Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.

Dwelling Apparatuses, Heidegger.

RAVENINGHAM 2025

WORKING NOTES

Developing relations on the specificity of a landscape and the weather.

Construction site, towards an alchemy of thinking and making space and the instants of the wonderous.

Some ways of thinking.

Processes enabling situations through strange constructions.

Diffractive apparatus of components, materials and filtered light.

Explorative, site specific and performative.

A fictive space articulated through the alchemy of light and water.

Sensing space, seating for a site of speculative inquiry.

Material Matters : Architectural/Perceptual/Sensing Phenomena.

Correspondences, Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Reflections/Movements/Environments/Landscapes

Using site as a research instrument, a compounded object of self assembly, and crafted components, materials and substances. A sculptural intervention, event based merging the poetic with the tectonic.

Apparatus/Device/Model.

Sensing composition, situating a site for speculative inquiry.

An exploratory and site specific installation that can open up our interior world to the proximity of both the situation of a natural environment and the experience of a conceptually made object/space that facilitates a sense of wonder, resulting in  an alchemy between these two realms of experience.

Art works constantly to  brokers these relations within us.

 

Shadow Theatre/Sculpting In Time : Visceral Compositions~Gatherings

A Resultant Complication of  Agencement.

Shadow Theatre for a  Performative Interior.

Enfolded Structures : On a sympathy of correspondence.

Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.

Photographic Documents : Domain-Court-Cell : Research Collages

Spatialities and Interior Spaces~Apparatuses for Diffractive Thinking.

Science~Inside The Church : Spatial Documentation~Defractive Readings.

VISITORS : Collage/Waverley Project/Exploratory Practice 2015.

Cyanotype Process

Modern/Primitive

Collage/Fragment from Dom Hans van der Laan

Cell/Court/Domain

Visitors

Godfrey Reggio 

Research collage with photographic document, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham.

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

Kengo Kuma, anti object, hut, poetics of shelter in the immediate environment.

Thinkers and Vessel Makers.
Weaving the body into architecture
Kengo Kuma

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.

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

Raveningham Sculpture Trail : Spatial Garden/Dwelling with the Landscape.

Hungate Exhibition. 2023.

Making felt through intervals/editing from within.

The Scriptorium 

Performative Canvas as Shelter ( prearticulation for an installation, not used) 

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

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

http://www.gjf.cz/archiv/kengo-kuma-woven/?lang_code=en

‘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)

‘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.

‘A monument is a form that preserves time through the compression of space, a form in which visual perception is the parameter. A monument is a compression of time and space’ (Kuma,2008:92) Anti Object.

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

‘Like McTiernan or the theorist Paul Virilio, 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)

Art and The Humanities in reference to Waverley Abbey
Contemporary Art Practices, Installations and Interiors

This research and its design proposal are centred on the arts and the humanities and their ongoing function in our contemporary society. The emphasis of this inquiry is located by the spatial practices of architecture, fine art and performance. My project is a field event and symposium that would be able to host intellectual dialogues, lectures (TED) workshops, performative events and exhibitions. I am particularly interested the relational production of social spaces and the aesthetics of builtspaces, both historical and ephemeral. The proposed use of Waverley Abbey near Farnham as a possible site and retreat for this venture is valid as it links a possible interdisciplinary territory of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Tim Ingold (Making) Colin Renfrew (Figuring it Out) and others have for many years been researching and mapping this new spatiality.

What remains of Waverley Abbey and its sense of place are critical to the holistic and contemporary underpinning of this experiential event. Founded in 1128 it was the first Cistercian Abbey to be built in England. It is recorded that Cistercian life was initially based on manual labour and self-sufficiency, this was further supplemented by other activities like agriculture and brewing that enabled the abbey to support itself. Later over the centuries education and academia began to dominate the concerns of the abbey. The abbey was suppressed with its dissolution in 1536, although records show its activities were already at this time substantially diminished. The ruins and their site then enter into the imaginary realm through classic literature in the novel Waverley by Scott. Further on a pictorial reference from an engraving shows the ruins now incorporated as a fashionable landscape feature within the newly built Waverley Abbey House.

