Overspilling Forms : Unnoticed Displacements/Tensions and Correlations~The Silent Transformations

 The Fluidity Of Life.

(or how one is already the other)

The notion of silent transformations encountered in the corner of a page. How will these unnoticed displacements, the silent transformations one day be considered.

Francois Jullien

The Silent Transformations

Things Superimposed~Dispositive~Spill

Overspilling Forms~Sympathy~Abject(ion)

Architecture In Abjection

Bodies, Spaces And Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar

Gaston Bachelard.

John Piper.

Lucio Fontana.

https://seagullbooks.org/products/the-silent-transformations

To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption—just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern—specifically Chinese—ways of thinking about time and processes of change.

Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought’s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, offers a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and provides insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.

In The Silent Transformations, Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy.

Ceramics and Architecture : Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

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Spatial Bodies~Environments :  Matter(s) of Interference

Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

Circulating Objects : Lines/Holloways.

Making~Journeys.

The items shown in the image are ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

These pieces are part of his exploratory, architectural-themed work. 

They are characterized by a processual nature that focuses on the imprint of the artist and the material itself. 

The sculptures often feature a raw, distressed finish, incorporating white paint and visible construction marks. 

Moreton's practice in these ceramics investigates themes of silence, architectural space, and the interconnectedness of interior spaces. 

The image displays a workspace cluttered with various documents, papers, and art-related materials, suggesting an environment dedicated to research, archival work, or artistic preparation.

Workspace Setting: The desk is heavily organized with stacks of papers, binders, and printed documents, which is characteristic of an academic, curatorial, or creative office space.

Artistic Materials: A large, black-and-white print or photographic work is prominently displayed on a board in the background, surrounded by smaller reference materials pinned to the wall.

Documentation: The presence of extensive paperwork and what appears to be exhibition or research documentation suggests the space is used for managing art projects, publications, or historical research.

Professional Environment: The overall composition implies a professional or semi-professional setting, likely related to art history, gallery management, or creative practice, where the physical handling of documents and visual references is central to daily work.

The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.

Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.

Theoretical objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.

The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.

Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.

Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.

The objects in the image are slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Technique: Hand-built using slab construction.

Style: The works are processual in nature, featuring raw, distressed finishes and architectural themes.

Inspiration: The artist's work often explores the interconnectedness of interior spaces, architectural settings, and the imprint of the maker.

Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.

Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.

Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity

If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.

Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.

The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.

Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.

Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies

The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.

Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.

Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013

Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.

Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.

Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.

Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.

Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance.

Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.

Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation.

London.

Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.

The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.

Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

 

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.

Time : Duration and Perception.

Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.

One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.

Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.

Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.

The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..

Steven Holl.

Hungate, Norwich. 

Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023

Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.

Clay Making. 

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.

Assemblages of movement : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies/Body Matters

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Parables for the Virtual.

Brian Massumi. 1985

When we think of space as 'extensive' as being measurable, divisible and composed of points plotting possible positions that objects may occupy, we are stopping the world in thought. We are thinking away its dynamic unity, the continuity of its movements. We are looking at only one dimension of reality.

If you know where you where you will end up when you begin, nothing happens tn the meantime.

Bergson redefined space in terms of movement, space is not a ground on which real motion is posited, rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself. Space comes into being through motion or event.

On Architectural Experience.

Architecture has the potential capacity on human/spatial bodies to affect or to be affected.

Relations of Movement and Rest.

The bodies capacity to enter into relations of movement and rest, to affect or to be affected.

Massumi/Spinoza/Deleuze.

Architecture still remains primarily as a discussion of distinct bodies, spatial and human with the two remaining physically and psychologically distinct.

Violated Bodies-Spaces.

Intense confrontations between body and space.

Tschumi allows for architecture to be considered as an assemblage, composed of a space and a bodily event, however, even his 'equation' retains a demarcation between spatial bodies and human bodies engaging in event and maintaining that the two function according to independent logics, but  serve to affect one another.

Bodies and spaces excrete out of themselves, they penetrate one another, contemporary architecture does not know what to do with such borderless entities. It has no mode of thinking about assemblages of this kind, where once discrete objects leak into one another creating indiscernible masses. There is a multiplicity of bodies, bodies that are forever being created and dismantled, forever in flux.

Architecture between Spectacle and Use.

Anthony Vidler. 2008

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

For Vidler this spectacle architecturre is one that embraces the ideas of image and iconomy.

In addition to carefully placing and posing lone figures within architectural photographs, architecture is also synonymous with casting idealised bodies, Le Corbusier's athelitic figures and his 'Modulor' of an ideal masculine body. And then there are the bodies available in computer models, and the physical little white plastic figurines. These are all ideal figures, doing proper things.

Disjunction.

Volatility-Violence.

Sets in motion a particular series of potentialities that otherwise lie dormant, which can alter architectures physical, social, cultural, ethical and at times political properties. 

