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

Sensing Architecture : Movements of  Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Thinking/Making within gestures of drawing spatial speculation.

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

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

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.

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)

Water at Hungate : Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

 Outpost 130723

Hungate Installation of Works.

Making Material into Paths-Of-Difference.

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

Working Fables/Visual Aphorisms.

The Poetics of The Pragmatic.

The Multivalence of Metaphor.

A series of three follies to accommodate the family, the on-site guardhouse and an art gallery.

Private Estate, Montana, USA, 1991.

I opted to be a fabulist rather than an ideologist because fables retain the ring of immutability long after ideologies have wilted.

Emilio's Folly as well as offering a figurative and allegorical manifesto of its author's idiosyncrasies, is also a catalogue of the metaphors that recur in his architecture: water and the earth, the house with a Mediterranean patio, subterranean architecture and the descent towards the depths. Emilio's island of folly tranforms the eighteenth century penchant for picturesque aesthetics into the narrative frame of a passage describing a private garden and in constructing a design image,  envisages a miniature theatre of memory in which the mechanism of memory is analysed and forgetfulness suspended.

Passing from the canopy at the entrance to the twilight glimmer of the misty cavity offers a didactic description of memory elaborated through cognition's subterranean strata, while simultaneously testifying to the hopes associated with the act of designing, evading paralysis by memory's repetition compulsion.

Fulvio Irace.

My work is a search for giving architectural forms to primal things: being born, being in love, and dying. They have to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level. I understand  architecture as the search for a spiritual abode. On the one hand, I am playing with pragmatic elements that come from my time, such as technology. On the other hand, I am proposing a certain mode of existence that is an alternative, a new one.

Emilio Ambasz.

Anyway, to come back to the story, yes, water plays an important role in what I do because it doesn't have a shape of its own; that is to say, it does have indeed have an immense power of its own, but the shape it adopts is the shape of the container you give it. To me water is important it can be nebulized.  I have used fog many times to evoke the presence of a building which isn't there, and its presence becomes very strong when the sun creates a rainbow. It cools you or warms you if you make those clouds of mist.

I use fog and its indeterminate form maybe because I am a prisoner of my time and afraid of making definitive statements. I seek to make statements which are constantly being reformulated. 

I always say there are two ways to cast a shadow: one is as a tree and the other as a cloud. I think that I chose to be a cloud.

Interview, Emilio Ambasz, Emerging Nature.

Working with the the force of a relational environment, expressing thought as an incipient movement being  articulated through sensation. 

Indexical Traces/The Flux of Processual Drawing.

Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

Bringing potential relations into actual experience.

Experiential experiments/proposals/inquiry expressing the force/nature of a relational environment.

Resonances that modulate her body, her own becoming, movement in tandem with the environment moving.

Hortus Conclusus, Centre Pompidou. 1989.

You always have the sense that behind the walls of these projects are absent presences or present absences. The notion of that which is in front of you and what happens behind the wall has always appealed to me. There is a certain anima or spirit behind the wall.

Emilio Ambasz.

The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and it is also the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity. 

Michel Foucault.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

The Art Of Colleagueship

It is a shared curiosity that ties individual creative actions into a dialogue of immanence. A special feature of which is the willingness of the participants to temporary suspend judgement so as to seriously entertain the open potential of our discoveries. That nothing occurs in a vacuum is an idea which is particularly true of human actions. So while the art of pure inquiry is uniquely individual, it does not take place in isolation.

Certainly the pure void of concept beckons the curious, and the unique motive for a pure inquiry of a pure subject is curiosity and the desire to know.

The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject-all that is out there-and the pure potential of the individual perceiver-all that is in here. Where the strength (clarity) of this inquiry lies is in its single motive-the desire to know.

What is key here is that certain ideas (possibilities) are immanent at particular moments. That in each time and place there exists a unique body of shared experiences, knowledge, and need, that marks our moment in time, and from which all inquiry steps off. Merleau-Ponty, in writing about the work of Cezanne, reflected that art may have an advantage over philosophy as a speculative thought form in that it has at once a tactile and a cerebral dimension.

Robert Irwin.

Hungate Group  Exhibition 'Water' 2023.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His  use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.

Spatial Practices/Apparatuses/Events : The Scriptorium : Collage, Architecture and Blueprints.

A HUT WITHIN THE INFLUENCE AND NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE

The tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental condition and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow.

Juhani Pallasmaa. Hapticity and Time.