On a contemporary note Waverley Abbey has featured in a number of films ranging in genres from period costume dramas through to fantasy, together with post apocalyptic visions of dystopia. A recent film shoot required the construction of a sixty-foot tower made from internal scaffolding with a skin that recreated the adjacent ruinous fabric of this historic site.

Encountering the site is currently only manageable by foot; this short walk in the surrounding landscape sets up the sense of place and prepares our own subjectivities to its reception. It is in this expectation, this thinking in the landscape that the pastoral and educational aspects of the site become apparent. Currently access is only available through one directed pathway; a multiplicity of other access points and even other structures (bridges, earthworks and thickets) could begin to open up the spatial palimpsest already located at Waverley. What remains of the architectural fabric with its diminished interiors still grants a hospitality and refuge for both the body and the imagination. This activity opens up the experiential space of encountering ourselves through the enjoyment/entanglements of layered social space.

Waverley Abbey is a public monument in the custodian care of English Heritage. It can only be accessed by walking about a quarter of a mile from the limited parking spaces.  

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

Raveningham : Exploring the aesthetic ecology of making things.

Collected Notes : Raveningham Sculpture Trail 2020

Studio Blackboard

ODYSSEY Aesthetic Intervals/Timbre/Traces

Immateriality/Temporal/Transitions material and movement/Human agency

A Species of Spaces

Construction/Making/Collage

Forming, slowness and repetition, elements of painting

Assemblage, sensation, surface, objects and spaces between them gathered/thresholds

Sheltering/Weathered/ Exploring a fragility of a painting in the landscape

Robert Mangold, Paintings and Architectural Forms

Fragments from sketchbooks

Ephemeral Architecture

Canvas as spatial verb

Yellow Ochre, Molochite, Gesso, Canvas, Paper, Textiles,Wood, Lead, Nails.

Canvas as folded construction/shelter/place

Operative Design, A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs.

Georg Simmel, text Frames, Handles, Landscapes and the aesthetic ecology of things

The Social Life of Making : Thoughts with materials, making good, occupation and maintenance

 A Species of Spaces 

The Social Turn 

Museum Site and Display 

Political Philosophy

We have all the choice in the world in terms of products, but very little choice in terms of the kind of economy within which those things are made, accessed and used

Whose Economy Reframing the Debate After Neoliberalism Doreen Massey

Other 'material interventions' and the revaluation of making through strategies of repair and maintenance

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010

Making is central to who we are as individuals, what we make as part of everyday practice forms our identities and place in the world

The mundane experience of making, and thus of labour, is resolutely political, a geographical imperative, and a critical means of operating a meaningful relationship with this material life The Quarry as Sculpture : The Place of Making

D A Paton 2013

The making of a building does not stop when the building work is (temporarily) finished. But only really begins upon occupation, when the work commences of maintaining the buildings integrity against an onslaught of willfully destructive elements, insects, rodents, fungal infestations, corrosion, damp, harsh sun, water, wind

Evocative Thoughts on Building, Alvaro Siza 

The social life of making

Making good is about maintaining continuity with the past, in the face of efforts to rupture that continuity.

The need for repair is a remorseless and necessary process that keeps society ticking over.

Posted by Russell Moreton on 29 May 2022

Giving Sensations Place/Site/Raveningham Sculpture Trail : Subjective/Hypothesis/Bricolage/Tectonics/Working Scripts/Making Camps.

 

IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES MAKING IN THE LANDSCAPE.

RAVENINGHAM SCULPTURE TRAIL 2018/2020

STIMULATING TENSIONS.

BRICOLAGE / HEURISTIC PRACTICE, Using things at hand, temporal, self constructions, becomings, mind forming explorations.

Mediating/Architecting the experience of LANDSCAPE.

The building as nothing more than an exposition of itself.

Georg Simmel, text Frames, Handles, Landscapes and the aesthetic ecology of things.

A subjective hypothesis, a drawing developed into an objectivity for experience/learning.

SITE, the undoing of PLACE.

The House-sheds : Camping

There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through.

Roger Deakin

WILDWOOD

A Journey Through Trees

Art Practice as a Speculative Spatial Practice.

