A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Outpost 310323

A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Matters of Concern/Fact.

Drawing/Contingency/Sensing/Seeing

Drawing away from descriptive depictions that illustrate preconceptions/aesthetics.

Julian Stair.

Quietus. 2012.

The Vessel.

Death and The Human Body.

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

Julian Stair.

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

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

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

Glenn Adamson.

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

Life-Class/Anatomy/Pathology.

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

Georg Eisler.

Herbert Boeckl.

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

Alfred Hrdlicka. 

A Group. 1973.

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

The Posed/Nakedness/Social Scrutiny.

The Life-Class.

Isabel Bradshaw/Michael Grimshaw

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

Lines of Movement/Vectors

Lines of Static Forms/Boundaries

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

Form-Movement

Mass-Volume

Skin-Surface

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

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

Julian Stair.

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.

Open Studio/Cyanotypes and Collages : Harleston Revisited/Norfolk and Norwich 2018

Civilizing Rituals
Inside Public Art Museums
Carol Duncan

Julian Stair
Quietus reviewed
Archaeology of an exhibition

Spirituality in Contemporary Art
The Idea of the Numinous
Jungu Yoon

The Aesthetics of Silence
Susan Sontag

A Field Guide To Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit

Essays On The Blurring Of Art And Life
Allan Kaprow

Ways of Curating
Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

On Show : Contemporary ceramics in the Goodison gift in the context of a historic museum collection.

A rare opportunity to hear different perspectives on how the art of display can animate objects and deepen insight into historical collections.

The study day will draw on two current displays exclusive to the Fitzwilliam Museum: the Goodison gift of contemporary ceramics and the exhibition Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery. Speakers include four internationally-acclaimed UK ceramicists whose work features in both displays: Julian Stair, Carol McNicoll, Philip Eglin and Jennifer Lee. The study day concludes with a conversation between Amanda and Sir Nicholas Goodison, followed by the opportunity to share reflections on the subject.

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art and Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward.
Art in mind : How contemporary images shape thought
Ernst van Alphen

Walking and Mapping
Artists as Cartographers
Karen O'Rourke

A Bigger Splash
Painting after Performance
Catherine Wood