Drawing/Situatedness and Site : John Berger, simultaneously a now and an elsewhere

Drawing has the ability to hold complexities separate enough so as to be read, yet drawings also merge into a perceptive unity marked by a sensation or realisation of intuitive nowness authentically caught in the tension of the line.

John Berger’s definition of what a drawing might contain when it is simultaneously viewed as both a now and an elsewhere, marks for me a threshold of encountering space­ time, we are passing through as we perceive our very consciousness. 

I sometimes think of these drawings as sites, containing both physical and playful evidence of explorations. The cyanotype process captures objects and turns them into “inclusions” or vessels that might induce an interesting dialogue, a buried association or simply a stage for thought. I feel the objects recorded are the result of an assemblage of thoughts/interests close at hand driven into the visual through an expediency (working with light and time) and an aesthetic that contains my sense of materiality from which to nurture a creative subjectivity. Strangely it is this aesthetic that just keeps things separate enough but which still makes things actively conspiratorial. It appears to be able to render things in isolation and then bring them together. It is as if the intuition that comes from working and theorising within an art practice is placed into the realm of things, off loaded, detached, and orphaned to make its own way in the world. 

Link Gallery.

Forum Notes, 27 March 2010

Site is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.1 

Art Practitioner with earlier experience in ceramics and glass, recently completed visual arts course at Winchester, now at Canterbury completing MA course in spatial practices. Working mainly on drawing, photography and architectural interventions/ installations that explore our sense and experience of place. 

My work explores a philosophical inquiry into the need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences.

The use of materials from the locality (field chalk) implies a personal geography drawn from the direct relationship to an inherited Earth. There is the suggestion that the absence recorded by the trace is an inclusion, a legacy set into a field of materiality, but it might also suggest a metaphysical field of thought. 

This act of drawing becomes its own experimental field of exploration, a sort of “in-between reality’’/Maurice Merleau-Ponty) an enmeshed experience. Thought of and read as a material memory encountering the realm of the insubstantial.

This “undoing of place” might instigate a threshold and a situation/room from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

This work and others like it attempt to articulate an interest in the body as both a physicality ( social, spatial and per formative presence ) and a poetic surface in architectural space.

Influences, Myth of Butades, origin of drawing, Pliny

Interested in the inscription ( a surface inscribed, written or carved as a formal or permanent record ) of a presence, a trace that reveals an origin of feelings/gestures centred around the body.

Inscription brings with it a notion of performativity, that of body and place, and their interaction, situation and experience. This spatial activity renders a sense of a material memory surfaced by place.

Tacita Dean, Drawings are more than just visual therapy, they speak of collective experiences and dilemmas that trouble humanity.

This simple work gathers-up an intimate social inscription on a surface, a playful act to then associate natural material.

Drawing is the primal means of symbolic communication which predates and embraces writing, and as such it functions as a tool of conceptualization parallel with language.

Drawings offer a partial comprehended rumination of the mind, Avis Newman. Drawing, becomes a sort of dwelling amongst an intimate comer of oneself, perhaps even a site for the solitude for the imagination. Gaston Bachelard comments in the Poetics of Space that a corner in a room can become “a symbol of solitude."

Drawing like walking becomes a form of thinking. This thinking is further articulated and accompanied by the intrinsic qualities of substances and liquids that are placed in proximity so as to be encountered.

My use of chalk as a materiality, emblematic of a solidity, a localised material and a metaphor of a inherited and compressed layering of time. The whiteness of this found material draws associations with the surface of the paper, there similarities’ also render there material differences. The inclusion of wax onto the surface was an attempt to seal a sense of a reflective surface, a surface amongst the work that might accommodate the light and nowness of place. Any drawing is a static object, but contains the trace of actions, traces carried out in time. Perhaps this drawing is registering itself into a language of matter.

1  Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place, a Philosophical History. (London: University of California Press, 1998) page 186.

ARTISTS CV/STATEMENT re INTERNATIONAL BOSPHORUS ART BIENNALE, ISTANBUL 2011.

RUSSELL MORETON 

Visual artist/maker of dwelling spaces.

Spatial Practices MA Canterbury UK.

Visual Fine Art BA hons Winchester UK 

Contemporary Crafts Sculpture Waterlooville UK 

Ceramics HSND Epsom UK

June 2011 Artist Statement/Outline of Interests.

Visual artist working with alternative photographic processes, clay and architectural glass. The current practice continues to explore themes and realities around the contemporary human condition. The exploration of these interests is predominately developed through drawing and traces of actual objects and performative gestures referencing the body as a site amongst the layering of material and data. The use in some works of site specificity and materials drawn from the location are used to further underpin a sense of engagement and dwelling. The resultant drawings with their traces of agency and exactitude, lightness and ambiguous multiplicities seem like a compression of a filmic substrate, a material memory brought to the surface. These personal consolations of working practice are initiating thoughts centred on building architectural spaces, from which to register and response to a sense of serenity and enchantment amongst the scripting of materials in spatial/social dialogues.

Astronomy, Science, Natural History, Architectural Spaces, Stained Glass, Early photographic Processes, Ceramics, Anthropology, Craft Disciplines, Theatre, Film, Arte Povera, Contemporary Art Practice/Research/Philosophy/Exploration.

IMAGE, PANSPERMIA 2010 Added notes.

