Stranger Things : A humble, passive, somewhat absurd object, yet potent, mysterious, sensuous : Hans Coper

Hans Coper, Theory and Object Analysis.

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

MA Interior Design

2014.

Things made of light and dark. Hans Coper : Brian Clarke. Sainsbury Centre, Norwich UK

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea l983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Drawings in the form of tracings were gathered from the flat planes of the display cabinet; these were further superimposed in an attempt to map the surface and forms of the Hans Coper pots and to explore their volumes and interior spaces. These new sight lines subjectively link surface details with profiles into the possibility of new spatial forms. These plans and mappings became the starting point for a series of slab and thrown assemblages. Thrown and slab worked clay forms in T Material, preliminary drawings done in-situ some with annotations. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Rotterdam Exhibition with Lucie Rie. 1967 Hans Coper.

His arrangement was highly original and innovative, he showed his families of vases in groups, emphasising their subtle differences in form and surface treatment. The space between the pieces was just as important as the objects themselves. The architectonic character of Coper’s pots become visible through their dry, stone like skin and the sophisticated way in which Jane Gate photographs the work.

“Potters of reconciliation, they sought a marriage of function and beauty.” Douglas Hill SF author/intro to exhibition.

Craft Study Centre Publication 2014

Object Analysis

Name of object:   Vase, flattened oval form on a cylindrical stem, pinkish cream to grey glaze over                                       manganese on exterior, manganese over interior and recessed foot. It is decorated                                    with incised lines on back and around the stem with concentric rings incised on the                                   foot

Accession number:                P.74.28

Maker:                                   Hans Coper 

Construction techniques:

Materials:                               stoneware

Dimensions:                           22.2 x 18.8 centimetres

Date made:                             1960s      

Provenance:                           Made in Hammersmith, London. UK

Given to Muriel Rose by Hans Coper in 1966

This thistle-shaped vase is constructed from five individually thrown pieces. The joints making up the pot have been selectively accentuated with the residues of the manganese engobe. Incised geometric marks remain from the initial turning process of the component parts, prior to the construction of the pot. (Russell Moreton. 2014)  

Name of object:     Vase, unglazed rim. manganese interior, decorated with vertical scoring on the                                         exterior      

 Accession number:                   P.74.103

Maker:                                       Hans Coper 

Materials:                                  stoneware

Dimensions:                              12.7 centimetres

Date made:                                1950s

Provenance:                               London. UK                                      

Single thrown form with the remains of the sgraffito technique after the ceramic has been heavily abraded after firing. The vertical lines of the sgraffito technique and the form itself are similar to Lucie Rie's flower vases, see Lucie Rie by Tony Berks page 112.

This single thrown form perhaps best illustrates the creative union of both Coper's and Rie's practices, the form almost a kind of beaker might itself been inspired by the "dark pots” Lucie Rie found whilst visiting Avebury Museum. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Name of object:     Squeezed ovoid-shape vase with flower holder inside, manganese interior

Accession number:                    P.74.30

Maker:                                   Hans Coper

Materials:                              stoneware

Dimensions:                          22 x 22 centimetres

Date made:                            1970s

Provenance:                          London. UK

Wheel thrown forms, comprising of bowl, open cylinder and an interior ring acting as a flower holder. The bowl form has been turned before being jointed with the upper section. The piece was then indented at four points to form an ovoid form. Pronounced incised horizontal marks remain from the joining, which has been further transposed by the action of becoming ovoid. Very subtle and restrained use of the manganese engobe followed by Coper's characteristic post firing technique of abrading the surface of the ceramic. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Hans Coper : Working Notes CSC/10 March 2014.

Notes re/statements

1.   Specific to the form in question.

2.   Context in relation other similar forms.

3.   Key Words: Impregnated, Incised, Eroded, Reduction, Surface, Soil, Abraded Surfaces, Machining, Grinding, Assemblage, Components, Parts, Groups, “Aryballos,Spade, Thistle, Diabolo, Cycladic, Spherical,” Sculptural, Pottery, Architectonic, Space between Forms, Spatial, Sensuality, Form and Fold, Bodily Spaces, Light and Dark, Clay, Water, Fire, Agency, Difference,

Extracts from catalogue “The Essential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014”

“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which 

may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”

“My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration. The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, and provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process.”

