Clay~Vessel~Ritual~Body : Drawing Forms and Vessels

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

10/03/2017

CLAY : Speculative City : From Pilgrim to Tourist
From Pilgrim To Tourist (or a short history of identity). Zygmunt Bauman.

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation

Clay drawing/situation/collage based on a performative script/reading

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

 Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.



Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency 2010.

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.
My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel 2010 into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking” States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself.

This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)

Soul Cages for Architecture and its Abject Objects.

Spatial  Matter(s) manifesting care with making.

Inhabitation : Ceramics work/relate by becoming readings of archaeological research.

Soul Cages/Architectural Bodies.

My art practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes.

3 Compositional Forms.

270mmx230mmx70mm

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

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

Water at Hungate : Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

 Outpost 130723

Hungate Installation of Works.

Making Material into Paths-Of-Difference.

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

Working Fables/Visual Aphorisms.

The Poetics of The Pragmatic.

The Multivalence of Metaphor.

A series of three follies to accommodate the family, the on-site guardhouse and an art gallery.

Private Estate, Montana, USA, 1991.

I opted to be a fabulist rather than an ideologist because fables retain the ring of immutability long after ideologies have wilted.

Emilio's Folly as well as offering a figurative and allegorical manifesto of its author's idiosyncrasies, is also a catalogue of the metaphors that recur in his architecture: water and the earth, the house with a Mediterranean patio, subterranean architecture and the descent towards the depths. Emilio's island of folly tranforms the eighteenth century penchant for picturesque aesthetics into the narrative frame of a passage describing a private garden and in constructing a design image,  envisages a miniature theatre of memory in which the mechanism of memory is analysed and forgetfulness suspended.

Passing from the canopy at the entrance to the twilight glimmer of the misty cavity offers a didactic description of memory elaborated through cognition's subterranean strata, while simultaneously testifying to the hopes associated with the act of designing, evading paralysis by memory's repetition compulsion.

Fulvio Irace.

My work is a search for giving architectural forms to primal things: being born, being in love, and dying. They have to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level. I understand  architecture as the search for a spiritual abode. On the one hand, I am playing with pragmatic elements that come from my time, such as technology. On the other hand, I am proposing a certain mode of existence that is an alternative, a new one.

Emilio Ambasz.

Anyway, to come back to the story, yes, water plays an important role in what I do because it doesn't have a shape of its own; that is to say, it does have indeed have an immense power of its own, but the shape it adopts is the shape of the container you give it. To me water is important it can be nebulized.  I have used fog many times to evoke the presence of a building which isn't there, and its presence becomes very strong when the sun creates a rainbow. It cools you or warms you if you make those clouds of mist.

I use fog and its indeterminate form maybe because I am a prisoner of my time and afraid of making definitive statements. I seek to make statements which are constantly being reformulated. 

I always say there are two ways to cast a shadow: one is as a tree and the other as a cloud. I think that I chose to be a cloud.

Interview, Emilio Ambasz, Emerging Nature.

Working with the the force of a relational environment, expressing thought as an incipient movement being  articulated through sensation. 

Indexical Traces/The Flux of Processual Drawing.

Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

Bringing potential relations into actual experience.

Experiential experiments/proposals/inquiry expressing the force/nature of a relational environment.

Resonances that modulate her body, her own becoming, movement in tandem with the environment moving.

Hortus Conclusus, Centre Pompidou. 1989.

You always have the sense that behind the walls of these projects are absent presences or present absences. The notion of that which is in front of you and what happens behind the wall has always appealed to me. There is a certain anima or spirit behind the wall.

Emilio Ambasz.

The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and it is also the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity. 

Michel Foucault.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

The Art Of Colleagueship

It is a shared curiosity that ties individual creative actions into a dialogue of immanence. A special feature of which is the willingness of the participants to temporary suspend judgement so as to seriously entertain the open potential of our discoveries. That nothing occurs in a vacuum is an idea which is particularly true of human actions. So while the art of pure inquiry is uniquely individual, it does not take place in isolation.

Certainly the pure void of concept beckons the curious, and the unique motive for a pure inquiry of a pure subject is curiosity and the desire to know.

The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject-all that is out there-and the pure potential of the individual perceiver-all that is in here. Where the strength (clarity) of this inquiry lies is in its single motive-the desire to know.

What is key here is that certain ideas (possibilities) are immanent at particular moments. That in each time and place there exists a unique body of shared experiences, knowledge, and need, that marks our moment in time, and from which all inquiry steps off. Merleau-Ponty, in writing about the work of Cezanne, reflected that art may have an advantage over philosophy as a speculative thought form in that it has at once a tactile and a cerebral dimension.

Robert Irwin.

Hungate Group  Exhibition 'Water' 2023.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His  use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.

Making Statements/Making Things : Hungate/Anglian Potters.

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits . Erin Manning.

Architectural slab built pieces investigate ceramic forms as a dwelling place or a model for a building construction. Some thrown shapes on the theme of crucibles fired by the Raku process. Recent work has been exhibited in historical sites and locations, exploring contexts of ceramics and rituals. Studied Ceramics at Epsom School of Art and Design UCA, Visual Fine Art at Winchester, Teaching at Brockwood Park School.

Anglian Potters

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

Water at Hungate.

Hungate Architectural Explorations. 

Air/Place/Breath/Light/Architecture/Ritual/Social Space

Cell-Court-Domain.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.

Violence of Architecture : Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

 Outpost 170823

The Movement of Bodies in the Space of Architecture.

White Cubes/Art Museums/Architectures of  Ritualized Display.