A reflective building is an echo not a statement.

Haptic devices/seating/dwelling in the landscapes of the mind. Landscape assemblages and the significance of solitude.

The immensity/intimacy and its immediacy to the imagination. Immensity is within ourselves. Gaston Bachelard

The site a Raveningham offers the spatial practice of a social event and the opportunity to playfully engage with architectural forms, fine art surfaces and textures.

The sensing space, a sculptural assemblage created at Raveningham is an inquiry into 'making' and 'reflexivity' amongst a social landscape.

SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE.

Creating a new viewer, who has to look in two self contradictory/self annihilating directions at once. Darkest Spaces of Our Times, Therese Oulton, Jacqueline Rose.

CONTEMPORARY ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY : SPATIAL PRACTICE.

Making Place/Tools, cognitive enactments/materials and performativity/wellbeing.

Sociological aspects of the Arts

Archaeology, Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Tim Ingold.

A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST : Rebecca Solnit 

Experiential anthropology / Walking as 'being/becoming in place' 

Sensate, Sensing Sensuality, Otherness.

WHITEBOARD : PAVILIONS/RAVENINGHAM

Art as Contemplative Practice : An Applied Praxis/Inquiry

Expressive Pathways/Building/Making as an extension to the Self/Selves In Response : To Place/Site and “Dwelling/Hut”

Subjective Hypothesis Bricolage/Tectonics/Making.

Poetic Abstractions/ Components, Elements

Physical Experience/Experiential Phenomena ( Light/Gravity/Air) Sculptural Assemblage, Building/Making an Exposition of Itself

Smithsons, The Parallel of Life/Art the everyday/quotidian Grounding/Earthing/Dwelling/Home : Reflexivity/Reflection/Reverberations

Knowing Through Making/ Embodying Insights, Tim Ingold

MAKING : Deliberation/Awareness : Constructed Situations/SURFACES and TEXTURES SENSING, Sensorium/Embodied Experience, Sensate, Intra/Intervention

PLACES that transform Chaos into Cosmos, Karsten Harries

PERCEPTUAL psychologist, J.J. Gibson departs from 'the classical approach to depth or space' in favour of an ECOLOGICAL approach to VISUAL SPACE PERCEPTION, which take SURFACES and TEXTURE as its starting point.

 

Socializing a Sculptural Practice, Jack Robins 2015

Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe 2015

Visual Tool, Post Studio, Daniel Buren

INDEXICAL, Traits/Traces and subjective narratives Situational/Relational Aesthetics, Victor Burgin, Nicollas Bourriaud

Handmade, Repetition, Empirical, Experiences.

Metonymy, Cristina Iglesias ( Metonymic Thinking Processes)

Architecturally Speaking, Practices, praxis between art .architecture and the everyday. Visual Perceptions/ The Image

Surrealist Techniques, Collage, Photograms. Decalmania, Frottage. Assemblage, Brutalist/Modemity/Intervention

Minimalist/Drawing/Painting ARCHAEOLOGY : Mark Dion

Agency/Nature/Subject Matter. Collection of Finds, Metaphors/Interpretations for the lived experience. AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF LANDSCAPE :

Taskscapes/Relationscapes

Anarchism, everyday Aesthetics/The aesthetics of everyday LIVING Pragmatist Aesthetics/Interpretation of Concepts

Materiality, material makes more than one language possible, excess of material. LANDSCAPES for an excess of Interpretation/Politics

EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE, through/with the CORPOREAL EXPERIENCE of OTHERS

A STRUCTURE INTERPOSED between the sunlight and the interior space it encloses. Poetic abstractions/Physical experience

Soft/Blurring boundaries between art and the everyday making/becoming REFLEXIVITY / TRANSLUCENCY surfaces into an architectural presence TEXTURES ILIMINALITY on the absence of material

STATIC ENVIRON I ANIMATED THROUGH THE BODY

THE ARCHITECTURAL SKIN / SURFACE. Blurring, revealing, masking, filtering, ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE / WALL / ARCH / PASSAGE /

VISUAL TOOL / POCHOIR, hand coloured through stencils

SCULPTURAL ASSEMBLAGES, towards Speculative Forms/Expression 

TECTONICS IN MAKING, and the tectonics of immateriality/traces hidden by building.