Artist Statement, Victoria and Albert Museum/Collingwood, Coper Exhibition 1969. Small Beige Spade 1966.

The body comprises a thrown circular form, from which the bottom has been flattened into an oval and the lower section has been pressed together.

Throwing rings are visible on the inside.

Areas of the white engobe have loosened from the underlying layer during firing and formed blisters.

Cycladic Vase 1973.

Blisters in the slip have been sanded down to reveal a rust coloured underlying layer. Medium Sized Spade 1973.

There is a clear delineation between the light upper section and the rougher and darker lower section.

Small Thistle Shaped Vase 1973.

There is a large incised circle on one side of the disc and a smaller circle on the other. Hans Coper’s characteristic use of light engobe and dark manganese oxide has produced a hazy texture.

Black Aryballos 1966.

This ceramic form has its origins with the Oil Flask used by athletes in Greece and Asia Minor.

Tall elongated diabolo forms.

After being thrown the cup has been formed into an oval and then indented at four points.

Text Fragments. Momentum Wheel.

It is difficult to determine in which order the parts were assembled.

The underlying surface is showing through the grooves that are linking the body and the base.

The manganese engobe is demarcating dark and light zones through an undulating incised line.

“Rings” caused by the placement of a prop in the kiln. Brown-Beige Colorations.

Sensations caught within the form. 

Soil like deposits/remains. 

Reductions of the fired surface. 

Abraded Surfaces

Incised Line. 

Droplet.

Blisters, pricked open and sanded after firing. This process has produced an irregular, patch surface.

Parallel lines have been incised with a pointed object on the exterior of the base. Thistle Shaped Vase 1966.

The dark brown patches (around the jointing of the pot) and flecks appear randomly distributed but have been purposefully placed to accentuate the structure of the vase. This flat vase with the contour of a stylised thistle flower is made up of five individually thrown pieces. The tall cylindrical foot supports a vertical disc, comprising of two individually thrown flat plates. It is as though the disc has sunk approximately ten centimeters into the foot.

Spherical Vase with Tall Broad Oval Neck 1966.

The transition from sphere to neck is accentuated with darker colourations.

Hans Coper

Hans Coper's iconic assembled ceramics frame the later part of the twentieth century with an ambivalence of both alienation and reconciliation. His pots reveal differences that have resisted the homogenizing effects of the culture of the time. They embody and are a physical testament to what the potter himself has reflected on his life, "endure your own destiny"1 2 within the space and time of the human condition.

Bom in 1920 into a prosperous middle dass background, his childhood years were spent in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany. In 1935 his father Julius, is singled out like many other Jewish businessmen for harassment and ridicule

under National Socialist Party. This would result in the Coper family moving frequently to escape the attention of the Nazis. Tragically in 1936 Julius takes his own life in an attempt to safeguard the future of his family. The remaining family. Erna Coper and her two sons return to Dresden. In 1939 Hans at the age of 18 leaves Germany for England, the following year he is arrested in London and interned as an enemy alien. He spends the next three years first in Canada then returns to England by volunteering to enroll in the Pioneer Corps. In 1946 a meeting with William Ohly who ran an art gallery near to Berkeley Square, brought about an opportunity for a job in a small workshop run by Lucie Rie, a refugee potter from Vienna. Hans Coper now began earnestly through his engagement with ceramics to reveal a continental modernity "whose work seemed uncomfortably abrasive to the traditionalists."*