Notes on Fragile Architecture. 2000

Contemporary artists aim to produce specific relations with the technologies they adopt and adapt;
This schematic offers a partial taxonomy.
Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium : Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art 2006

Immersive
the "cave" paradigm, the virtual helmet, the black-box video, the earphone set

Alienated
taking technology and "making it strange," exaggerating attributes to provoke shock, using technologies to switch senses or induce disorientation

Interrogative
work that repurposes  or remakes devices to enhance their insidious or wondrous properties; available data translated into sensible systems

Residual
work that holds on to an earlier technology, repurposes or even fetishizes an abandoned one

Resistant
work that refuses to use marketed technologies for their stated purpose; work that pushes viewers to reject technologies or subvert them

Adaptive
work that takes up technologies and extends or applies them for creative purposes, producing new subjects for the technologies in question 

Domain-Court-Cell : Research Collages, UCA Interior Design MA

02/10/21



https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24401545681/in/datepost

Architectural Abstracts/The Works Subject/Conceptual Resonance

 

Outpost 070723

On The Plane of Feeling.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Individual Human Experience. 

We Are Moved To Think.

Incipient Expressions.

Feeling-with is a force for thought.

A work creates a force for rethinking as much as a force for the experience of sensation's relays towards prearticulation.

One work can have many dynamic forms, many concepts, many feelings or thoughts.

The artist is not the subject, rather prearticulation is.

The Work's Subject

Is Its Dynamic Form

Its Valuation

Its Conceptual Resonance

Its Diagram.

Activating new parameters for thought.

The force of feeling-things becoming into existence.

To posit a subject for feeling means, engaging with the creative from the outside. This taking form is less the formation of a concrete identity than the culmination and residue of a process.

The Work creates its own subject, its subject is the force of becoming it proposes.

Feeling is power's compulsion of composition.

Whitehead 1929/1978.

The compulsion to compose is an aesthetic drive, a will towards sensation, a will to power-feeling.

Becoming-Bodies Feel-With The World.

Amanda Baggs feels-the-world. Watch her reading a book, she touches it, puts her face into it, listens to the pages rustling, smells it, looks at it. Through her the book becomes conjunctive, valued within a complex responsive environment. By culling the bookness from the book, Baggs makes the field of its musicality felt, its texture, its force of becoming not only as an object to be read but as a relation to be lived.

By feeling the book, Baggs brings the book into relation with a force of prearticulation that exceeds the book-as object.

Erin Manning.

Concepts appear/manifest-themselves as forces of expression in its incipiency.

The Multiple Sense Of Concepts.

There is no event,

No phenomena,

Word,

or Thought 

Which Does Not Have Multiple Sense.

A thing has many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it.

Deleuze. 1993.

Concepts value the rhythmic pressure of feeling/thinking with the work/world.

The concept is a gear-shift mechanism that acts on blocks of sensation, oscillating between thought and articulation, it pulsates between the actual and virtual realms. On the virtual stratum concepts propel the becoming event of thought, they feel its force of creation. On the plane of composition concepts articulate the dynamic form of prearticulation, they express the feeling of force.

The theoretical object as a concept to express the force and feeling of inquiry.

The Stick Thing, Canterbury School of Architecture/Spatial Practice/Oren Lieberman. 2009.

Robert Irwin

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

2011/2017.

Editor's Note to the Reader.

Beatrice Hohenegger.

The fact that so many manuscripts have until now remained unpublished reinforces Irwin's characterization of his writing as motivated not by communication or publication, but rather by a desire to examine and clarify core questions that he was pursuing at key moments in his career.

Introduction 

Irwin's Writing.

Matthew Simms.

In a statement published in 1998, Robert Irwin emphasized that his essays, were not written in order to communicate, I am a visual artist, not a writer, or to refute criticism, writing was for me a means to examine the questions that were turning in my head concerning the 'why' of art, with the intention of clarifying the process of making. Together, they reflect relatively well the development of my thinking and the guiding idea of my work: the potential of each person to perceive the surrounding world from a unique aesthetic perspective. 

Notes toward a Conditional Art brings together for the first time Irwin's published and unpublished writings. While the texts span a wide range from letters to project proposals, the vast majority are personal ruminations, sometimes set down in draft form and other times worked up into fully developed essays. They cover a diverse conceptual terrain including, among other things, Irwin's philosophy of teaching, the lessons of modern art, and the artist's understanding of art as a form of pure inquiry. Above all, this book makes clear that starting in the 1960s and continuing up to the present, writing has been and remains an integral element of Irwin's multifaceted art practice.

White Washed Spaces:

Hungate/Water.

Provisional Objects/Architectures.

Porous Fired Clay-Drawings as Spaces.

Thinned Gesso, Sanded/Abraded Surfaces.

Lead  Sheet/Glaze/Slip/Batt Wash/Opal Glass.