This work began as a performative drawing between the touch and tact of its maker, marking a personal and intimate involvement with both the corporeality of the female body and a loved one. This fragile union and fecundity is expressed by the photograms of “elderflower seedheads” left as evidence within the territory of the body/vessel. The personal intimate space of these initial acts and gestures are shifted against infinite space of the known universe. The title stems from speculation that life might have been introduced onto a fertile Earth from spores from space. Interestingly having dwelled with these initial thoughts, I feel that perhaps the work augurs an exodus at some point in the future.

Russell Moreton

CHAPEL ARTS, ARTISTS OPEN STUDIO AND TALK

TALKING AROUND A TABLE OF DRAWINGS

THE WORKING SPACE AS INSTALLATION

THE SPATIAL PRACTICE OF RUSSELL MORETON

Objects or vessels that might induce an interesting dialogue a stage for a future event or trajectory. I feel the objects are the result of an assembly of thoughts driven into the visual through an expediency and an aesthetic that just keeps things separate yet somehow they remain actively conspiratorial. It is all about the intuition that comes from working and theorising with and within an art practice.

The intension of the “charting table” (8x4 ply sheet on builders trestles) was to allow the subject of practice together with my activities to become visible, and in so doing create a public sense of speculation around the material on show. The spatial agenda would be addressed, bought into being as it were by the exposure and placement of objects, tables and projections into the main reception area at UCA Canterbury. It is hoped that the curiosity of some will solicit the interest of others and thereby create the unfolding of an event; the projection could be a real time monitor of the charting table. I am beginning to view the show as an exhibition/event around working practices, but unfortunately the sense of site dominates my practices situatedness. Conceived as a contingent/speculative intervention into the normal running of this space as a reception area. 

Resident artist will host an “open studio” at Chapel Arts Studios on 2 December. The chapel will be open from 12.30 onwards to view an installation and other material. The “talk around a table of drawings” will commence at around 6.45 pm.

Earlier training in ceramics and stained glass together with extensive experience in the construction industry are now being utilised in my contemporary practice.

My current spatial practice, is centred around a multi disciplinary approach underpinned by “drawing” to critical issues of site. This activity could be understood as an investigative creativity amongst the phenomenological aspects of architectural place and the potentials of producing working spaces/sites for the reflection of others. The working practice currently employs the use of clay, glass and photographic processes. The practice is informed by interests in astronomy, architectural space, theatre and anthropology.

The use of “site” as a working drawing from which to create a temporary intervention into place helps to instigate a threshold, a room or event from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

Anima-Animus : Winchester Cathedral/10 Days in the City

‘When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction’ Jung.

Russell Moreton uses analogue film processes that inquiry into both the surface and the materiality of the photographic image. He was invited by Helena Eflerova and Kye Wilson to document the filming process of Anima-Animus. He uses 35mm and medium format cameras together with a number of pinhole type cameras. In using historical processes like cyanotype and light sensitive silver gelatine, he explores the relationship of the image to its supporting surface. A number of his images are heavily worked in the darkroom to exploit differences between the seduction of the photographic surface and its actual physical presence altered by chemical and physical interventions. His work echoes themes around the body and the architectural spaces of institutions and beliefs.

Hidden Curriculum/Assemblages : Synergies of creative practice

“When building and art are jointly focused in joint search not of an image, but of a mood, they cannot fail to produce integrity, even if they don't produce great art."

Brian Clarke, Glass In The Environment Conference, held at the RCA, London 1986.

UCA Canterbury :  Postgraduate School 2010

My current spatial practice is centred around a multi disciplinary approach through "drawing" to critical issues of site. This activity could be understood as an investigative creativity amongst the phenomenological aspects of architectural place and the potentials of producing working spaces/sites for the reflection of others. The practice informs specific sensibilities and my intuitions through concise and simple trace strategies; promoting a sense of material memory and knowledge which becomes enmeshed with the human condition. These resultant trace strategies, drawings are open, active and present in-situ where they become vessels for placed geographies, maps around human relations.

The use of site as a working drawing from which to create a temporary intervention into place helps to instigate a threshold, a room or event from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

Previous working sites have used the agencies of natural light, water and clay in long durational works realised by installation, performative drawing and elemental photographic apparatuses and processes (pinhole cameras/cyanotypes).My practice continues to employ simple indexical strategies to promote the possibility of a spatial "open text" from which to render transparency and superimpose a charismatic sense of nowness with an awareness of a duration of place.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Land Drawing : Layered Canvas, Gesso, Yellow Ochre on Paper.

Hidden Curriculum, teaching intervention in the library of Brockwood Park School.

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand in the chapel of rest, Andover.

Fossil Worlds, human outline with cyanotype, field chalk and Jurassic earth materials.

My practice is an inquiry into the realms of both architecture (built and social) and fine art based methodologies of making/thinking and presentation. Although my working methods and processes are informed by a number of theoretical and philosophical sources and interests, it is however the simple wonder of things and phenomena that can be brought into new forms of expression that I find wonderous and challenging.

 A Philosophy of Solitude

John Cowper Powys

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

ASSEMBLAGE:

An assemblage is any number of "things" or pieces of "things" gathered into a single context. An assemblage can bring about any number of "effects"—aesthetic, machinic, productive, destructive, consumptive, informatic, etc. Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the book provides a number of insights into this loosely defined term:

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of the substantive. On side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects what it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity... Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. (3-4)

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

Maternal Body : Clay Impression and Fragmented Form installed at Chapel Arts, Andover

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand in the chapel of rest.

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. 

A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.

Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency 2009

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.

My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions. 

Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.