Hans Coper and Lucie Rie worked together at Albion Mews for 13 years forming a friendship and a working relationship that was mutually reciprocated through practical concerns, innovation and experimentation. There is a creative synergy in place through their mutual sharing of process and experimentation within the practicalities of the studio space. A documented instance of this reciprocal inventiveness is in the appropriation of the technique of "Sgraffito" which Lucie Rie employs after being inspired by some Bronze Age pottery at Avebury Museum bearing incised patterns, which are displayed with some bird bones, which may have been used as tools to incise the pottery. These "dark bowls of Avebury"3  are transposed through the use of manganese engobe and a steel needle into Lucie Rie's ceramics, Hans Coper although not present appropriates the bird bone for the engineered steel of a pointed needle file and uses the action of an abrasive hand tool to remove layers of the manganese engobe. In this way Coper is enacting onto the surfaces of his ceramics, the very agencies that Modernism was acting out in the realms of architectural space and surface treatment of materials. In 1959 a move to Digwell Arts Trust would bring to a close his working relationship with Lucie Rie. Coper now became involved with a number of architecturally based projects through the Digswell Group of architects and building professionals. Coper's engagement with the Digwell Group was not without problems and creative frustrations, but seen in retrospect it became an experimental period where Coper was strengthening his ability to bring his pottery into a spatial communion with the modernist architectural sensibilities of the time. However it was a wartime friend Howard Mason who introduced Coper's work to Basil Spence, from this introduction Hans Coper was commissioned to design the candlesticks for the new modernist cathedral at Coventry. The Six Coventry Candlesticks completed in 1962 explicitly reveal a sensitive and progressive spatial awareness to the architectonics of built spaces. The candlesticks delicately tapered and waisted are made in sections and assembled on site onto rods set into the architectural interior. These assembled thrown and fired towering forms seem to be more about a presence than their actual physicality. They appear to paradoxically transcend the monumentality of their setting through their very immateriality, their slight of form being perfectly balanced to accommodate a single candle and its temporal flame.

As a maker of pots he was in constant touch with his working process, an analogue process, a creative membrane that surrounded the agency of making and thinking. He was able to pursue his vocation "My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration"4 His resultant works reflect what might be termed a "machining in" of a creative durability that is both ancient and modern that contains both tensions and fragility, and that above all seems to exist in a state of timelessness.

His assembled "pots" are constructed from thrown components, "throwing" as o process that he remarks on "I become part of the process. I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now". It is through the wheel, the body and the interplay between clay and air that the inner space that defines the form is created. Adam Gopnik writing about the art of Edmund de Waal describes what I might be termed a spatial sensibility "the pot-ancient as it is. is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out."5 Hans Coper further adds sensuality to this "innerness" when he encloses it in a skin that appears archaic through a deeply physical surface treatment of engobes, incised grooves and scratching of the raw pot; then when finally once fired the dry vitreous surface is further machined and abraded to give a graphite-like sheen.

Hans Coper's pots speak in silence of this interior "architectonic" space that is itself reverberated through an almost archaic modernity. He seems to be able to tune the interior, to load its mass, its void.

There is a strong sense of the vessel, the concrete with the emptiness, even an analogy to corporality set in motion by his treatment of the surface and interiors of his pots. The pots themselves belong to ever extended families, to new familiarities created by the subtle interlays between the negative spaces created through the spatial awareness that has been crafted into their very making. The pots through proximity with each other are in a spatial communion, they act to define particular spaces by defining boundaries and creating thresholds between exterior surfaces and space. These pots are themselves are 'encounters' they ask us to be attentive to the responsive sensory inner space set up in residence by the permeable world of the ceramic vessel.

1 Birks. Tony. 1983. Hons Coper. London. William Collins Publishers. p75. 

2 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers p22. 

3 Birks. Tony. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine. Stenlake Publishing ltd: p44.

4 The Essential Potness. Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014. Collingwood and Coper Exhibition 1969. Victoria and Albert Museum.

5 Gopnic.Adam 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things : About the Art of Edmund de Waal. New York; Gagosian Gallery: p6-7

Brian Clarke : Properties of Matter and Imagination (Working Text)

Brian Clarke

The Art of Light/Paul Greenhalgh,2018.

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Architecture and Material Practice, Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Water and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard.