Concerned with bringing the material from its physical form into the meta-physical world.

PAVILION 

FUSELAGE

THE CAMP/HUT

represents the true reality of things, Deakin.

MOBILITY MOVEMENT

TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTED SPACE

A building component, scaffold, joists and fixings, a surface of absences and the movement of others come together.

MAKING, from form to programme.

WAVENEY VALLEY SCULPTURE TRAIL 2018 RAVENINGHAM

AUDIT OF NOTE FRAGMENTS 27 August 2018.

Archive as a generative form/membrane Tarlaton, mesh, paper, liquid light,

Presenting, Creating, Synergies, that further explore site embodiments. The Politics of Things

Diffractive Practices : Agential Cut, Barad, Learning Spaces, 

Brockwood Park School. Reimagining  Education 

In The Cave/Canvas of the Cave

ART. began with the questioning of the involuntary, trace of a human hand, an otherness. 

Moments, Nowness, The Instant, Actuality,

Habitus of Difference

Robert Mangold text on painting/drawing minimalist interrogation into the spaces around perception Minimalist Works / Working Processes represent fields of energy/causality within our experiential perceptions.

Drawing is the experience of seeing made visible/manifest Rhizomic feedback and flow, Deleuze

Research Horizons,

Culture drives growth, wellbeing, social enterprise and community

Lines of intervals, linerality, chains of codes, intersections, utilities, interventions Causality and Chance of ideas, creative acts, art,nature, becoming, the everyday,

Quotidian/Everyday Interests, Complexities of Contemporary Life. Ambients, Phenomenas, Objects, Subjectivities,

Everyday aesthetics, heuristic practice,

Photography, Social pathology of traces layered into ecologies (Anthropological localities of desire)

Photography, The Body, Life, Death, Flemish Painting, Vivitas, Domestic Life, Nature on reclaiming the void left by the death of the mind

Walking creates its own feedback loop, The Journey, The Return,

The specific, Here and Now

Psychogeography, Dossier, Forensic Study, Inquiry.

Spatial Abstractions : Reflexivity on Reflection. Embodiment on Experiential Subjectivity LANDSCAPES Constituted by creative practice

Walks as erasures, sedimentation, (Gardiner)

Getting Lost, Walking whilst deep in thought/embodiment in the environment 

Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape

Between PLACE and SITE.

Art Making  Agency/Spatial Agency.

Art Poverva, Materiality, Agency, Making, Nesting Building, 

NASCENT FINDINGS

Encoding DATA, LANGUAGE

Entanglements of Visual Data and Abstract Language 

CATHEDRALS OF INTELLIGENCE

The Urban Documentary,Text, Sebalt, 

The River : The Colour of Light

Albers/Colour Perceptions

Vernacular Architectures, Building/Making beyond the design

Footings, Voids, Roof Structures, Cavities, Between Walls.

Sensing Spaces in the very making of the building.

The Architectural plan/model and its proposal became the real virtual space for architectural energy and innovation.

TRANSACTIVE MEMORY Texts, Contents, Particulars, Process,

Working through ideas with things/devices/apparatuses Cognitive Landscapes /Relationalities ? Possible Worlds Subsumed by the causality of relationships/culture

Mies van der Rohe 

The Art of Sculpture

Moholy Nagy 

The New Vision Abstract of an Artist

Light brings the moment in time to us

Presence, Praesentia, exactitude of light on place and time.

LAND, LANDSCAPE, CLAY

Pot, Shard, Remnant, Culture, Jug, Dominion/Grounded Temporal/Spatial Perspectives

Light/Dark Room : Towards a new Interior Experimental Vision : Research Collage

Aesthetics of the Everyday Creative, Human Praxis

Supportive Material/Texts/Cyanotype Drawings from found objects

SITE / COLLAGE COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax  

AFFECT

SENSATION / CAUSALITY LIVING

THINKING LOOKING

DRAWING and THE LAW OF STRATIFICATION, the inevitable results of the working of GRAVITY STRATIFICATION OF RECOLLECTION / MEMORY OF THE WORLD. 