Creating a schism between program and space, space and program, it does this so precisely because event-space and movement each follow a distinct logic, that when they are superimposed over one another they create disjunction.

For Tschumi there is an intense confrontation that occurs between body and space, bodies violate space and space violates bodies, the relationship between the two is symmetrical.

Wayfaring Forms : Living Architectures beyond Function.

 

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Living Architectures/Wayfaring.

Environments formed/experienced through Movement and Attention.

Lines.

Tim Ingold.

Numinous Odyssey : Raveningham

Spectral Affinities : Architectural Constellation

Processual Bodies.

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

Art's Use of Architecture: Place, Site and Setting.

Artists in 'Psycho Buildings' explore architecture's psyche, through the production of places, sites and settings, sites and settings, which engender spatial experiences that connect the viewer psychically, as well as perceptually and conceptually, to broader social issues and cultural phenomena.

Art and architecture are frequently differentiated in terms of their relationship to 'function' or 'use'. Unlike architecture, art may not be useful in pragmatic terms, for example in responding directly to social needs, providing shelter or somewhere in which to perform open-heart surgery, but we could say that art provides a place for other kinds of function – self-reflection, critical thinking and social change. If we consider this expanded version of the term function in relation to architecture, we realise that architecture is seldom given the opportunity to consider the construction of critical concepts and spatial relations as its most important purpose.

Jane Rendell.

Processes/Processual Thinking that constitute entities.

Moving Attentively In The Field of Material Structure.

The Itinerant Library of Excessive Tendencies.

Heterogeneous matter driven by disparate parts and elements of assembly.

Bricoleur Performing Practices.

Discursive Inquiry/Reading/Making.

Abjection flows between bodies, it never solely concerns one body.

For Kovar, when abjection is one of those processes, a very particular assemblage manifests itself. Where boundaries are disrupted, connections made and zones of proximity that are otherwise absent, are reached. Abject(ion) causes an inherent schism on the physical and psychological levels.

It opens bodies, to one another.

It opens up bodies for 'exchange'.

Such that they are in a perpetual process of being made and unmade, unfinished bodies.

It is precisely because abject(ion) is not only psychological but also physiological that it straddles both genders and is not solely reducible to the feminine. Abject(ion) is both feminine and masculine.

Assemblages of Event : Visual Art+Spatial Practices/Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies

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The Everyday.

ANTONIO  He misses not much.

SEBASTIAN  No, he doth but mistake the truth totally.

The Tempest.

The Transparency Of The Morning.

One never sees what is always seen.

The immediate, just like the simple, the natural and the ordinary, does not perceive itself.

Substances : Artworks, rituals of purity and impurity.

Demarcations/Systems/Fields of order and contravention.

Material Margins/Transitional  Spatial Spaces.

Knowing that this clarity which has sprung up will soon dissipate.

Morning coincides with the emergence, giving back a possibility of springing up, of rising before the day has started to spread out.

For Jullien, it is possible to gain access to it only as we gain access to the immediacy of the day from the night. A world in which living is not right away (in which respect metaphysics is correct) it is necessary to cause it to rise. But without again being concealed by whatever has been entrusted with revealing it.

Life, is devoted from the outset to what its 'end' might be (telos) in the full sense of the Greek word.

Telos, at once a conclusion, aim, perfection, abandoning all the preceding 'between of life' to indifference.

The Way- Without demarcation, rather a way of viability by which the continuum of life is renewed.

The Philosophy of Living.

Francois Jullien.

Developing Open Subjectivities/BwO : Visual Art, Winchester. 2006.

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

Bodies are conditioned by architectural surrounds.

Architectural Body.

Reversible Destiny. 

Arakawa and Gins.

The transformative body, creates bodily interiors/relations that can open up to become productive alliances in which using spatial bodies, (other than the ideal types) they can be brought into new affiliations with systems outside of their boundaries. 

Creating an affective intensity.

Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Relationscapes/Bodies/Events.

Organism-Person-Environment

Event-Space-Movement, superimposed over one another creates disjunction(Tschumi) and assemblages (Deleuze).

Drawing/Beginning a dialogue with matter/material between human bodies and spatial bodies.

Simple articulations (frottage) with the immensity and immediacy of the everyday.

Abstracted-Diagrammatic-Inhabitations.

Paintings/Drawings/Sculptures/Instalations.

Francis Bacon.

The Logic of Sensation. 1981, 2003.

Deleuze.

Reliquaries/Enclosures of Spatial Silences and of Light/Air.

A type of labyrinth with a momentary impossibility of escape (soul cages)  these are minoritarian architectures (Deleuze).

Real Spaces for Fictional Events.

A becoming architecture to provoke potentials to occur.

On the everyday, abjection of the human body.

The Clinic.

Bathrooms are spaces associated with the clean body and simultaneously with the dirty body. They are spaces that allow for hygienic evacuation of our excretions, they order our un-containment.