Violence of Architecture.

Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion  of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another. This intrusion is inherent in the idea of architecture; any reduction of architecture to its spaces at the expense of its events is as simplistic as the reduction of architecture to its facades.

By 'violence,' I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity but a metaphor for the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces.

Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, those bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought. No wonder the human body has always been suspect in architecture: it has always set limits to the most extreme architectural ambitions. The body disturbs the purity of architectural order. It is equivalent to a dangerous prohibition.

Spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces. One does not trigger the other; they exist independently. Only when they intersect do they affect one another. The same occurs in architecture: the event is altered by each new space. And vice versa: by ascribing to a given, supposedly 'autonomous' space a contradictory program, the space attains new levels of meaning. Event and space do not merge but affect one another.

When spaces and programs are largely independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which architectural considerations do not depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another.

A ritual implies a near-frozen relationship between action and space. It institutes a new order after the disorder of the original event. When it becomes necessary to mediate tension and fix it by custom, then no single fragment must escape attention. Nothing strange and unexpected must happen. Control must be absolute. 

Bernard Tschumi.

Everyday Life/Spatial Intimacy.

The original, spontaneous interaction of the body with a space is often purified by ritual.

Concerned with the way art museums offer up values and beliefs.

Civilizing Rituals/Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan.

Art always risks the plurality its iterations, that they can become colonized, immobilized and arrested within dominant belief structures. It is always the plurality alive in the art work that always risks being overtaken by the forces of encounter it invites.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes.

The Diagram/Drawing of the Work

In-Gathers the Works Feeling.

The Dreaming's, potential to create new kinds of futures in the present.

Making works/drawings that resonate/openings into the indeterminacy of experience.

Allowing the workings of art to facilitate the opening of the present to its potential for experiential complexity through the ontogenetic plurality of sense(s). 

Napangardi's work activates the Dreaming's potential, becoming both a technology of the future and a technique for the present.

Erin Manning/Dreaming's paintings by Napangardi.

The Final Act/Fact in the Work of Art.

Landing Sites, we land into the focus of an awareness that becomes with us.

The Decision of Emphasis is how the work satisfies its becoming, this satisfaction is the present finality of its current iteration.

Alfred North Whitehead.

Creating art-work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Feeling Drawing/Spatial Experience.

Indexical Traces/Decarcations/Materiality/Media

The flow of time in the event/duration of drawing.

Figuring it out, drawings/diagrams/lines/paths of sensory inquiry.

How we feel things/phenomenology.

Uncovering unconscious things/psychoanalysis. 

Life Drawings/Propositions with/for the human body.

What the ecology of the drawings show, what is hidden, seeing naked or nude.

Naked in Norwich.

Undercroft.

Space violating bodies : Architectures of Display/Ritual/Violence.

General Ritual Features of Art Museums.

Firstly, the achievement of a marked of 'liminal' zone of time and space in which visitors, removed from the concerns of their daily, practical lives, open themselves to a different quality of experience.

Secondarily, the organization of the museum setting as a kind  of script or scenario which visitors perform. Carol Duncan has argued that western concepts of the aesthetic experience, generally taken as the art museum's raison d' etre, match up rather closely to the kind of rationales often given  for traditional rituals (enlightenment, revelation, spiritual equilibrium or rejuvenation).

In the liminal space of the museum, everything, and sometimes anything, may become art,including fire extinguishers, thermostats, and humidity gauges, which when isolated on a wall and looked through the aesthetizing lens of museum space, can appear if only for a mistaken moment, every bit as interesting as some of the intended-as-art works on display, which in any case do not always look very different.

Circumstances are everything.

Notes on the making of a conditional art.

Robert Irwin.

Art is primarily a situation.

Robert Morris. 

Like everything else in life, art is not defined by its physical description, its formal qualities or even its conceptual foundation, circumstances are everything. Something could be art or it could not be art, it all depends on the situation.

Bernard Tschumi agues that architecture is never autonomous, never pure form, not a matter of style and cannot be reduced to a language. He opposes an over-rated notion of architectural form, and hopes to reinstate the term function and more particularly, to re inscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture. In Architecture and Disjunction he refuses the simplistic relation by which form follows function, or use, or socioeconomics. In contrast, he argues that in contemporary urban society, any cause-and-effect relationship between form, use, function, and socioeconomic structure has become both impossible and obsolete.   

 

MAPPING : Ritual,fire and stone : Human Filament

Astronomical data with outline of human form,candles,string and stones on paper.150cm x 240cm

Fingal's Cave, Staffa. Walking on black stone.

Fingal's Cave, Staffa. Walking on black stone., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Fingal's Cave, Staffa. Walking on black stone.

In Defence of Sensuality : John Cowper Powys 1930.


Foreword.

The author feels that perhaps some explanation is due to the reader for the rather unusual employment of the word "Sensuality" which serves as the title of this work. The advantage given to the author by the use of this particular expression is that it enables him to proceed from rock-bottom upwards as far as he likes. A more refined title would have cut him off, in his method of developing his idea, from the physical roots of existence; for while it is easy to indicate the overtones and undertones of Sensuality it would be hard to bring a gentle, vague word, like the word "sensuousness" down to the bare, stark, stoically-stripped Life-Sensation which is the subject of this book.

J.C.P.

Dedicated to the memory of that great
and much-abused man

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Amongst lightness and the reverberation of material.

Amongst lightness and the reverberation of material., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

A
Short
History
of
Myth:

Karen Armstrong.

" The history of myth is the history of humanity; our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, link us to our ancestors and each other."