Showing posts with label Tim Ingold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tim Ingold. Show all posts

Wednesday, 15 July 2026

Inside The Horizon : Terminus/Fields/Landscapes of Inquiry : A Spatial Practice/Between the Silence


We fly to the other side of space and of time.

Carlo Rovelli~Dante

White Holes. 2023




Terminus.

Taking form always begins with the terminus. 

The terminus is not an end point, but the energy of a beginning. 

The terminus kick-starts the process of articulation. 

There is no causal finitude here: 

We never know what becomes of a beginning.

The terminus is a force of thought towards articulation.

Erin Manning.


The Apparent Chaos of Stone (8.36)

Moonchild (5.40)

Travis and Fripp

Between the Silence.

Theo Travis : Alto Flute/Soprano Sax.

Robert Fripp : Guitar/Soundscapes


Outpost 010223


















A Spatial Practice.

Bring things to life, creative entanglements in a world of materials.

Art/Ontology/Education/Philosophy.


Creative practice is a meshwork of what shall I do next?

Tim Ingold.


Things in general, like the mind-leak.


Iteration, following the forces/flows.

Organism-Person-Environment

Gins/Arakawa.


Improvisation is to join with the work or to meld with it, one ventures from home on the thread of a tune.


Lines of Flight

Lines of Becoming

Critically these lines do not connect.


A line of becoming is not defined by the points it connects, or by the points that compose it.

On the contrary it passes between points, it comes up through the middle.

A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two.

It is the in-between, the line of flight running perpendicular to both.

Deleuze and Guattari.



Brockwood Teaching Academy. 

Back To Free School, Kilquhanity.


Curriculum Making, education for improved human-environment relations.


For to live we must dwell in the world, and to dwell we must already relate to its constituents.

Meaning inheres in these relationships.




Raveningham Sculptural Array

Solargraphy/Land Markings.


Performative Intraventions




Hungate 

Water

Site-specific research and artworks.


Water : A Phenomenal Lens

Steven Holl.


We start from the fluid character of the life process, wherein boundaries are sustained only thanks to the flow of materials across them.


Life is all about relations that hold a being in place, an erotic ecology of matter and desire.




Outpost Gallery

Mentorship Programme.

Sunday, 12 July 2026

Correspondences~Relational Fields : Other Affordances : Analogous Experience~Clay~Thinking

Clay~Making : The Analogous Atmosphere of  Experience.
Clay+Ceramic : Immersed in a self entertaining relational field.
Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation.

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?
Erin Manning. 

Poetics of Spatial~Small Gestures
For Bachelard : Reverberations~Conduits between philosophy~poetic writing relations of human and spatial bodies.
The artwork featured in the image is titled "Apparatuses: A Litany of Echoes~Resonances" by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 
Artist's Practice: Russell Moreton is a visual fine artist who explores themes surrounding "making," architectural space, and the interplay of materials like clay to demarcate and construct environments.
Materiality: His work frequently investigates the imprint of the artist and the metaphysical, immersive nature of his chosen media, often utilizing processes that evoke construction and the physical manipulation of materials.
Architectural Inspiration: Moreton is notably drawn to the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, often using his practice to engage with the concept of architecture as tranquility.

The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret. The significance of the hut.
"He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar."
Gaston Bachelard.

 
"All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency."
Jacques Monod,
The Human/Straw Dogs, John Gray.







AI Overview
This artwork is a sculptural assemblage by Russell Moreton, featuring ceramic vessels and forms. 
The work explores themes of reverberation, innerness, and volume through a processual approach to clay. 
Moreton's practice investigates the interconnection of making interior spaces, demarcating and folding material into spatial forms. 
These pieces are described as 'extreme atmospheres' or 'fired clay labyrinths,' utilizing textural surfaces and industrial-like perforations


CLAY/Propositions/Correspondences : Letting the material speak for itself/Technicity/Generative AI.

Claywork/Correspondences/Vibrant Matter : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Reading with Deleuze and Spinoza~Radical Intuitions : Interacting with clay.

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







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

"Claywork/Correspondences" explores how clay, as a material, and the resulting artforms, can reveal situated interactions between bodies and habitats, emphasizing the material and relational aspects of human-environment connections. 

Here's a deeper dive into the concept:

Clay as a Material of Connection:

Clay, being a natural material found in the earth, becomes a tangible link between humans and their environment. The act of working with clay, from gathering the raw material to shaping and firing it, involves a direct engagement with the earth and its processes. 

Correspondences and Situated Interactions:

The term "correspondences" suggests a relationship or connection between different things, in this case, the human body and the habitat. By examining claywork, we can understand how humans interact with their environment, how their bodies are shaped by their surroundings, and how these interactions are reflected in the art they create. 

