CLAY/WITH FIRE : Thinking Architecture/Exploratory Research/Vocabulary

Spatial Bodies in Architectural and Contemporary Art.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Thinking Poetics : Architecture and Ceramics.

Urns : Immersive Cells of Containment~Dissolution.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry. He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

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

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

 Outpost Studio 130423

The Changing Culture of Display.

How things work in museums.

Body/Mind/Movement/Material/Craft

Dynamics of Display inside The White Cube.

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

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

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

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

Civilizing Rituals.

Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan. 1995.

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

Julian Stair.

Giving 'Pots' universal aims and characteristics/utilities.

Ceramics.

Philip Rawson.

In this land we placed baptismal fonts

And an infinite number were baptized

Americo. 

Patti Smith.

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

Parallax.

Steven Holl.

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

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

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

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

Hungate, Norwich. 2023

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Existence-Space and Architecture.

Christian Norberg-Schulz.

Architectural Body.

Organism/Person/Environment

Gins and Arakawa.

'Lever' 1989-92

Antony Gormley.

Indios Verdes No 4 1980

Manuel Neri.

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

These objects are moving through time and space.

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

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

Experiential Values.

Responding to Quietus and the liminality that is created. 

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

Making art that is the pivot for human behaviour.

Pots operate on so many levels.

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

Pots can become invisible, so familiar that they disappear. 

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

The Presence of Unglazed Clay.

Seeing Raw Material.

Working Vessels.

Quietus, 12 years in the making.

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

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

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

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

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

Archaeology of an Exhibition.

Quietus-Reviewed. 2013

Julian Stair.