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.
