.

The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson,2009:36)

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer 2009 

Procession, the choreography of light for the moving eye.

Iconic works of space in motion: The Perceptual Flow.

‘Related concepts relevant to architecture are found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom cinematic flow is a living rather than linear experience, achieved when film is stretched and lengthened by human memory and by images that evoke something significant beyond what we see before us, allowing time to flow out of the edges of a frame. ’(Tarkovsky, 1986:117)

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vais.

Donald Judd’s Untitled 1980.

Jean Nouvel’s Culture and Congress Centre 1999.

‘More important still to de Waal’s project is the way that Judd’s stacks use interval. These cantilevered boxes are literally, one thing after another; but they do not touch. Rather the positive steel and plastic elements are separated by negative spaces that are their exact equal in volume. The works operate according to a binary, on/off logic, suggesting temporal as well as spatial extension.’(Adamson,2009:40) see also 

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews: Chicago, 1967/1998.

Fried recognizes the durational aspect or dimension of minimalist sculpture, but condemned it for its “quasi-theatrical presence” that by occupying the time of the viewer this sculpture became mundane and everyday rather than transcendent.

Stacking is a way for de Waal to engage with the history of sculpture. It can be thought of as a compositional tool that suggests the storeroom, the kiln or a way of just putting pots together. Stacking produces a visual syntax through ‘exploring the formal and implicitly psychological relationships that pots can have with one another. ’(Adamson,2009:38)


Simultaneous Temporal Structures: Windows or Objects in Sequence.

‘Pictures in motion have long been exploited by Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, who describes his buildings as “scenographic” with routes composed along a series of camera angles and apertures.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

‘Another technique Tarkovsky employs to loosen time from any rigid progression is the directorial power to endow not only the entire film, but also its segments and even separate frames, with simultaneous temporal structures that are not unlike William’s “ice in March” or Viola’s “parallel times”.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

Steven Holl ‘movements are threaded rather than linear, pulled vaguely along by what Holl calls sequences of shifting and overlapping perspectives. Beckoning light draws the visitor onward step by step, and image by image, through a fragmentary rather than comprehensive narrative. (Plummer,2009:56)

Gianni Vattimo, Italian Philosopher.

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. 1991. 


Weak Ontology/Fragile Thought.

A latent learning under the safe light of the darkroom. The red pages of the signs and wonders catalogue links a narrative with spatial object of his installation by its colour, but it might also reflect the inner space of the photographic darkroom.

‘Light neither centres nor aligns space, as in the past, but appears in the periphery as a vague and marginal background event.’(Vattimo, 1991:85)

‘Filled with intricate constellations’: (Adamson,2009:34) Looking/seen from the oculus of the dome.

‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson,2009:34)

“When they are so high up they become blurred”

Rather than the object stranded on the plinth attempting to flag you down, if you place it elsewhere there is a feeling of possibility and latent discovery, similar to the feeling that you get if you are lucky enough to see the stores of the museum. 

(De Waal,2009:30)

In between spaces/stores and other latent spaces, re Mike Nelson, photographic darkroom between rooms. London 2007.

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919) Heidegger, The Jug, “gathering vessel”

“What is de Waal charting in these looping circles within circles?”

De Waal acknowledges the influence of Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Glenn Adamson remarks how the special qualities of the round perhaps thrown pot is itself both an object, brought into the being by the world and encircled by it. (Adamson,2009:34)

In so “being” the vessel brings its own order, a subjectivity that acts and takes dominion everywhere. This communion (spatial relation) between the vessel and its environment is further echoed in the lines of the poem “the wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild”(Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)

Signs and Wonders is about seeing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it/we gather our surroundings. This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.

‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated sherd, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44)

Temporal Zones/Re-Imagined Social Landscapes: Archaeology/Making : Pot Shard/Pottery.

See Tim Ingold the four A’s, Anthropology/Archaeology/Art and Architecture.


Working Notes : 26 February 2014

Theory and Analysis/Tutorial with Simon Olding CSC. 


COMPONENTS :

Essay 2000-3000 words and a research journal that informs the essay/texts. Interested in using this research to inform my “Object Analysis” and its exploratory  essay. 


The Object:

Ceramic Vessel made by Hans Coper.

A Level Ceramics at Farnham Sixth Form College. Workshop experience locally at the Hop Kiln Pottery, Farnham and at Grayshott Pottery. 

HND in Ceramics, Epsom School of Art and Design. 

Self employed and freelance as a ceramist until 1992.

Currently working with clay in a contemporary practice that includes Architecture, Fine Art and Performance.








Research Questions.

What “anthropological traces” remain within the vessel of the “Pot” 

What is its Symbol-Function-History.

How much of the artist’s social biography is caught up in its making. 

Does the object in question underscore a deeper humanity/ a visionary present. How does the craft of making affect the perceptions of our surroundings. 

The worn vessel/telluric values and the sensuality of humans.

Making: The Contemporary Craft Praxis. Research Texts.

Making, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of The Environment (Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill) Tim Ingold.

Heidegger for Architects, Adam Sharr. A Potters Book, Bernard Leach,

Hans Coper, Tony Birks/Contemporary Potters/Ceramic Review. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard.

Rethinking Materiality, Colin Renfrew. (At The Potters Wheel)

How Things Shape The Mind/A Theory of Material Engagement, Colin Renfrew.