Properties of Matter and Imagination

FUSION OF PHYSICAL/METAPHYSICAL

Working Title : An Inquiry with a Material Practice

The poetics of glass as a super-cooled liquid.

Molten Fluidity.

An organic flux frozen for an instant.

Chaos and order, flow and turbulence, pooling and shifting translucence.

Chemistry becomes alchemy, the banality of the raw materials - sand, metal and minerals – turn into a magical universe of the imagination. Perhaps this is the key to Brian Clarke's stained glass; it embodies the fusion of two things that normally don't mingle; the physical and metaphysical.

Botanical

Cosmological

Biographical

The screens are an intense site of innovation and artistic consolidation. Some of the screens are principally about the organic flow of forms derived from nature; some of them deal with ideas that push into universal concepts and have a symbolist, otherworldly ambiance; and some yet their driving force incidents, memories and emotions that shaped the artist's life.

The Modern World (the artist's attitudes to)

Life

Violence

Mortality

Many of the screens are highly specific to an incident or influence, the titles give us a clue to the complex symbology at work and the intertwining of the artist's personal response with wider perceptions about place.

Contrapuntal/Counterpoint music introduces multiple melodies that are equally important.

Polyphony describes the use of overlapping melodies.

For Clarke the concept of a screen as a vehicle of artistic expression is not a new concept, rather it clearly resonates back through his life, becoming part of his artistic consciousness virtually from the start of his work in glass.

Literal and Phenomenal Transparency

Layering of Planes/Layering of Spaces

Rowe and Slutzky 1982

What exactly is a screen and what does it mean in the context of modernity?

A screen is simultaneously a physical object and a complex conceptual metaphor. We use screens to divide and to mask things off from each other, and as boundaries/barriers to hide behind. At the same time, the screen provides ways of looking at things/displaying; we screen films and we screen people. We look through them, and they can act as a catalyst that changes our vision of whatever is on the other side. In its usage in art, a screen is automatically a series of images – a diptych, triptych or polyptych – a sequence of free standing panels that allows the artist to develop a narrative and aesthetic theme.

Screens divide up space and make it function differently.

Alabaster windows before glass. (contemporary windows by both Soulages/Sigmar Polke/Iglesias

The Glass House

The screen as emblematic of modernity.

Conceptually, the sensibility at work in many early Modern buildings was one of space divided by screen walls and windows. In this sense, the giant windows at either end of Norman Foster's seminal Sainsbury Centre building for example are light-screens.

The nature of Brian Clarke's architectural practice, in which his core practice is painting.

It is through painting that I understand how to view architecture. It is through painting that I can appreciate the rhythm of the poem. It is through painting that I can appreciate and draw pleasure from the structure of a well-composed sentence. And it is through painting that the complexity of music makes itself understood to me. It is through painting, in fact, that I am.

Brian Clarke, 1989.

I do not identify mostly with painting, but I identify mostly with all other things because of painting.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

Clarke is gripped by the technology and engineering of how a building is made, but also by the psychological function and its emotional impact, he refers to himself as an architectural artist.

The medium of glass in its modern form will only be seen when people have been sufficiently exposed to it.

During the 20^th century – the age of specialisation – theorists and historians were obsessed with separating out the arts disciplines, positioning them in specific groups or classes, and then subjecting them to philosophical discourse as to why they belonged there. In short, the Anglo-Saxon world in particular artificially created the categories of art, design and craft, and then intellectually policed them. Stained glass was inevitably positioned as a craft, with all the confused cultural and economic consequences of this class allocation.

Clarke with the complexity of his practice and interests has led to embrace the concept of gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art). A concept first championed by Richard Wagner, who perceived opera as a means of combining all of the arts, including music, and literature, in order to completely surround the spectator. In the visual arts, it is essentially about generating a complete art environment, in which all elements are orchestrated into an aesthetic whole.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, designers of the De Stijl movement.

Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor

I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material
Neo Baroque, Postmodern rendered/computer generated surfaces.
New Forms of Media Aesthetics, Peter Greenaway

Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.

The Interrupted Grid/Motifs

Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies

The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena

Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.

The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.

Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome.

Grisaille

Pointillism

Divisionism

Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thorn Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends)

The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.
Mesh Topologies 

Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.

Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.

An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making.

The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead – a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline – into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else – the poetry, ideas, emotions – emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Night Orchids

Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together.

The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke's recent work; mortality.

The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.

There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes – Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.

Robert Storr.

Francis Bacon

The Logic of Sensation

Gilles Deleuze

Memento Mori

The inevitability of things.

The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.

Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modern art.

The use of memory as a conceptual tool.

'Every instant has a thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.

Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level'.

Memory is a means by which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.

Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.

Objective and subjective visions of life - and death – come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.

Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.

A Valediction of Weeping.

Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.

Liminality

Numinous

Spiritual

Transendental

A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.

Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.

Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal.

The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.

I don't want to do anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.

Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana.

Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.

The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body.

Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.

Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.

Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.

Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. ( the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)

Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.

Studio Workings : Outpost/Drawing/Architectural Body.

Outpost 041024

Sensing Peripheries/Gestures and Acts. 

Trace Drawing

Body Outline/Material Flows.

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

A sudden quantum like jump between a thing and its parts, between its different scales, its ontological gap. In a way a whole is really another specific, not a generalization about a specific thing, this means that there is a 'weird gap' between the whole and the parts, an ontological gap.

Timothy Morton.

Architecture in the Space of Flows, 2012.

Andrew Ballantyne, Chris Smith explain that everything can be understood as functioning in terms of flows – flow of various kinds and scales make up architecture and connect it with the world. Here, a volatile mode of thought begins to proliferate architecture as a whole, rather than developing the thought in relation to the body or space in isolation.

The Extracorporeal Space.

Architecture in Abjection.

A visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject. 

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space that begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion).

The basic unit of study is body coupled with architectural surround. 

Arakawa and Gins.

You shouldn't force the memories. Just try to untangle them slowly.

I would suddenly have the feeling that a story was coming back to me and I would reach out instinctively to seize it. But there was nothing for me to hold. When I could no longer stand to stare at the blank page, I would type a, i, u, e, o, and then, imagining that I would now be able to write something, I would erase them again. But of course nothing came to me, and I would return to a, i, u, e, o. And the process would repeat itself. In the end, all that was left was a torn page, from the many times I'd erased what I'd written.

The Burning Library.

It may take a long time for every word to disappear, we held our breath as though fearful of disturbing this beautiful scene. 

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Ceramic Objects/Monumental vessels that explore contemporary society's relationship to death and ritual.

Abstractive figurative forms invite the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.

Stair's exhibition explores humanity's reliance on art as a means to transcend the unknown.

Themes of Containment/Embodiment.

Julian Stair : Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, 2023.

Developing explorations in which material culture and artistic practice can engender 'a new , expressive language to both mediate loss and celebrate life, Julian Stair'.

Francesca Woodman.

Gagosian, 2024.

Putri Tan: In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that , as you said, is the body. I'm never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she's holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it.

Corey Keller: There's both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, you don't quite know whether they're trapped or liberated. I think what's interesting about the work is it's never quiet only about the space and it's never quite only about the body, but it's about the psychological spark (tension) that ignites when those things intersect.

Architectural Body

Arakawa and Gins.

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

A bioscleave is an event-fabric within which all exists only tentatively, within which all is perpetually shifting, and within which architectural bodies form and collapse, here distinctions between body and space, subject and object are diluted. This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another.

I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man's death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now.

But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.. But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man's death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.

The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different-as though I were trying to glue a pebble I'd found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Brian Clarke : Glas/Derrida : Trans-illumination/Dwelling and the emotional, existential experience of things.

Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Brian Clarke is one of the most important artists working in stained glass. Since the early 1970s, he has collaborated with some of the world’s most prominent architects to create stained-glass designs and installations for hundreds of projects worldwide. He is also a painter of international repute, and has increasingly engaged, over the last two decades, in creating complete architectural spaces - total works of art - that integrate painting, sculpture, ceramic, glass, metalwork and mosaic.

