The Inner Room~Clay/Jug and the Primacy of Being : The Potter and The Philosopher, Coper/Heidegger.

15 March 2015

UCA Farnham.

Working Notes. Visuals and Text

Extracts from Waverley Project/Research Folder, MA Interior Design.

Clay and the Primacy of Being

The Potter and The Philosopher

Innerness and Defined Space

Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.

Ceramic Assemblage : White Spaces/The Patina of Objects.

The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),

Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

Brian Clarke, Stained Glass, Sainsbury Centre.

The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.

The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.

Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951

Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”¹

Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.

Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.

This almost vocational unfinished architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”²

Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.

Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”³

As recorded in his most architectural writings.

The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971

Being and Time 1927/1962

Art and Space 1971/1973

“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”⁴

Building locates human existence,

Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”⁵

This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.

Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”⁶

Heidegger on Thinking,

The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.

Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.⁷

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.

Influences on the “fourfold”

Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.

Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.

Friedrich Holderlin/poet.

George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.

Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.

Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?

Waverley Project 2014.

Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.

In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki

Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.

Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the

effect of light, or through attention to details.⁸

Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.

“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)⁹

This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.

Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.

On building a house. Ingold.

“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”¹⁰

Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)

Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”¹¹

It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”

For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.¹²

Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.

The pot like the building participates in daily life.

This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.

In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.

Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.

“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”¹³

Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)¹⁴

Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.

Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.

Clay and the Primacy of Being.

Studio Spaces.

The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.

For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.¹⁵

Notes:

1 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects.

2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7

5 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 9

6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10

7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30

8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65

9 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1⁰ Tim Ingold. Making. 59

1¹ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1² Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1³ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 43

1⁴ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 45

1⁵ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 71


Wallace Stevens :  Anecdote of the Jar/Vessel takes dominion/Edmund de Waal

Related 

Jackie Leven ; Clay Jug (The Mystery of Love is greater than The Mystery of Death)

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

Atemwende, a breathturn : Adam Gopnik and Edmund de Waal

Craft and Art : Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)

Ceramics and Architecture.

Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment

The Porcelain Rooms

The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience of possessed space.

These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

‘ The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.

‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.

The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.

The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.

Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots.Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)

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

Innerness~Interior : Hans Coper and the Egyptian Vessel/Wallace Stevens 'Anecdote of the Jar'.

Innerness and Interior : Surface Pleasures

In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?

Theory and Analysis. Russell Moreton

Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. 2015

This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.

In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?

Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.

This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)

A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.

Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘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.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.

There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.

‘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)

Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)

Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)

The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?

Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.

I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)

Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.

‘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 shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.

Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.

Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.

The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.

Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.

His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.

Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)

Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)

In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)

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. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing 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 helps us to gather in our surroundings.

‘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) 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 Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘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)

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.

His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?

Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.

Rebecca 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 post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern 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)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.