Architectural Stratification/Installation : Crafting/Painting Transformative Reconstructions/Relationscapes

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Sites of building over lived lives.

Of doing and un-doing, of being~becoming un-done by theory. 

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 

Sensing Spaces/Caryatid.

Painting Matter, Lime, Gesso, Charcoal, and Indian Ink on paper.

Clay.

Water.

Ceramics and Architecture.

 Architectural Stratifications, Carlo Scarpa, Intervening with History. 

The Placing of Pots.

The Hungate.

The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

A Moment of Pure Presence.

Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett

The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.

Analysing The Observed.

To abstract from the observed means to simplify the complexities of seeing.

Piet Mondrian.

Space and Form are ignored in this type of Abstraction, the Lines and their Vectors of Movement become a Map, Mapping Forces onto the Surface of the Picture.

Thinking with directional, durational markings/feelings/intuitive judgements.

Small Perceptions/Perceptions in Folding.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another, as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze, 1993.

Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaging landing sites.

Relationscapes.

Erin Manning.

'Incoherence' exists, which is why the composition 'Art' exists.

Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them. By giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they remain forever incoherent.

Andre Aciman/Edmund de Waal. 

For nearly fifty years my darkroom and studio have been the focus of my solitude.

Landing Sites.

The Expanding Field of Relations.

Organism/Person/Environment

I need silence to be able to think clearly, and an empty space where my thoughts can accumulate undisturbed.

Duration.

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid flowing time which is intertwined with an experience of being, where past, present and future merge into an experiential time of the individual being/becoming.

Steven Holl.

Darkrooms were dangerous places as well as magical ones, they are a painful metaphoric yoking of creation and destruction.

My final print is a golden square enclosing the pinkest dusk sky I had ever seen or imagined.

Filtered Light/Pot Metal Colours/Silver Stain/Filtows/Filters/Shadows.

The Light Gatherers.

Bodleian Libraries.

March 2022-October 2023.

Light Laboratory/Creation as Duration.

Glass vessels, as light filters shining the enlarger light through them and creating photograms. Garry's work oscillates with differential velocities. He works with great deliberation and then he works with abandon. I keep thinking about the tension between deliberation and abandon. You look at a painting by Agnes Martin and experience the temporal aspect of lines repeated slowly over days and weeks. A cell like structure repeats and changes, you repeat so that in return you can find the smallest oscillations of difference. An expanded field where you sense the development of different kinds of time, movements and their durations.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

Farewell to an Idea, Wallace Stevens/Edmund de Waal. 

Haecceity, thisness of things, which engenders feelings between ourselves/things/world.

I was grateful to have been able to live with so much pure colour for so long.

Space-Enfolding-Breath

Lake Of The Mind.

Ideas are already abstract.

Abstracted Transcriptions.

Drawing, Vectors and Forces of Subjectification.

Lines, mappings of forces across the surface of the picture.

Drawing on, analysis with, Dominants.

Formed by the dynamic forces derived from the outlines of objects and their surrounding spaces.

Palimpsest Collages

Psychogeographic Mappings

Architectural Models

The Process of Drawing/Building is Left Visible.

Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley.

Crafting Recovery and Regeneration.

Transformative Reconstruction.

SPAB, Summer 2023.

Michal Saniewski.

Falerone, San Francesco Monestry. Italy.

It's the forefront of modernisation, something that we thought the city was. The countryside is still the place where new ideas and experimentation actually take place..

Countryside : The Future.

Guggenheim Museum, 2020.

Heritage Conservation/Preservation

How do we insert new fabric into old and respect layers of history, of which the earthquakes are an inherent part? Perhaps some of the scars and cracks should be preserved to serve as a poignant  reminder of the past, becoming a living memorial? And perhaps there is potential to develop a new language of additive, 'surgical' architecture, where the contemporary timber frames serve a protective function, supporting and bracing the damaged medieval walls,  but at the same time can be inhabited, framing new uses and reprogramming internal spaces.