A Land, J Hawkes.

FACTORING THE TACTILE CONDITIONS OF THE REAL WORLD into perceptual awareness. 

PERCEPTUAL psychologist, J.J. Gibson departs from 'the classical approach to depth or space' in favour of an ECOLOGICAL approach to VISUAL SPACE PERCEPTION, which take SURFACES and TEXTURE as its starting point.

COLOUR AS CONDUIT.

PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA /IMPROVISATION

PIERCED /DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW /SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS.

TECTONICS AND TEXTILES. 

INDEXICAL /GESTALT / VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan

ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS I GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS ACTUALITY

IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard. 

Tidbury Ring, field drawings with cyanotype liquid on paper.

A Hut of Ones Own. Heidegger for Architects. 

Immaterial Architectures.

SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE

EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE

Soft/Blurring boundaries between art and the everyday making/becoming REFLEXIVITY / TRANSLUCENCY surfaces into an architectural presence TEXTURES / LIMINALITY on the absence of material.

STATIC ENVIRON / ANIMATED THROUGH THE BODY

THE ARCHITECTURAL SKIN / SURFACE, Blurring, revealing, masking, filtering, ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE / WALL / ARCH / PASSAGE /

VISUAL TOOL 

SCULPTURAL ASSEMBLAGES, towards Speculative Forms/Expression. 

TECTONICS IN MAKING, and the tectonics of immateriality/traces hidden by building. Concerned with bringing the material from its physical form into the meta-physical world.

PAVILION / FUSELAGE

THE CAMP / HUT

represents the true reality of things, Deakin.

The building as nothing more than an exposition of itself.

A subjective hypothesis, a drawing developed into an objectivity for experience/learning. 

SITE, the undoing of PLACE. (Casey)

BRICOLAGE / HEURISTIC PRACTICE, Using things at hand, temporal, self constructions, becomings, mind forming explorations.

DWELLING / MOBILITY / MOVEMENT IN THOUGHT

TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTED SPACE

TETHERED FOLLY against a fabric of time.

ART AS INDETERMINATE, able to arrest perceptions into different states (becomings) Stone Worlds

Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology Architecture and Ritual, how buildings shape society.

Bought to Light

Photography and The Invisible 1840-1900

CURATORIAL / DEVICE / BENCH / INTERLOCATOR

Jannis Kounellis, Theatre, stage crew shifting actors during a performance. Interconnected, between contexts, opening places between the social fabric.

Making spaces, expanding vision to create spaces 'between' in which to write ourselves. 

CONTEXT AND CONSIDERATIONS :

ART MUSEUM CULTURE

THE CONTEXT FOR CONTEMPORARY ART IS THAT WE MAKE, EXHIBIT AND VIEW.

MUSEUM DIRECTOR, CURATOR, COLLECTOR, ARTIST

None of that means anything anymore. Artists are now more DIVIDUALISTIC. They discover themselves not by securing a role within the historic narrative of a chosen medium. But by INTERGRATING into a more DIFFUSE ECOLOGY that involves not only making art, but also putting on shows, publishing, organizing events, teaching, networking.

THE STUDIO is no longer a retreat, but it now INTEGRATES, IT IS ALL EXTERIOR. THE NETWORK places the artist as a ’like' ITEM within an INTEGRATIVE

INVENTORY or DATABASE.

Immateriality/Temporal/Transitions material and movement/Human agency

A Species of Spaces.

Construction/Making/Collage

Forming, slowness and repetition, elements of painting

Assemblage, sensation, surface, objects and spaces between them gathered/thresholds

Sheltering/Weathered/ Exploring a fragility of a painting in the landscape

Robert Mangold, Paintings and Architectural Forms

Fragments from sketchbooks.

Ephemeral Architecture

Canvas as spatial verb

Yellow Ochre, Molochite, Gesso, Canvas, Paper, Textiles,Wood, Lead, Nails.

Canvas as folded construction/shelter/place

Operative Design, A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs.