An asperity of thoughts/Vibrant Matter : Braking Down/Diffracting/ The Apparatus of Reading/Research

250323

Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl

Building/Uncertainties into the explorations of making. Rem Koolhaas.

.

REVIEW into INTERIORS MA UCA 2013-15 Research into new forms of translation/transmission

MAKING vibrant gaps/assemblages between the texts/images/objects and everyday things LANDSCAPES OF AFFECTIVE AESTHETIC ATTRACTION

MATERIALS THEMSELVES become the TOOLS of PERCEPTION 

Enchantment from the potential of things.

The Fabric of thoughts

The invisible within the visible (energy,magic,causality)

RELATEDNESS, connected to the Place and Function of Things within a Field.

Texts, form their own contexts/reflexivity, breaking down phenomena into meaning, conclusions and critique, they render phenomena and its psychic information redundant.

We think we know how we should feel sociologically, yet in doing so we deny ourselves the direct affectiveness of people and objects that can provide different perceptual relationships.

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE=ECOLOGY Lygia Clark : A Space open to time. Cornelia H. Butler

The World is a Collage

Collage and montage are quintessential techniques in modem and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Hapticity and Time

Notes on a fragile Architecture

The Perception of the Environment Essay in Livelihood, dwelling and skill Tim Ingold

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception Madeline Schwartzman

STILLNESS IN A MOBILE WORLD Bissell, Fuller

ECOLOGICAL approaches/affordances to aesthetic perception ART and AESTHETIC PATTERNS : into an ecology of mind.

Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information that it contains. Camouflage is addressed, perhaps, less to architecture itself than to the subjective processes by which 

human beings experience architecture. Illustrated by the photographic practice of Francesca Woodman, we see her seemingly absorbed by her environment in way that shows a desire to both identify with, and become part of her surroundings.

A desire/transgression met and mediated through a certain sensitivity and openness to the environment, fostering a sense of connectivity between human beings and their environment.

Neil Leach

EXISTENCE, SPACE and ARCHITECTURE Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Developing the idea that architectural space may be understood as a concretization of environmental schemata or images, which form a necessary part of man's general orientation or 'being in the world.'

SUBSTANCES guide the kinds of practical actions that the organism senses from elements of the environment, creating affordances/utilities for the human body.

SURFACES separate substances from medium, the wall and roof of my house afford comfort by separating me from water and too much air.

AFFORDANCES as aesthetic sensations determined both by the environment and qualities we impose through observation, sensation and perception.

Without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible. The rational organization of society has its own Aesthetic Attraction

Symmetrical Patteming/redundancy : provides for the observing mind a maximum of insight with a minimum of intellectual effort.

Colour Light Time

Quintessentially relational phenomena in which location, background, density will provide for different perceptual relations.

Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

WORKING TEXT: 16/May/2020 The R Value in Academia

Reading/Reflexivity/Research with precision and indeterminacy 

Research Material : Studio/Archive 2004-2020

The Language of Specitivity/Places of Inquiry Extradisciplinary Investigations

Social Utilities/Contemporary Art Practices imported from Political Philosophy

The return of limited and ancillary projects where the human being is the fulcrum and the fire of research in replacement of the medium and the instrument.

A whole range of materials and topics that do not fit, that can create an eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields.

Arte Povera, an aesthetic-philosophical movement, artists that chose to live with direct experience and feel the necessity of leaving intact the value of the existence of things. An art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen.

Germano Celant 1940-2020 

Developing discursive reading 

WORKING DOCUMENT/LANDSCAPE LANDSCAPES/Thinking Spaces

Concepts of space-time/Ecologies, embodiments through identity, individuality and environments. Our universe is evolving in time as our views are evolving

RIVERS/Eddies and husbandry

(in/with the phenomena of water, thinking with the fish in mind) 

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being. SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

Architecture/Built Environments Ecology/Political Philosophy

Spatial Practice, Culture, Creativity and Environment

Diffractive erotics of the body in her speculative post studio practice 

Asperities of flesh, dirt and the built environment

Neil Leach, Camouflage, F Woodman

 

The Enchantment of Modem Life.

Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett

Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise

Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate David Childers, Heart In My Soul

Spatial Practice Interior Design

Building a precision/working praxis that is both aesthetic and technical that can give an intimate understanding of the material and its situation.

Subjectivities interwoven through light and media Asperities of fabric and texture : White Collaged Postcards

CREATING AN ANTHROPOLOGY TOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE DEVELOPING MATTER AND DESIRE IN ART BASED ACTIVITIES

WORKING NOTES, 24 October 2018

SETTING UP THE CRITICAL DISTANCE / DISCURSIVE FIELDS OF ANALYSIS MEASURING AFFECT

PERFORMATIVITY ITS EXPERIENTIAL QUALITIES/PSYCHIC IMPACT RESEARCH IN LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN Visiting the Archive : Exploratory Workshop

September 1, 2018. W&BA Harleston

CREATING THE FEEDBACK LOOP

BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN PARTICAPANTS AND ARTISTS RADICAL INTERVENTIONS INTO THE EVERYDAY

Walking and Making with Clay, Brockwood, Speculative Learning Program

' the clay itself seemed to absorb them into a wandering relation with the landscape' A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit.

In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty.

Tracks Across The Landscape

Setting up a critical spatial practice within the walking landscape of the everyday. Edward Thomas, Paths

John Piper, Covehithe, South Bank Show, painting/drawing both on site and in the studio. 

Watts Gallery, analysis and audit of activities from which to develop visitor programs and the experiential circulation of those who visit.

Melancholy and The Landscape, Jacky Bowring.

Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in the Landscape. Investigation into the creative membership and activities of W&BA.

Sculpture Trail, Curatorial Strategies/Market/Audiences

From newsletter to art themed walks, Historic Culture/Landscape and Tourism Plotting points of social interactions, asking Why Here, Why Not There?

What directs events, governs outcomes? Success and failures?

Management and event led, members as audience? MA Arts Management

New Cultural Diversities

10 Days at the Laundry, Winchester 2009.

Group of creatives based in and around Winchester School of Art, use of fallow site in which to respond and to create for 10 days a contemporary arts festival. This original event 'fused' new creative partnerships that went on to produce other groups and exhibitions. The follow-up event 10 Days in the City, was funded, had more prestigious venues, but lacked the cohesion and community of the first site.

Supplementary content, resources, dossier outlining the inquiry of which the work is a part. MOVING THE CULTURE

DISCURSIVE FIELDS FOR NEW TYPOLOGIES/OPERATIONS AND TACTICS CONCRETE POETRIES

LOWER GREEN, NORWICH

' At the surface, the gorgeous materiality of Okon's work is seductive but her intention to breach superficial readings is much more serious. This conjugation of material is also a conjuration, an earnest attempt to attempt to imagine and materialise new possible realities.'

Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology, Andreas Weber.

SITE SPECIFIC EMBODIMENT, working, making, discovering. Post Studio Practices, Daniel Buren. Deep Arts Ecology Investment and Nurturing, 'it always begins with the art, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 

The heavy, awkward investment of actually getting people to 'place' to participate is difficult. New technologies could offer solutions that could in turn promote innovative creative ecologies.

NEW TOPOLOGIES FOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE NETWORKS, MESHES, NODES, CONNECTIONS

Becoming embodied within the making of the work, within an intimate dwelling place. Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe.

Crafted Scenography, 

Exhibition, 

Visual Art, Tacita Dean

Shadowcatchers 

OUTPOST

STUDIO as a discursive site for un-doing and re-making relations/aesthetics between objects/the social/the everyday.

STUDIO ANALYSIS 2018-2020 21 September 2018-19 August 2020

Art School Spaces Outpost Studio Spaces Urban Fallow Institutional Buildings 

Open Plan Office Spaces

Studio 3.16, Central Norwich, nearby parking, Floor area/footprint 5.0mx5.0m, wall spaces 2x2.4mx5.0m, well lit, open plan, large making table 1.2mx2.4m. Electricity, small heater, lighting, running water WC, access 24/7.