Examples in Art and Culture:

Ceramics and Pottery: The creation of pottery and other ceramic objects demonstrates a deep connection to the earth and its resources. The process of shaping and firing clay involves a careful manipulation of the material, reflecting a knowledge of its properties and behavior. 

Figurines and Sculptures: Clay figurines and sculptures can offer insights into the beliefs, practices, and social structures of past cultures. The forms and materials used in these objects can reveal how people perceived themselves and their relationship with the natural world. 

Glazing and Decoration: The application of glazes and decorations on clay objects can further enhance the connection between the material and the artist's vision. Glazes, with their diverse colors and textures, can transform the raw material into a vibrant and expressive medium. 

Beyond the Object:

The study of claywork can extend beyond the object itself to encompass the broader context of human-environment interactions. By analyzing the materials, techniques, and cultural meanings associated with clay, we can gain a deeper understanding of how humans have shaped and been shaped by their environments. 

Mind and material engagement | Phenomenology and the Cognitive ...

1 Dec 2018 — The preferred analytical convention is to break the line's cognitive life into pieces: first by separating ourselves fro...


Springer

Clays and the Origin of Life: The Experiments - PMC

In our view, the most promising theory to explain the origin of life is centered around the interaction of active sites on clay mi...

PubMed Central

Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness ...

But there is a key difference: in contrast to the map, Indigenous human life on land is omitted. However, three small figures can ...


British Art Studies

Generative AI is experimental.



Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

The Becoming of Continuity/Relations.

In/Out of Material, Tony Cragg.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The Ways/Movements of Practice.

Ceramics In The Environment.








Clay, is always a working idea, a matter/material process between things, a form of thinking in process.

The Durational Time of Play/A Lure For Feeling.


You don't need a choreographer to dance, what you need is a choreographic proposition. Propositions are ontogenetic, they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience. For Manning what else is an associated milieu but a cornfield for crafting of the as yet unthought, where the microperceptual meet to create new movements in the making.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning, Always More Than One, Individuation's Dance. 2013.










https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton


Crucible Bowls. 2020.

Slab Facades. 2021.

Rutile/Yellow Ochre/Red Iron Oxide/White Raku Slip/Transparent Raw Glaze.


The Moon Tower, Nina Hole. 2000.

The Watchdog, Michel Kuipers. 1990.


Intertwinining Thinking and Making.

Painting in Form of a Bowl.

Quietus, Cinerary Jars.

The Vessel/The Human Body.

Volumes/Voids


Clare Twomey.

Tony Cragg.

Eduardo Chillida.

Paul Soldner.

Julian Stair.

Bryan Newman.

Gordon Baldwin.

Hans Coper.

Lygia Clark.

Richard Hirsch.

Edmund de Waal.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Steven Holl.



Ceramic vessels and surfaces  for a reflective solitude, an architecture of light,silence and innerness.

Spaces between Objects/Things/Making, Giorgio Morandi.



The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.


Volume And Space.


Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, 'Man Pointing,' is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.


Paintings of nothing, ceramic, raw material, dry pigment, wax.


With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.


The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.


Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.





Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.


Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.


The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.


Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.


Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold. 


Urban Spaces, palimpsest, impressions, traces, ecologies, redundancies.


Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.


The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Affordances of Things.


Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.


Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.


Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.


An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.



Matter and materials are lively and require attention. 

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.


Aleatory, by chance, lots of the 'acts' of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.


In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.


All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.


Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.


A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, understood by the physical phenomenon of an energy or force as it flows across an obstacle. Diffraction is the process of ongoing differences, and ass such it can be used as a tool for analysis, as it attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Karen Barad.


Areas Of Presentation and Participation.

Historic and Social Sites, Art Venues and Exhibitions.

Making Theoretical Objects, Installations and Interventions.


Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.


“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.


Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.


The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry' He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.


With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.


Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  



The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.


Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.


Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.


Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.


Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.


Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.


Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.


Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.


Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture.

How to build your own.

Beginning.

Model Making.


We will begin practising by constructing a room and covering it with a simple dome or a vault.


Once a person has constructed a model, within hours, he or she is encouraged to learn and understand more. The knowledge thus gained will trigger quests in building with earth. It is possible to learn the basics of thousands of years of earth architecture within a day if it is taught in the simplest terms, and  if all our senses are involved in the learning process. 

Nader Khalili.


Re-imagining learning, workshop session, conducted and initiated a walk across a landscape with clay being actively manipulated by a number of participants as they engaged with the material, their bodies and the landscape.


Beach firing at St. Ninian's Scotland, experimental kiln and site built reduction pits excavated from the beach. Pots fired and reduced with found materials, then washed in the Irish Sea.


Hans Coper, essay on professional practice, including his architectural ceramics. 

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.


Sectional Works.

Slab Constructions.

Plasterwork, Pressmoulding.


Working with materials/substances/drawing and traces of making.


Raku, engobes, slips, oxides, templates, spray diffuser, stencils, fabric inclusions, intermediaries, Indentations, found objects, ferric chloride,  

Reduction materials, woodland branches through shredder.

Clay body additives, molochites, mica, vermiculite. other material,


Clay Tools : Block Strips and Combs.


Sound Vessels.

Capacitors/Insulators.

Passive, encapsulated layers.

Architectural Slab Works.


Ceramic and gesso/whitewashed/waxed/painted/bound/surfaces and structures.


The Chapel Of St.Ignatius.

House, Black Swan Theory.

Steven Holl.

Nail Collector's House, New York.

White plaster walls, hickory floors, and cartridge brass siding nailed in pattern over a wood frame, create a tactile weathering for this structure, a poetic reinterpretation of the industrial history of the site and the pre-Civil War architecture of Essex.


The jewel-like Chapel of St. Ignatius contains the essence of Holl's vision, his interest in the phenomenology of space, his passionate investigations of form and material, and his use of reflected light and colour.


The angst of a concept before spatial definition, interior and exterior are simultaneously explored.


The largest 'tilt-up' slab weighs 80,000 pounds and is filled with reinforcing steel. Its greatest stress is during the lift.


Working from the specific towards the universal.

The Built and The Unbuilt.

A theory of architecture that is mutable and unpredictable.

The body as a theoretical object doing/architecture (architecting its situatedness, Oren Lieberman)



Friday, 3 July 2026

Makings~Silent transformations~translations from the continuous weather-world.

Translations~Places of Inquiry.

Interactions and correspondences wayfaring through the weather-world of clay and texts.

Continuous Readings~Translations : Weathering and the Passage of Air.


14 Weather-world.
'Can man live elsewhere than in air?' asked the philosopher Luce Irigaray.


The Life Of Lines.
Tim Ingold.











Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is interested in developing collaborative and speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.

A site-based practice that further develops into speculative learning, creative propositions for knowledge production through Spatial Practices.

Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material further develops his inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased.

His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.

Assemble forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.

For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His finished fired constructions could become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s).

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham. Spatial Practices MA, Canterbury School of Architecture. Visual Art BA Hons, Winchester School of Art. Ceramics HSND, Epsom School of Art and Design.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton

Wayfaring Notes: Material Flows Between Form and Emptiness : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

Tim Ingold engages with Deleuze and Guattari by adopting their concepts of "assemblage" (agencement) and "lines of becoming" to emphasize a relational, process-oriented ontology. He translates their abstract philosophical ideas into a "meshwork" of walking, weaving, and storytelling, focusing on how life is lived along lines rather than between fixed points. 

Academia.edu





Key aspects of Ingold’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari include:

Meshwork vs. Network: Ingold contrasts the "network" (connected points) with the "meshwork" (interlaced lines of growth and movement), highlighting how beings and materials constantly emerge and change through interaction.

Lines of Becoming: He interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s "becoming-animal/plant/molecular" as a process of world-making, where individuals are not static beings but are constantly in flux, "becoming with" their environments.

Wayfaring: Ingold uses the concept of "wayfaring" to represent life as a continuous movement or trajectory, aligning with the philosophical notion of navigating lines rather than occupying pre-defined positions.

Critique of Hylomorphism: He draws on their ideas to reject the traditional view that form is imposed upon passive matter (hylomorphism), arguing instead for an understanding of form-generation that emerges from the material flow. 

Ingold’s work often merges these perspectives with other thinkers like Gibson, focusing on how organisms and materials are entangled within their environments, creating a "topologically fluid" space. 



Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.


Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres.
Ceramic Building Technologies.
Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.









Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.
Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.
Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.


The Vessel.
Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics.


Human Interest.
Explorations into the human form and human nature.

Beyond The Vessel.
Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel.

Earthly Inspirations.
Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay.

Surface Pleasures.
The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.








Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry.


A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

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

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where
“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

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



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

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



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

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.
The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

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

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

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?
Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

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

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

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

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel.
Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

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

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea1983)

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.

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)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things.
A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino1996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10)

The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:11)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modern 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something.
The Abstract to The Concrete.
Architectural Experiences.
Anthropomorphic Qualities.
The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects.
Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes?

This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.
Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002
The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit 2002)

The pagan life that St Augustine (born 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)



Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?




Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, a kind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, W.H. Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into a “fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces.

Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.


Ceramics are like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasmaa“ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’.The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.