Stained glass has been one of the most spectacular of the European arts for centuries, since its full development in the early Middle Ages. References to stained glass in England date from the 7th century, and by the 12th century it had become a sophisticated art form. The basic techniques used in medieval times have barely changed: pieces of coloured glass are held together in a framework of lead. Early stained glass was made by melting sand, potash and lime together in clay pots. It was coloured by the mixing of metallic oxides - copper for green, cobalt for blue, gold for red - and by the mid-16th century many colours were being used.

A key figure in keeping this magnificent art-form alive and relevant in modern times, Brian Clarke is at once a leader in new technology, and a brilliant aesthetic innovator. The works in this exhibition are at the very frontier of what it is possible to do with stained glass. Stained glass entered the artist’s consciousness early. As a boy, as he was just beginning to determine his commitment to art, he tells us that “I saw a stained glass window being installed in a church in Lancashire and it filled me with interest for the medium.” He went on to be a painter, but he never forgot this early experience, and by 1973, barely into his twenties, he began to work with glass.

This exhibition focuses on two bodies of work produced over recent years: his stained glass screens, begun in 2015, and his works in lead - a core element in the stained glass process - continually produced from 2007.

The relationship between these bodies of Clarke’s work and light is intrinsic. The contrasting relationships are clearly visible - the leaded works absorb the light and the stained glass lets light through. Glass is a super-cooled liquid. There is a fluid quality to this barely static matter, as the layers respond to the changing light. The sense of movement comes from the journey the light makes, creating an ever-changing environment for the spectator.

The artist has always been involved with modern architecture, and has collaborated with Norman Foster on a number of occasions. Because of this, it was decided that the best way to show the stained glass screens - and to celebrate the fortieth birthday of the Sainsbury Centre building - was to show them in the main space, among and around the Sainsbury Collection.

Night Orchids

Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together. The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke's recent work; mortality.

The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.

There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes - Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.

Robert Storr.

Francis Bacon

The Logic of Sensation Gilles Deleuze

Memento Mori

The inevitability of things.

The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.

Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.

Objective and subjective visions of life - and death - come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.

Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.

A Valediction of Weeping.

Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.

Liminality Numinous Spiritual Transendental

A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.

Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.

Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal. 

The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.

I don't want to do anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being. 

Brian Clarke, 2018.

UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.

Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana. Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.

The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body. Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.

Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.

Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.

Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. (the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)

Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modem art.

The use of memory as a conceptual tool.

'Every instant has a thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.

Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level'.

Memory is a means by which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.

Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.

Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor

I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material

Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.

The Interrupted Grid/Motifs

Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies

The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena

Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.

The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.

Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome. Grisaille

Pointillism Divisionism

Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thom Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends) The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.

Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.

Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.

An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making. The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead - a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline - into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Derrida, fragments GLAS

Derrida’s text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and families into unstable figures; their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual hierarchies.

Architectural Transformations, Old Buildings/New Designs.

Space is already structured (Deleuze), it is place that is the relational human praxis of space.

The Dehumanised Nature of Human Consciousness, Silke Panse. Screening Nature : Cinema beyond the human. 2013

Metaphor (as a spatial experience/sensation?) is itself a philosophical concept. Multiplicity and Memory : Talking about Architecture with Peter Zumthor. Six Memos for The New Millennium, Italo Calvino.

Interiors as book, poem, essay, philosophical treatise.

To define these spaces one needs decisive characteristics woven into the fabric of the building in its everyday function. These characteristics or spatial zones will define exact physical limits to be read or navigated as an experiential experience. These zones mark the outside limits or boundaries of layered experiences.

GLAS; Derrida, (a philosopher interested with the “between”) Gias in French means the death knell tolling of a bell. 

The methodology of reading.

Playful interrogations of the borders between philosophy and literary writing. “This anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature.”

Destabilising tactics through different typographical styles, formats and languages.

On The Lefthand Side.

Philosophy as expressed by Hegel, who believed that the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of absolute knowledge and its subsequent passing down through strictly controlled channels.