The reconstruction process should be used as an opportunity to add value beyond what existed before the earthquake. 

Exploring possible new functions and uses of currently empty spaces and damaged buildings, the local community was asked to participate in the act of psychogeographic mapping and thus rediscovering and revaluating the town on different levels.

Key themes of the New European Bauhaus initiative.

Renovation of existing buildings and public spaces in a spirit of circularity and carbon neutrality.

Preservation and transformation of cultural heritage.

Regeneration of urban or rural spaces.

 

Could Falerone become an experimental hotbed, an example of sustainable, community-driven reconstruction of urban fabric and place identity? The new crafts school could be an opportunity to achieve just that, stimulating collaborations not just with other towns and universities, but with regional authorities and even with the EU. 

Studio Cyanotypes.

Tools/Working Drawings and the Semblances of Spatial Agencies.

Keywords.

Visual Substance, Causal Doing, Investigating, Inquiry, Process, Agency, Matter, Material, Discursive, Iterative, Creative Apparatuses, Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies That Matter, 

Being Alive~Creating physical origins/entities : Correlations of Utility and Relevance.

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

Creating physical origins.

Biology of Cognition.

We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.

We become self-conscious through self-observation; by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process.

Autopoiesis and Cognition.

The Realization of The Living. 1970.

Humberto R. Maturana.

Francisco J. Varela.

For Niels Bohr,

Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices, it has more imagination than we do.

The well defined and solid picture of the world given by the old physics is an illusion.

Meaningful Information : Utility and Relevance.

Natural systems rooted in the physical world.

Correlations that care both physical but also intentional.

Relative information is generated by the interactions that weave the world.

The organism cares about its relevant relative information, it connects between something internal and something else generally external, 

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.

The Minds Eye

Bridget Riley.

POETICS/ARCHITECTURE.

Effective Correlations : Architectural Body.

Recasting/Reconfiguring Life.

Madeline Gins and Arakawa. 2002. 

Drawing Apparatuses: OUTPOST 2022.

Daylight observed, spatial exposures and tracked blueprints.

Intermediaries induce space between (relations) object and process, they create, set in motion diffractive phenomena.

Deconstruction, removal and revealing of objects by taking away, an archaeological process of context sheets to reference a layered and exploratory removal of material.

SPAB Shotesham Working Party.

An attitude to historical buildings.

Well-being within the preservation and social agency of what remains of the building.

Working with lime, soft capping, clay lump, flintwork.

The ruin, its tower and the early church in the landscape.

Wayfinding/Shelters/Involuntary Remains/Sculptural Outcrops. Exposed Architectural Fragments.

Lime/Flint a plastic architecture, a fabric made up of instances of building gathered from the locality.

The 'lift-line' and the shuttering and infilling of flint-work, prior to the whitewash render finish.

Undifferentiated Landscapes.

A Field of Earth.

Jean Dubuffer.

Dubuffer used a plasterer's technique, in which walls are coated using shaken branches instead of loaded trowels. He applied many layers, scattered substances such as sand and other materials, the mortar was scratched, poked and prodded until it gave the impressions of teeming matter, alive and sparkling, he could then use it to evoke all kinds of indeterminate textures, even galaxies and nebula.

Earth Colours.

CHROMAPHILIA.

A mortar of mixed material, of added soil, ash, gravels and other earth elements added to this viscous paste.

Anthropology, a study of what remains from  human societies, rituals and artefacts.

A contemporary art/architecture that takes on anthropological and sociological concerns.

The sensorial realm of practical making, learning and well-being through the hapticity of craft.

Mobility-Movement-Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.

Red Kiln 

Hebden Bridge, 2007.

Refurbish, new fibre lining, ceramic fibre adhesive, fire cement, gas burners.

Re-locate and re-assemble for larger architectural ceramics.

Outpost Members

Submit archive material. 

Anglian Potters.

Demo day with Rebecca Appleby.