At the end of the day , the curtain is hung and there is a certain visceral repulsion to the damp curtain hanging in the window. To the drying of our bodily excretions and their gradual visual indiscernibility with the fabric. So no one knows what the fabric has absorbed.

All that remains is us, inhaling ourselves as air passes through the curtain and into our lungs. A re-absorption of our expulsions.

Zuzana Kovar.

The work of Deleuze and Guattari as a whole provides a way of approaching all bodies void of a dualistic framework. In particular for Kovar, Deleuze's work specifically touches on abject(ion) through his notion of an open and transformative or spasmodic body, which he discusses in the work of Francis Bacon.

Figure at a Washbasin. 1976

Francis Bacon.

Event-spaces in the paintings of Francis Bacon.

The Body-Figure/Figural-Event.

From the start, the figure has been a body and the body has a place within the enclosure of the painting from which the figure expels itself, gymnastically on the fields of colour. Is this the event of a body escaping itself into a figure, of the body in Deleuzean terms of trying to escape any notion of identity/form of repression?    

For Bacon, the body-figure exerts an intense motionless effort upon itself in order to escape down the blackness of the drain. This plexus (the body as plexus) its effort or waiting for a spasm, becomes for Bacon a painterly approximation of horror or abjection.

Paintings that create spasms that re-order the human organism, in order to escape it, by growing bodily organs as prostheses, or by allowing the enclosure of painterly space and contour to become an apparatus, an extension of the body-figure-figuration.  

The body waits to escape itself in a very precise manner, to escape itself via a spasm, the movement of the figure towards the material structure, towards the field of colour.

For Deleuze, the body repeatedly attempts to escape the organism, the particular organisation of organs that may be understood as constituting the subject the 'I', for Deleuze the body attempts to escape the 'I'. It is not 'I' who attempt to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of, a spasm. But the body is not simply waiting for something from the structure (its place is an enclosure), it is waiting for something inside itself. It exerts an effort upon itself in order to become a figure now it is inside the body that something is happening, the body is the source of movement.

Athleticism, The Logic of Sensation. Deleuze.

Elliptical Circulations

Studio Wall Spaces/Artist's Books.

Between 'Devices'

Documentation/Research/Reading/Places/Images

Interpolation/Interpolation/Interstitial. 

Sculpting In Time.

Tarkovsky.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

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

Making as an Ecological~Intimacy : Trace~Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

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Human Thicket : Matter(s) of Composition~Connectivity~Decay

Life Outside the Circle of Architecture.

A Hut of One's Own.

Ann Cline.

The Importance of The Hut in Contemporary Society.  

For Ann Cline the ostensible subject of this inquiry is the primitive hut, a one room structure built of common or rustic materials. She gracefully weaves together two stories: one of primitive huts in times of cultural transition, and another of diminutive structures in our own times of architectural transition. From these narrative strands emerges a deeper inquiry: What are the limits of architecture? What ghosts inhabit its edges? What does it mean to dwell outside it?

Of Huts.

An ecological intimacy, a return to veering towards both humans and nonhumans.

When we study attunement, we study something that has always been there, ecological intimacy, which is to say intimacy between humans and nonhumans violently repressed with violent result.

Tuning, Timothy Moreton.

Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces And Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

The Raveningham Projects.

On the nature of crafting sheltering social spaces.

Site specific experiences on making/building/using.

A primitive attunement/dwelling, a return to the affective power between things.

A creative site specific study on 'dwelling, occupancy, and  hosting' through studying speculative architecture with its boundary conditions and formative structures. 

Simple 'undesigned' places valued for their timelessness and authenticity.

Philosophia/Socrates.

Philosophical love of wisdom rather than the possession of it.

A Philosophy of Solitude.

In Defence of Sensuality.

John Cowper Powys.

The Mythical City of Orion.

Storytelling through ceramics and explorative site markings, this sculptural intervention plays with archaeology, ceramic artefacts, and astronomy.

Sensing Self/Marking Realities.

Trace Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

Territories/Borders/Boundaries.

Art-Workings.

Being able to work with and appreciate ambiguity.

An aesthetic timbre of the inter connective causal perceptual qualities of things.

You don't know why you should care about this, isn't that what we are all feeling when we experience something beautiful/wonderous.

Care/Love as an ambiguous spectral aesthetic around ethical decisions.

Being/All Art is Ecological, Timothy Morton

The Working Drawing.

Critical Body Contour/Outline.

The Fossil Line.

A primitive gestural drawing underpinning a Palaeolithic idea on an inter-connective, causal perceptual aesthetic force that invokes and engenders a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy.

Spectral Aesthetics, OOO. 

A line of energy flowing around the extremity of a formed space.

The reserve of a papers surface retains both its former presence and its continuing absence held captive simultaneously.

The Figurative/Experiential Flatness between seeing and sensing self.

The remembered, reconstituted spatial dimensions rendered attractively into volumetric flatness.  

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