Projects/Contexts bought into the studio space

Drawings/Southampton roof rubbing, drawings/art works as sociological shelters/habitats Immaterial Paintings/Cyanotype, layered papers

Raveningham sculpture elements from intervention Cley, sketch books and paintings

Re-presentation of drawings/collages with new research material/contexts

Paintings displayed with large analogue phonographic images and collages Architectural concerns, coloured glass, aesthetic surfaces, paintings with raw materials Installation of research bookcases as diffractive elements/spatial practice within the studio White paintings, used layers of paper texts, meshes and cloth

Ceramic objects on field paintings/grounds

Research material, folders, wrapped ceramics with fabric, yellow ochre on paper

Canvas painting, inclusions, shells/stones, cyanotype/yellow ochre, gesso/white paint, pierced 

STUDIO WORKS

Paper/canvas paintings 1.5mx2.4m Canvas re Raveningham Shelter, 2.4mx2.4m

Spray paint, large floor works left undisturbed during making Future proposals Cley 2021, Artpocket activities, Project Space,

WORKING NOTES

OUTPOST 12/09/2019

A Philosophy of Solitude

Hand Bookbinding

Lead/Waxed Paper

Art puts US on Display

Strange Tools

Art and Human Nature

The Politics of Things

The properties of Light

Fred Sandback/Luis Barragin

On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them Melancholy and the Landscape Process-Relational Philosophy

Jannis Kounellis

Christopher Wilmarth

The Ground of The Image

Sally Mann, The Flesh and The Spirit 

The Eyes Of the Skin

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

Raveningham/Trails and Wayfaring/ Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one's feet. J. G. Bennett.

Existing between the subjectivity between things.

You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.

Clouds and Clocks.

The project arises between a dialectic between the poetic and the systematic.

Between Science and Art.

The Embodiment of Minimal Gesture.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. 

Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Everyday Aesthetics : Ordinary Lives

What shall I do next?

Tim Ingold.

Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one's feet.

J. G. Bennett.

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who has looked at the interface between people and the environment. In The Perception of the Environment, he argues that ecological psychology and the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the world becomes  meaningful through active inhabitation, or 'dwelling', rather than cognitive representation. 

Curriculum Making : The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'

Tim Ingold 

Raveningham/Scripted Places

Garden/Ground/Circulation Diagrams.

Doing Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things/Walking/Listening to the wind 

Boundaries/in the making between the personal and the commonly shared.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'

Tim Ingold 2011

The Autonomy of The Natural Environment.

Sculpture/Playing with the existence of things.

Field Studies : Pathways around the Sun.

Drawing : Assemblage of Lightness and Weight.

Enmeshed Space : Working Drawing with Handwritten Notes.

Lawn Deliberations/Mappings of Human Agency/Space/Time.

Space projected from the body is biased towards the front and right.

The future is ahead and 'up.'

The past is behind and 'below.'

Time as a structure/place to observe things in constant motion/relation.

Drawing Site/Spiral Windings/Diagram/Spherical Markers

Terracotta, lime wash/lamp black/blackboard paint/chalk/ink

Ground Pegs/Labels/Text Markings/Archival Information

Points becoming lines, Tim Ingold.

Reading Matter/Rooms.

The Lake of The Mind.

Stochastic Thinking.

Steven Holl.

Raveningham : Site-specific project place

The Garden of Ongoing Differences.

Diffraction/Energy/Analysis/Attunement 

Site Cyanotypes/Drawings/Intermediaries

Spatial Collages Reconfigured  

Walking/Thinking with Ideas/Observations.

Site Drawings and Observational Mappings.

Cultivation Field.

The circle and square together embody what I think of as human nature.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

If the everyday can be considered an ecology where passions circulate in a perpetual state of intensification and entropic decline, the empirical self (and not just David Hume's version of it) is essentially in a state of flux. This posits the human as an organism constantly adjusting to its passionate environment, with a self that is constantly appearing and disappearing, crystallising and dissolving.

Ben Highmore

Rich Lyrical Motifs.

Brilliant Trees.

Within each lesson lies the price to learn.

David Sylvian. 

Artist's Development.

Planting Research

Vital Nourishment.

Raveningham Garden Project.

Circle/Linear Time/Centred on objects.

Spiral/Deep Time/Awareness between things.

Architectural Ceramics.

Inseminations/Sketchbooks

Cell/Seeds/Dispersal/Cloud

Organism-Person-Environment

Working Ideas/Proposals into Matter/Making

Contents/Description/Instructions/Diagram/Drawing

Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

Art is contemplation and must act upon our consciousness.

Objects/Things are part of the artist's immediate existence.

Contemplative experiences become truly meaningful when they occur in everyday life and when nirvana or the state of superior awareness blurs into samsara or ordered time.

For Tapies, repetition is above all else a perpetual questioning or a perpetual becoming.

A working process that is additive, which incorporates changes and accidents and as such his methods are hardly erasing anything that is already present on the canvas.  

A Summer's Work, Antoni Tapies.

The Garden/Material of/for Forking Paths.

The Diagram/The Program/The Inquiry

Marking Durations.

Ground Mappings.

Solar/Daylight Observed/Shadows Recorded 

A Garden Observatory/Philosophy of Silence/Solitude. 

Raveningham Sculpture Trail. 

Site Visit 160423

Sculptural Spacings and Sensual Engagements.

Showing Points/Lines/Vectors of Change/Movement.

Dwelling Demarcations/markers of temporality and disappearance. 

A poetics derived/driven from both the systematic and the small wonders of the everyday.

Circular Breathing/Cyclical Lines. 

The Peripheral Movement/Moment

The Space/Time between things.

The Concept of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

The Array, a phonographic inquiry recording transits of the suns pathways across the sky. 

Wanderings, caught up in the wanderlust of stillness and slowtime.

Paths of movement, paths of observation, paths of existential abstractions following daylight.

The artist's creative act of a self amongst others.

A sculptural deliberation that engages with the experiences of working a site in the landscape.

Curatorial.

Spatial Practice.

Practice/Display/Audience.

Of the mason's who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.

Tim Ingold 'Making'

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Camouflage offers  a mechanism of locating the self against the otherwise homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence. It thereby promotes a sense of attachment and connection to place.

Camouflage may  therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of traditional structures of belonging - the family, church and so on - has begun to break down. This aesthetic sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of belonging, such as religious devotion or romantic attachment.

Aesthetic  production should maintain the capacity  to operate as  a mediation between the self and the environment, but only aesthetic production whose design has been carefully  controlled can achieve this. The difference between productive and unproductive modes of expression is therefore a question of design. In this respect we can recognise the important social role of design in providing a form of connectivity for ‘cognitively  mapping an individual within the environment. 

Design becomes  a crucial consideration for the effective operation of camouflage.

In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their environment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.

The thing contained is not the thing contained.

Manifesto for explorations of 'IN'

Steven Holl.

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

Outpost 200623

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, 

Ceramic Deconstructions of Hidden Architectural Interiors : Spaces/Surfaces/Interiors on Solitude/Sensuality

Sensing Architecture : Movements of  Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Thinking/Making within gestures of drawing spatial speculation.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/53757637955/in/dateposted-public/

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold.

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.

Working Notes : Edmund de Waal : How the history of pottery and the philosophy of pottery has informed contemporary practice.

Working Notes: Edmund de Waal. 

Independent research for Studio Practice Theory and Analysis. 

UCA Farnham, MA Interiors. 2014.

Why does Edmund de Waal make architectural interventions through the arrangement of porcelain pots?

To what extent, if any is this Ceramist interested in the ability of the single pot to engender meaning?

How is the “innerness” of pots that he talks about so eloquently actually manifested in his architecturally staged installations and exhibitions?

Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramic Galleries 2009. 

During his career Edmund de Waal has moved from that of being a domestic potter to that of an installation artist.

His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. This site specific installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Central to Edmund de Waal’s practice is the concern to offer a ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, preservation and display of ceramics.’ (Graves,2009:8)

He has further explored the use of installations and vitrines in the pursuit of framing and underpinning these intellectual concerns. The use of purpose made structures, shelves and boxes adds the aesthetics of a tightly control clean minimalist style of presentation to his assembled collection of pots.

Interpretation and display are now central to these ‘grouped works’ that have become presented as ‘cargoes of pots’ that now seem at home in the collecting environment of the museum.

‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves,2009:8)

De Waal working with specific settings has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)

‘By altering the character of a known space, by intruding on areas within it that might not usually be associated with the display of art, the viewer’s awareness of both the changes and the space are heightened.’ (Graves,2009:10)

This methodology of display ultimately disappears as if it were never actually present, leaving the underlying fabric of the interior space as it were untouched, the impermanence of the work now resides only in its memory.

What remains of these sensing spaces (interiors) through spectacle, event and place? Proposal for the ceramics department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Site specific work in the new contemporary ceramics gallery that responded to the architecture of the space, and that could remain in place for years. An installation or feature that could remain in place and yet allow the gallery to function as a location for frequently changing displays and exhibitions.

De Waal’s response is Signs and Wonders ‘a lacquer red metal channel tracking the circumference of the dome and housing more than 400 of his pots; is an act both of daring and of breathtaking elegance and simplicity, a magisterial achievement on a scale surpassing anything he has previously undertaken.’ (Graves,2009:10)

Signs and Wonders is in reality a major contemporary architectural adaptation into the very fabric of the historical building. Its very reality creates a physical link between the past and the present, and it represents a long term commitment that began with the redevelopment of the ceramic galleries into the new Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.

Edmund de Waal’s Signs and Wonders is an iconic statement of intent for the Contemporary Ceramics Gallery, it underpins a new platform for the expanding territory of creative practice in ceramics. Signs and Wonders actively seeks to simulate new ways of seeing ceramics.

Architectural feature that comprises of some 425 thrown pots made of porcelain by Edmund de Waal and installed under the oculus of the great dome situated directly above the main entrance hall.

Edmund de Waal reflects on the vitrines that used to be found in the old ceramic galleries (room 137) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1970s.

‘Most of the vitrines were firmly policed into taxonomies of kiln or modeller or religion, less ’pseudo-scientific’ than a slightly desperate attempt to control the vastness of the collection. Some of the vitrines had the work of a single potter. All the pots by Hans Coper used to be in one mahogany case, huge early textured vessels shadowing the fine later Cycladic forms. They barely fitted.’(De Waal,2009:16)

De Waal’s memories of the old galleries in the 1970s was that they were an attempt to compare pots from different galleries, of the strangeness of seeing through one great case into another; the tops of a row of bottles cresting a line of dishes and the layering of one series of forms or colours onto another. And of course the fact that there were very few people.

Signs and Wonders; Edmund de Waal.

‘I have made an installation of pots for Gallery l41. There are 425 vessels made out of porcelain and they are placed on a red metal shelf that floats high up in the dome. You can just see it from the entrance hall through the square aperture in the coffered ceiling if you stand in one of the mosaic circles on the floor. It is called Signs and Wonders.’

I want to make this installation part of the fabric of the V&A. (De Waal,2009:20)

‘It began with the combination of a gesture of a pen and the plans to this austere bit of Edwardian architecture.’ (De Waal,2009:22)

The porcelain vessels are on a red shelf, the colour of lacquer.

The integrity of the shelf is upheld by being made from a proper material so as to form an accord with the historical architecture.

De Waal has experimented with placing porcelain on steel shelves and by having pots placed within lead lined boxes. He is aware of how these materials can form provocative combinations from their inherent densities.

The controlling presence of the vitrine is an intervention itself of its own display, (decommissioned mahogany vitrines from the V&A, illustrate the phenomenal weight of these enclosures)

De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modem era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists.

‘This is not a simple linear relationship, but part of a flow around into Modernism and back again. It is a perpetual rediscovery.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

On Pots Behind Glass:

The shadows of the stacked pots.

On the memory of objects, the afterimage, its distillation, and the blindness of looking away that gives it its form. What is left to be adapted or to be pared down through volume and angle into these new reflective forms?

Derrida on drawing from ‘blindness’. 

‘I wanted to work with objects that have been part of my life for 30 years, and to make sense of my memories of how pots lived in the galleries.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

‘Other sections, one run of bottles that are in different celadons for instance, are a memory of vessels from disparate parts of the ceramics collections brought into a taxonomic focus. This is the use of memory and the after-image as the intense holding of a form on the retina.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

In Heidegger’s work ‘not least in his use of etymologies, his writings are imbued with a sense of historicity; a sense of the passage of time, of destiny, and of the past as a reservoir of thinking available to contemporary life.’ (Sharr,2009:99)

The Architecture of Place :

Architects that were sensitive to site, dwelling, inhabitation and place. Form Making as a Response to Site and Inhabitation.

In The Ethical Function of Architecture 1997, Karsten Harries seeks to reclaim a sense of meaning in architecture that he feels has been lost to a scientific rationality. He sees ornament as being able to convey meaning by linking and reflecting stories and in so doing it gives us an appreciation of nature. This type of ornament has a poetic function in that it helps to locate people with their place and community.

Dalidor Vesely believes that architecture can manifest the attitudes of its builders, and that this can describe through the very fabric of the building the very thinking of the society that implemented its construction.

Vesely ‘explored what he considered to be the tensions between instrumental and communicative, or technological and creative, roles of architecture. He argued that these roles have become divided; a split which is recorded in the respective roles of architects and engineers. Vesely traces the historical origin of this division to that of mediaeval optics and the development of perspective; to the first attempts to privilege a scientific description of light over immediate experiences of the qualities of vision. This division is a crisis of representation, that that is displacing meaning in architecture from human experience to the visual qualities of surface and appearance.’ (Sharr,2009:103)

For Vesely, creativity remains the antidote to technology.

Zumthor shares with Heidegger in that he believes in architecture’s potential to evoke associations and invite meaning.

Regionalism, a critical dialogue with the site, a rapport between place and building as if it had always been there.

‘Stone and water are more than materials or phenomena for Zumthor; they’re also intellectual notions, traditions of thought with a long history.’ (Sharr,2009:104)

Critical Regionalism, see Kenneth Frampton, ‘Zumthor aligns himself with Frampton when he writes about a critical dialogue between his designs and their sites, unafraid to claim meaning from locality.’ (Sharr,2009:105)

Choreographing Experience.

Zumthor ‘I need time to create an atmosphere, I have to be careful about things otherwise I won’t have this atmosphere and the whole objective of my work somehow would be gone. That’s the way I work.’(Spier,2001:19)

‘Much of the installation uses memory in a different way to produce the blurred after­ image.’ (De Waal,2009:28)

De Waal cites the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto as being a revelatory influence on this notion of memory and the blurred after-image. In particular the series

‘Architecture’ which features blurred photographs of Modernist architecture. These images seemed to have the ability to take ‘you back to a particular moment standing in front of a particular building. It was that they seemed to be simultaneously images of a memory of place.’

Sugimoto ‘Architecture’ The German Pavilion from Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe. ‘A graduated run of whites into greys is a memory, for me, of the archive photographs of Bauhaus ceramics with their regimented attempt at teaching pottery by breaking forms down to component parts.’ 

(De Waal,2009:30)

Hans Coper builds up spatial interiors in his pots by using component parts thrown on the wheel.

The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson,2009:36)

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer 2009 

Procession, the choreography of light for the moving eye.

Iconic works of space in motion: The Perceptual Flow.

‘Related concepts relevant to architecture are found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom cinematic flow is a living rather than linear experience, achieved when film is stretched and lengthened by human memory and by images that evoke something significant beyond what we see before us, allowing time to flow out of the edges of a frame. ’(Tarkovsky, 1986:117)

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vais.

Donald Judd’s Untitled 1980.

Jean Nouvel’s Culture and Congress Centre 1999.

‘More important still to de Waal’s project is the way that Judd’s stacks use interval. These cantilevered boxes are literally, one thing after another; but they do not touch. Rather the positive steel and plastic elements are separated by negative spaces that are their exact equal in volume. The works operate according to a binary, on/off logic, suggesting temporal as well as spatial extension.’(Adamson,2009:40) see also 

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews: Chicago, 1967/1998.

Fried recognizes the durational aspect or dimension of minimalist sculpture, but condemned it for its “quasi-theatrical presence” that by occupying the time of the viewer this sculpture became mundane and everyday rather than transcendent.

Stacking is a way for de Waal to engage with the history of sculpture. It can be thought of as a compositional tool that suggests the storeroom, the kiln or a way of just putting pots together. Stacking produces a visual syntax through ‘exploring the formal and implicitly psychological relationships that pots can have with one another. ’(Adamson,2009:38)

Simultaneous Temporal Structures: Windows or Objects in Sequence.

‘Pictures in motion have long been exploited by Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, who describes his buildings as “scenographic” with routes composed along a series of camera angles and apertures.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

‘Another technique Tarkovsky employs to loosen time from any rigid progression is the directorial power to endow not only the entire film, but also its segments and even separate frames, with simultaneous temporal structures that are not unlike William’s “ice in March” or Viola’s “parallel times”.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

Steven Holl ‘movements are threaded rather than linear, pulled vaguely along by what Holl calls sequences of shifting and overlapping perspectives. Beckoning light draws the visitor onward step by step, and image by image, through a fragmentary rather than comprehensive narrative. (Plummer,2009:56)

Gianni Vattimo, Italian Philosopher.

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. 1991. 

Weak Ontology/Fragile Thought.

A latent learning under the safe light of the darkroom. The red pages of the signs and wonders catalogue links a narrative with spatial object of his installation by its colour, but it might also reflect the inner space of the photographic darkroom.

‘Light neither centres nor aligns space, as in the past, but appears in the periphery as a vague and marginal background event.’(Vattimo, 1991:85)

‘Filled with intricate constellations’: (Adamson,2009:34) Looking/seen from the oculus of the dome.

‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson,2009:34)

“When they are so high up they become blurred”

Rather than the object stranded on the plinth attempting to flag you down, if you place it elsewhere there is a feeling of possibility and latent discovery, similar to the feeling that you get if you are lucky enough to see the stores of the museum. 

(De Waal,2009:30)

In between spaces/stores and other latent spaces, re Mike Nelson, photographic darkroom between rooms. London 2007.

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919) Heidegger, The Jug, “gathering vessel”

“What is de Waal charting in these looping circles within circles?”

De Waal acknowledges the influence of Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Glenn Adamson remarks how the special qualities of the round perhaps thrown pot is itself both an object, brought into the being by the world and encircled by it. (Adamson,2009:34)

In so “being” the vessel brings its own order, a subjectivity that acts and takes dominion everywhere. This communion (spatial relation) between the vessel and its environment is further echoed in the lines of the poem “the wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild”(Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)

Signs and Wonders is about seeing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it/we gather our surroundings. This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.

‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated sherd, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44)

Temporal Zones/Re-Imagined Social Landscapes: Archaeology/Making : Pot Shard/Pottery.

See Tim Ingold the four A’s, Anthropology/Archaeology/Art and Architecture.

Working Notes : 26 February 2014

Theory and Analysis/Tutorial with Simon Olding CSC. 

COMPONENTS :

Essay 2000-3000 words and a research journal that informs the essay/texts. Interested in using this research to inform my “Object Analysis” and its exploratory  essay. 

The Object:

Ceramic Vessel made by Hans Coper.

A Level Ceramics at Farnham Sixth Form College. Workshop experience locally at the Hop Kiln Pottery, Farnham and at Grayshott Pottery. 

HND in Ceramics, Epsom School of Art and Design. 

Self employed and freelance as a ceramist until 1992.

Currently working with clay in a contemporary practice that includes Architecture, Fine Art and Performance.

Research Questions.

What “anthropological traces” remain within the vessel of the “Pot” 

What is its Symbol-Function-History.

How much of the artist’s social biography is caught up in its making. 

Does the object in question underscore a deeper humanity/ a visionary present. How does the craft of making affect the perceptions of our surroundings. 

The worn vessel/telluric values and the sensuality of humans.

Making: The Contemporary Craft Praxis. Research Texts.

Making, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of The Environment (Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill) Tim Ingold.

Heidegger for Architects, Adam Sharr. A Potters Book, Bernard Leach,

Hans Coper, Tony Birks/Contemporary Potters/Ceramic Review. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard.

Rethinking Materiality, Colin Renfrew. (At The Potters Wheel)

How Things Shape The Mind/A Theory of Material Engagement, Colin Renfrew.

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