Creative explorations of concept, media and scale.

An Artist Who Uses Clay As Her Medium.

In 2019 Rebecca started a new body of work titled 'Graces' which was of great significance and helped her to re-ground her practice in sculptural exploration of symbolic relationship between architecture, industrial and bodily transfiguration. 

In 2021 Rebecca was awarded a grant from the Arts Council to take risks and connect with a broader network and audiences, enriching and invigorating her career.

Interested in Order-Chaos-Impermanence, philosophical concepts addressing change.

Influenced by ceramists Gordon Baldwin, David Roberts.

Work/Making/Exhibition Titles

Urban Traces/Fragments/Translations.

Ceramics and The City.

Palimpsest. 

Fractures/Personal Trauma.

Concrete Cancer.

Ceramic sculptural works derived from Painting, Collage and Drawing.

Research material around abstract painting and architectural de-construction.

Ashraf Hanna, clay body, 55% mixed molochites.

Handbuilt slab forms fired to 1180 degrees centrigrade.

Monoprinting with slips on newsprint, underglazing, body oxide washes,  paper stencils, scratched, sprayed, and incised mark making. 

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

Other Worlds : Insistent moments of mark making/subjectivity

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CYANOTYPE SUN MAPPINGS/DRAWINGS

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer.

Adam Nicolson, Sea Room.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A history of Walking.

Site/Regional Specificity/Local Memory. 

SKIN, SURFACE, SUBJECTIVITY.

Insistent moments of alienated encounter.

Harriet Katherine Riches.

MATTER AND MUTABILITY

PRERSENCE AND AFFECT

Jane Grant.

AFFECTIVE ABSTRACTIONS

INTERMEDIARIES

CONSTITUENT PARTS

SPILL

IMMINENT REVELATION

EXPOSURE

NAMING THE LIGHTS

AFTERWORD

Garry Fabien Miller, Ian Warrell, Richard Ingleby.

The solitary artist literally at the edge of his environment and in a state of profound meditation about our place in the wider cosmos.

As if seeing herself from the desolate distance of a star, Woodman looks back through the alienating photographic lens of displacement and memory, her print the surface upon which she conjures an impossible moment of beautiful fusion.

Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to be challenged and to collapse.

For it is in the very nature of photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and in talented hands, an infallible medium of creation.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY.

Susan Sontag.

SPAB.

Building Conservation/Casework Campaigning/Innovative Research/Immersive Training Programmes/Working Parties.

Climate Action/Built Heritage.

Jacqui Donnelly, Spring 2022.

Traditional buildings are defined as those built with solid masonry walls, single-glazed timber or metal framed windows and timber-framed roofs usually clad with slate or tiles.

One of the most effective ways of increasing the resilience of our historical structures and sites is the application of good conservation practices.

Traditional  materials and construction techniques allow for the natural transfer of heat and moisture and relied on the thickness of the walls to cope with atmospheric moisture. It is therefore essential that all materials and finishes, including mortars, renders and plasters, used on traditional walls are vapour-permeable to allow this movement of moisture to continue.

Proactive Maintenance

Repair Programmes 

Upgrading through repair and adaptation.

Mitigation

Courses in traditional rural trades and crafts, Weald and Downland Open Museum.

The SPAB has made sure that the project not only repairs the mill but integrates public access and education into the process.

The scaffold design has allowed public access visits for the local community and students, offering opportunity to view the work while underway.

Douglas fir weatherboards

Vmzinc roof covering

Insulating Render, Cornerstone.

Developing a scheme that endeavours to fit a three-bedroom house into the existing footprint of the mud cottage and adjacent outbuilding,with some overspill into a new circulation space that connects the structures whilst clearly retaining the legibility of the existing modest forms.

INHABITATION, the inter-dependence of mankind within socio economic frameworks. 

Vernacular Concerns/Folklore/Heritage and Fabric of Buildings.

TONALITIES

BUILDING MATERIALS

THE POETICS OF SPACE

Gaston Bachelard.

Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar.

The numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index, whether they are in the first, second, or third position, besides having a purely ordinal value, correspond also to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and enquiry that, in varying proportions, are present in every part of the book.

Those marked 1 generally correspond to a visual experience, whose object is always some natural form; the text belongs to a descriptive category.

Those marked 2 contain anthropological elements, or cultural in the broad sense; and the experience involves, besides visual data, also language, meaning, symbols. The text tends to take the form of a story.

Those marked 3 involve more speculative experience, concerning the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world, the dimensions of the mind. From the confines of description and narrative we move into the area of meditation.

Studio Works

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The Thinking Field/Speculative Curriculums.

The Body-In-Action/Making Spaces between Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Anthropology.

Sequences of actions that add up to an observational-heuristic procedure.

Conserved without restoration of lost detail.

The problem of historical materials, which we can never ignore but can't imitate directly either, is an issue that has always concerned me. I am primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Carlo Scarpa, Castelvecchio.

Lime Wash, Field Chalk, China Clay.

Human Figure Drawing.

Waxed Paper, Canvas.

Charcoal, Clay, Liquid Iron Oxide.

 

Essential Work Only.

The SPAB Approach.

The Society's approach very often involves carefully considered inaction.

Where no problems exist, or where a problem has no major effect on use or conservation, an old building is best left alone and simply enjoyed.

Problems need to be tackled, but the society encourages work which is no more, but no less, than is essential.

 

Restricting work to these things helps ensure the maximum survival of historic fabric.

Site Sequencing/The Infra-Thin/The Viewing Chamber.

Tactically posed surrounds that contrast/entangle one segment of world with another.

Mapping Photons/Subjectivity.

Architectural Body/Collaged Users

Procedural Movements of Conservation/Care and Repair. 

Extracting that which has become interred.

Observing quotidian detail within the ruins of a  fabric of building.

Domestic and intimate details that create poetic themes that are universal and transcendent.

Wanting to see what things look like photographed/interrogations.

Pushing the photographic image to the point of failure, using the fading twilight to create new abstractions of light and movement.

The intermediate space of the negative.

A gap created between the mechanical attentive and unassumptive nature/vision of the camera and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye. 

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty struggled with the development of a theory of vision that would take account our embodied relationship to it, describing the 'chiastic' relationship between the viewer and the world, an intertwining through which the world was bought into a kind of visibility.

What needed to be put into question and seen as problematic was how the viewer came to be seen as separate from the world, how the visual ever became positioned as something other, something differentiated and separate from the spectator.

The force of presence/presentness.

Stillness and Time, 2006.

Still Video Portraits and the Account of The Soul.

Joanna Lowry.

The Visual, is predicated upon the construction of a distance between the spectator and the world, a distance maintained through the work of culture and the work of technology.

Photographic technologies have provided one key cultural mechanism for defining the place of the visual and positioning it in relationship to us.

In representing the subject they also define the site of the subjects's visibility, the place at which he or she can be seen.

They cut through the world, interrupt it, producing difference and distance and projecting it onto the surface of the paper or the screen.

They produce a differentiated space of the visible within which the subject and the spectator are made aware of their otherness and their distance from from each other.

 

Photographic Drawings/Haiku.

Luminous/Insubstantial Spectral Abstractions. 

Focus and detail  would drag it back to our world. 

Vision is the place where are continuity with the world conceals itself, the place where we mistake our contact for distance, imagining that seeing is a substitute for, rather than a mode of, touching, and it is this anaesthesia, this senselessness, at the heart of transparency that demands our acknowledgement and pushes our dealings with the visual beyond recognition.

Stephen Melville. 

Recombinant Poetics

Pinhole Photography/Qualitative Visual/Haptic Soundings.

St Martins, Shotesham. SPAB

Camera Room/Still Life

Paintings from the overlaying intervals of materials and processes of construction.