On The Righthand side.

Subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.

The experience of the text is its reading (like that of a collage) is that neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened up to the other column.

In each column, Derrida cites and grafts (what might these terms generate in architectural space) from Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s journal of the thief and his prose poetry.

GLAS; Has in fact a multiplicity (multiplicity and memory in architecture, Peter Zumthor) of author’s and their authority is always placed in doubt; in fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries that seek to divide it up inside itself. 

Peter Zumthor, interested in the authentic core of things, in emotions and imagining things and not theories. From the emotional/existential experience of things, Zumthor further embodies sensations of remembrance and memory into the fabric of his architecture.

Its fragments offer multiple beginnings and endings. Hegel’s Columns. (Heidegger)

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” spirals through dialogues of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis that is in tum interrogated by conflict and resolution (dwelling) until it comes to rest as an “ultimate harmony” presided over by “absolute reason”.

Genet’s Columns. (Winterson)

Metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles and dark labyrinths.

Derrida by placing both on the same page and in close proximity forces the reader to experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors that blossom up in explosions of meaning; from within the most rigorously unruffled philosophical prose.

Architecture on reality and living (dwelling)

Architecture can go too far in completing and controlling social space and influencing the politics of the everyday. Spatial practices are needed as a plastic and permeable social architecture that loosens and adapts the everyday from the imposition of both state and history. From these first speculative oppositions, architectural practice can be informed with the differences between the logic of design and the reality of place.

Red is not a colour/Filtered Light/Program/Tschumi/Sainsbury Centre.

 RODIN AND BEUYS

THE ALCHEMY OF BUILDING WORKING PRACTICES

RUINS, REDUCTIONS, and the LOSS of SUBSTANCE.

FRAGMENTS, ASSEMBLAGES and INTERIORS that re-enter the world of creativity.

The Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities.

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche Can one achieve architecture without resorting to ‘design’? What if, instead of designing a new building, you keep the one skated for demolition? How do you insert an original program inside the old and new structures simultaneously? How do you reconcile coherence with multiplicity? Bernard Tschumi 2012

 PROGRAM. Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 1999/2012 Architecture was no longer an autonomous and isolated discipline but participated in the movement and confrontation of ideas. Tschumi, Red Is Not A Color. 2012

Existential/Propositional Objectiles/ Spaces/In-Situ : Architecture/Photography/Installation

Objects exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, and in so doing they are inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.

Forsythe invites his students to participate in creating physical solutions to dramaturgic propositions. 

Erin Mannng.

Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia

Tate Modern

Millennium Bridge

VITRINES : Art Spaces/interiors/interventions
Anselm Kiefer :
In the Annenberg Courtyard
Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War
Anselm Kiefer often dedicates his works to intriguing figures of the past, be they poets or philosophers. This piece is one of a number of works emerging from Kiefer’s ongoing exploration of the Russian Futurist avant-garde writer, theorist and absurdist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922).

After years of study, Khlebnikov concluded that a major sea battle took place every 317 years, or multiples thereof. Kiefer celebrates this heroic and ludicrous activity with a work that is both monument and anti-monument. Measuring almost 17 metres in total and consisting of two large glass vitrines, Kiefer creates a transparent, reflective sea-scape in three dimensions that calls to mind the Romantic sublime of painters from JMW Turner to Caspar David Friedrich. Kiefer uses the frames of the vitrines to stage a mysterious drama, in which viewers, seeing each other and their own reflections, become participants.

Paul Soldner
Sainsbury Centre
University of East Anglia

















2017/2023

Brian Clarke : The Art of Light

Godfrey Reggio

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth

Friedrich Nietzsche

Water and Dreams

An essay on the imagination of matter

Gaston Bachelard 

Architecture was no longer an autonomous and isolated discipline but it now participated in the movement and confrontation of ideas.

Architecture In/Between

Bernard Tschumi 

Strategies Of Display : Relationscapes, Movement, Art, Philosophy

Research Material/Notes.
Outpost Studios, Norwich.

