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The Essential Mobility of Concepts. 

Correspondences faithful to the dynamism of imagination.

At the level of substances and their affective qualities/values.

Elemental Images.

Poetics of Air-Water-Fire-Space

A fecundity of instants, a mutative pattern rather than an additive or deductive one.

Reverie shatters frozen meanings and restores old words to their ambivalence and freedom. It reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication. There is only one requirement, that it seek (written) expression, whether through original creation or through an already existing encounter poem).

I should like to develop a philosophy that would have no point of departure.

Gaston Bachelard.

In those last days, she worked down here almost constantly, perhaps wondering when she would be able to sculpt again. When she gave them to us, she said she didn't see any point in just leaving them in the studio.

I carefully clipped his nails, starting from the little finger of his left hand. The nails were soft and transparent, and came away with the least effort, fluttering to the floor like flower petals. We listed to the quiet clicking of the clippers, their echoes sealing this moment in the depth of the night. When I finished, the sky-blue gloves were waiting on the table.

And that is how the Inui family vanished.

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa.

The Outside Studio.

Roger Ackling.

Drawing as notation of an event.

To fix the sun's rays.

To unify experience.

To mark place and time.

To seal them off from loss and forgetfulness.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

Colette Gaudin.

Images are incapable of repose, they must be studied simultaneously as isomorphic and unique.

The Poetics of Space.

Contradictions are the principle of aesthetic life.

Poetic language expresses the continuous tension within a substance, and as such it is by virtue of the dialectic of opposite qualities that poetic matter fascinates us.

Imagination not only sees a substantive within an adjective, it also finds a verb concealed under each word.

A value is not something already achieved, it is a becoming, an aspiration, moreover every value evokes its opposite and is in constant struggle with it. Bachelard finds in poetry an application of the philosophy of values that insist on their precariousness.

Bachelard allows his classifications to overlap, or superimpose one dialectic on another, he illustrates his unwillingness to establish a definitive system, less a structure, he is more interested  in the constant discovery of surprising poetic relationships which enrich the world.

For Bachelard, contradictions within matter are the true principles of individualization. Contradictions become alive when they require the participation of the entire subject, images that engage all our senses.

Contradictions are more than mere tolerance of judgement for unusual associations, they express the need to displace facts by value.

Bachelard rejects the role of the scholar who shares the fruit of his learning in the form of established truths, and invites us to experience with him, the essential mobility of concepts. 

The Interval/Gap/Spacing of a poetic instant.

The Poetic Instant.

The search for the interval inherent to the Japanese culture of Ma (spacing, interval, gap)

It suggests a consciousness of time that encompasses the intermediary and the in-between, composing the present, a present in the process of becoming.

Mono-Ha, the idea of the artwork as a phenomenon of natural order with no other meaning. The artist can simply organise what already exists, and only he who dedicates himself to it – and concentrates on it – manages to maintain a privileged relationship with the world.

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Beyond the formal attraction and cultural interest of the objects, the collections also translate the consistency, the tenacity even, of ending the dispersion of the fragments of the world to reach an (illusory) form of totality. Through the careful work done, the artist becomes a conservator, in the museum sense of the term: he gathers the pieces, cleans them, counts, tidies, names and exhibits them. The same applied attention is brought to collected pieces as to created ones. Of his monastic wisdom, he nurtures the kare-sensui of his art and his life, repeating identical gestures that deepen the sense of a relationship with the world.

We cannot create

what we can do is remove the dust

that has formed on the surface of things

thus rendering visible the world contained underneath.

Sekine Nobuo, 1969

Tsukuranai to iu kota (Do not create)

Roger Ackling.

The Invisible Appears. 2020

Lydia Rekow-Fond.

Translated by Derek Byrne. 

Practices on Solitude/The Alchemy of Imagination/The Permanence of Childhood

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Between The Lines.

Drawing as notation/mapping of an event/time/place recorded.

Sunlight Six Hours on Paper, Harleston 2022.

Sunlight on Wood.

1974. Starts making timed sun drawings in the time scale of one minute or one hour.

As many have for centuries I want to offer back into the world an affirmation of what is wonderful. I work on the surface but am aware that the spirit is often hidden within life a shadow in the darkness.

Roger Ackling

There is an aspect of Roger Ackling's work that might easily be forgotten in its assumed familiarity more usually performed onto something come across and minutely altered in the middle of a journey.

Simon Cutts.

The Work and Teaching of Roger Ackling.

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.