The Essential Solitude

Maurice Blanchot

Self Communion.

The person who is writing the work is thrust to one side, the person who has written the work is dismissed. What is more, the person who is dismissed does not know it.

This ignorance saves him, diverts him and allows him to go on.

The writer never knows if the work is done.

What he has finished in one book, he begins again or destroys in another.

Exploring the individual constituent parts of painting : Cyanotype substance on paper.

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Delicate Cutting

Symbolic of the 'connective tissue' which the photograph itself embodies, the pressure of the cold glass against warm skin glorifies the terms of the medium's indexicality, whilst also pointing out a fundamental disparity.

Notes On The Index, Krauss.

IMMATERIALITY AND TRANSPARENCY : Juhani Pallasmaa.

Technique and Expression in Glass Architecture, 2003.

The Poetics Of Glass

Glass And Modernity

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

The Technological Imperative

Between Polarities

Technique And Poetry

Return To Animistic Thought

Illusions And Reflections

From Form To Matter

The Secret Life Of Buildings

Mirrors And Symbols

Perfection And Imperfection

The Re-Enchantment Of Architecture

Introduction To Modernity

Henri Lefebvre

SPAB

Leaded Glass, repair, restoration, contemporary use of glass, architectural models in ceramic/glass.

In its framed state, Rothko's painting was constricted and not able to exist, as it should, on its; in other words, to be what it was intended to be.

Robert Ryman : The Dallas Installation.

Exploring the individual constituent parts of painting.

Untitled 1980-2003

Oil on steel plate with four fasteners, 48.3 x 48.3cm.

Page 1998

Oil and graphite on stretched linen, 38.4 x 38.4cm.

A series of visual experiences (interpretations on the art of painting), bracing,sensual, austere and luxuriant forms, calibrated to register from one work of art to the next.

The remarkable thing about Robert Ryman is that he has been working within his own matrix of questions, problems, and definitions for the past fifty years, and is still finding ways to make his art evolve from what has gone before.

Going beyond its appearance, to answer the question of what Ryman's art might mean is, of course, the challenge of abstraction itself, a challenge that has proven to be central to the art of the past century up to the present moment and that can arguably be seen still to define many of the issues of the art of our time.

Robert Ryman has investigated a basic set of closely related questions: how are paintings made, what are they made of, how are they installed in gallery and museum spaces, and hoe are these works experienced by those who come amidst them?

Ryman has concentrated on this specific line of inquiry by exploiting a highly select range of painting's parts: surface, support, medium, placement before the viewer, and importantly colour.

Ryman's art is about, and is itself, the paint on the surface of a material that is affixed to or hung on a lighted wall in a gallery or a museum.

It is a square made from any number of materials, and it shows exactly how it was made, what type of brushes or other instrument the artist used in applying liquid pigment, what its surface is, how its paint is affected by underpainting (the placing of one pigment over another to render a visual sensation), how its colours behave, what its material support is, and how it is placed before the eyes (scale has much to do with this), whether on a flat wall or somehow otherwise installed in relation to that wall.

Ryman describes the existence of something mysterious in Rothko with which Ryman was intrigued, so much so that he remembered its effect decades later. What stayed with Ryman, it appears, were Rothko's “form, structure, surface, and light,”

By the extreme boiling down of a painting's constituent parts, Rothko presented the viewer with an experience unlike any other to be found in contemporary life: that of a work of art defining itself and then acting strictly within this definition according to its own set of rules.

What was radical about Rothko, was that there was no reference to any representational influence. There was colour, there was form,  there was structure, the surface, the light, the nakedness of it, just there. 

What Rothko was after, the invocation of universal themes of human existence voiced through a vocabulary of numinous light-filled forms, was clearly not something Ryman pursued in his own art. Over and over, Ryman makes openly visible the way he paints and what he paints with: the meaning of the work seems to radiate insistently from these facts. 

Charles Wylie, 2005.