Parallel Texts, Interviews and Interventions about Art.
Victor Burgin

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
UEA Norwich
Holga Pinhole Camera


RELATIONSCAPES
Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning

Prelude : What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

AN
ANTHROPOLOGY
OF
LANDSCAPE
Christoper Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

Materiality
From our perspective in this book representations of landscape, textual or pictorial, are of secondary significance and we should treat them as such; they are selective and partial, and often highly ideological, ways of seeing and knowing.
It forms a material medium in which we dwell and move and think.
Redirecting the study of landscape from representation to the materially grounded messiness of everyday life and the minutiae of material practices that constitute it.
Landscapes are contested, untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making. Our landscapes of modernity are frequently on the move and peopled by diasporas and migrants of identity, people making homes in new places.

Field Observations
Spatial relations within the landscape are complex.
The manner in which persons and their bodies cannot be understood apart from the landscapes of which they are a part, reciprocally involved in forms of movement, action, awareness and social memory.
Embodied Identities
Art in and from the landscape
Fragile Environments : Nature and Culture

On Ways of Walking and Making Art
A personal reflection
M Collier
Making art is a practical application of phenomenology
Engaging  with an embodied experience of space and depth (what Merleau-Ponty called the 'flesh of the world').

WATERLOG
Journeys Around An Exhibition
Landscape and Memory

AFTER SEBALD
Essays and Illuminations
Edited by Jon Cook


INTERVAL


Transactive Memory
Systems Virtual Teams
The Body
Minds and Metaphors
Laban-CHOREUTICS

The Mind In The Cave
David Lewis-Williams

The Matter of The World
Minds and metaphors
Cathedrals of Intelligence
The 'Looking mind'

Information Processing and Performance in Traditional and Virtual Teams
The Role of Transactive Memory
Terri Griffith, Margaret A. Neale

Acquisition/Sharing of Implicit and Explicit Information

Organisations increasingly rely on teams to do much of the work traditionally accomplished by individuals.
Successful groups are those who are able to create synergies in the form of information aggregation and innovation that is beyond the ability of any single member.

Nascent Knowledge
Information Diversity
Task Conflict

The knowledge and perspectives of group members from the same social networks may be more redundant than diversified. However a total diversity among work group members is not desirable; some 'redundancy' (agreement in perspective) among group members is necessary to ensure enough common ground to facilitate successful group interaction.

Transactive Memory : Knowing and Accessing What We Know

For teams to have synergy they must be able to access their information, it is important to know who does what.
Wegner 1987; 1995)

RELATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
TIME
Synchronous/ Asynchronous
COMMUNICATION

Transactive Memory : A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind
Daniel M. Wegner

The study of transactive memory is concerned with the prediction of group (and individual) behaviour through an understanding of the manner in which groups process and structure information.

Individual Memory
Information is entered into memory at the encoding  stage, it resides in memory during a storage stage, and is bought back during the retrieval stage.

Organisation : differentiated/ integrated
Label
Location

THE LABAN SOURCEBOOK
Dick McCaw

Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) was a pioneer in dance and movement, who found a extraordinary range of application for his ideas; from industry to drama, education to therapy. Laban believed that you can understand about human beings by observing how they move, and devised two complimentary methods of notating the shape and quality of movements.

Diagram : Three Planes of Movement from Choreography
Inner and Outer Tension : Inner and Outer Form

CHOREUTICS : Principles of Dynamic Space and Movement

Choreutics presents the grammar and syntax of spatial form in movement and the nature of movement's harmonic content.

Effort
Exertion of Power, Physical or/and Mental

Force
Space
Time
Flight

Indulging/Contending
SPACE Flexible/Direct
WEIGHT Light/Strong
TIME Sustained/Quick
FLOW Free/Bound

Shadow Moves
An acute observer of Shadow Movement of a person in different situations and at different times will show the consistency of that individual's basic attitude and personality.

Effort and Recovery
Movement Psychology
Thinking
Intuiting
Sensing
Feeling