Showing posts with label anthropological. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthropological. Show all posts

Saturday, 7 February 2026

A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Outpost 310323


A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing








Matters of Concern/Fact.

Drawing/Contingency/Sensing/Seeing

Drawing away from descriptive depictions that illustrate preconceptions/aesthetics.


Julian Stair.

Quietus. 2012.

The Vessel.

Death and The Human Body.


There is an alchemy to making ceramics. We take an inert material, fashion it, dry it and expose it to heat and flame. The practice of cremation, of exposing the body to fire, going through an alchemical change, echoes and parallels the process of firing.

Julian Stair.


The materials he works, lead and clay are dense, both physically and emotionally. But Stair's use of these materials is not representational. These objects do not depict or illustrate, instead they enact and embody.


Stair's achievement in this cyclical exhibition is to have expressed both the universality and the specificity of death, each as an aspect of the other.


The great hand-thrown jars that stand at the heart of the exhibition exemplify this doubleness. Though completely abstract, they exist at the scale of the body. They invite a tactile response, visitors might stroke the ridges circumscribing the jars or tap them, or even give them a gentle hug.

Glenn Adamson.



Life drawing on the psychology of  nakedness and the human body in contemporary art.

Life-Class/Anatomy/Pathology.






The practical and theoretical problems of the confrontation with the human form.

Georg Eisler.


Herbert Boeckl.

His nudes speak a physical language, interpreting life and death in terms of human bodies, of functioning muscle and bone and the tactile aspects of flesh, and the knowledge of what lies beneath/behind it. 


Alfred Hrdlicka. 

A Group. 1973.

Proximity does not read as intimacy, the entangled naked bodies convey a sense of insecurity.

The Posed/Nakedness/Social Scrutiny.

The Life-Class.

Isabel Bradshaw/Michael Grimshaw


Drawings/Sculpted lines that bring sensations onto the surface of the paper.

Lines of Movement/Vectors

Lines of Static Forms/Boundaries


Mark-making, rendering the spatialities of the human form.

Form-Movement

Mass-Volume

Skin-Surface






Line is only the visual interpretation of an extremity of a volume. Mark-making on a drawing becomes a conduit for a sensation of seeing others.


The concept of anthropomorphism is central to the identity of pottery. We use bodily terms such as a neck, shoulder, hip and foot to describe the constituent parts of a pot. And the very nature of the vessel as a container, a holder of things, is analogous to the idea of the body as physical container for the soul or spirit.

Julian Stair.



Monday, 16 May 2022

Postmodern : Contested Landscapes for Melancholy



Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

Melancholy And The Landscape
Locating Sadness, Memory And Reflection In The Landscape
Jacky Bowrin

Path : Analogue Film Process
St Catherine's Hill, Winchester

Anthrocene : Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Skeleton Tree.
Walberswick :  Beach Slides/Digital Pinhole

Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape
Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:
 Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

Landscape : Entanglements of Affect

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging
Pinhole Photography (Holga)

Landscape : Entanglements of Affect/Aesthetics

Nihilistic Aesthetic :  Bleached Cyanotype