Compositional Tilt-up Pieces/Vessels.

Figural Body/Water on Chinese Paper.

Hybrid Body-Trace Drawing.

Indian Ink/Cyanotype Process.

Mounted/Inter-hanging/Canvas/Screen Mesh.

White Conduit/Nylon Line.

Re-Visiting The Human Outline.

Chinese Paper/Thinned Gesso/Wax/Lime

On The Plane Of Feeling.

We are moved to think through a conceptual unfolding a reaching towards-expression.

Through feeling, thought begins to take form as a conceptual force.

The complex interplay of the transversal passage between thought-concept-articulation-

For Whitehead, feeling is the pulsion that transduces thoughts into becoming concepts.

Feeling is a pulsion to think, a sensitivity that situates thought in the world. Through feeling, thought's affective tonality is foregrounded.

Affective tone is an environmental resonance of a  feeling-in-action, as a vibrantile force that makes a resonant milieu felt. (The Hungate, Norwich, Propositional Workings)

Feeling Is Affect Bleeding Into Thought.

Activating complexities on the verge of expression. At the threshold of thought as creation, feeling provokes an aperture for that which has not been thought.

Thought is a lure for feeling that prearcticulates the virtual inflections of its incipient expression.

Feeling-with is not without thought, it is a force for thought.

Making Statements/Making Things : Hungate/Anglian Potters.

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits . Erin Manning.

Architectural slab built pieces investigate ceramic forms as a dwelling place or a model for a building construction. Some thrown shapes on the theme of crucibles fired by the Raku process. Recent work has been exhibited in historical sites and locations, exploring contexts of ceramics and rituals. Studied Ceramics at Epsom School of Art and Design UCA, Visual Fine Art at Winchester, Teaching at Brockwood Park School.

Anglian Potters

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

Water at Hungate.

Hungate Architectural Explorations. 

Air/Place/Breath/Light/Architecture/Ritual/Social Space

Cell-Court-Domain.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.

Blue and Gray Paintings/Drawings on Glass : CELL COURT DOMAIN FIELDS

Pattern and Chaos/Liminality/Tectonics
Architectural surface for a Library,  raw materials, light, silence and solitude. 


Subjectivity and The Instant
The Numinous

In the last decades of the twentieth Century, philosophy witnessed a marked preoccupation with the discontinuous and the disruptive.
Translator's Preface, Eileen Rizo-Patron.
Intuition of the Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

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

Experimental Vision : Alchemy and the experimental fields of photography

https://russellmoreton.tumblr.com/post/189388625662/experimental-vision-research-collage-1-by

Drawing/Mapping : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

Lightness
Quickness
Exactitude
Visibility
Multiplicity
CONSISTENCY/Guattari
The Three Ecologies

Italo Calvino
Six Memos for  the Next Millennium

Reaserch Collage/Interior Design

Life Drawing/Fine Art

Stained Glass/Architectural Art

Life Drawing/Fine Art

Montage/Photography

Layered Drawings : Architectural Screens/Modulations of Translucency

Space Between People

How the virtual changes physical architecture
Stephan Doesinger

This book shows how the virtual has completely changed the physical world around us. If architecture is the construction of space between people, what happens when that space exists in a virtual world? That question is the starting point for this collection of revolutionary projects by a new generation of designers. The book begins by examining the important issues that have emerged as technology reshapes our idea of place and proceeds to present the four winning projects from the first architecture competition held within the explosively popular Internet community known as Second Life. Chosen for their inventiveness and aesthetic excellence, these structures - a cloud that can be inhabited; a meta-museum; an interactive sound scape; and a snow palace of discarded objects - illustrate the mindbending possibilities of digital design. In the books final section, media artists share their real-time experiences conceptualizing and creating projects for the virtual world.


Non Spaces/Digital Still Image : Fire escape Winchester School of Art

Meshworks/Norwich, moving analogue source : Midway/Dante
Beginning as one always does in the middle, in mediis rebus, one experiences a sense of disorientation, a sort of cartographic anxiety or spatial perplexity that appears to be part of our fundamental being-in-the-world. It is an experience not unlike that of Dante, in the opening lines of his Commedia:

Midway along the journey of our life,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

( Dante 1984 : 67)
Introduction : Spatiality .
Robert T. Tally Jr.
the New Critical Idiom, Routledge 2013

Art as Spatial Practice.
Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Sensuality, Drawing and Astronomical Space.
Architectural Translucency (Tracing Layers)
DSC_8860 Pavilion : Borderlands

Andreas Horlitz : Simulacrum. 2006

Brian Clarke : Lamina. 2005