Hortus Conclusus~The Troubled Hospitality of Interiorities 2026 : A Serious Place, Peter Zumthor on sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

Interiority/Atmosphere

The hortus conclusus is revisited not as a model of enclosed harmony, but as a situated body through which the troubled relations of shelter, difference, alienation and atmospheric openness become available for further spatial inquiry.

The important continuity is that the earlier material already understands place as something cultivated through sensory and material relations. The later matrix does not replace that understanding; it makes its tensions more explicit. Hospitality becomes more rigorous when it can accommodate alienation, and interiority becomes more generative when enclosure is understood as a condition continually negotiated through other bodies.

For Moreton, the key conceptual shift is from the earth as something that binds people to place towards earth~clay as a body through which place, making and belonging are continually negotiated. It brings in his earlier pastoral research into direct correspondence with his ceramic practice without making his ceramics a representation of the garden.

Reading Material (Waverley Project) 

Developing  a continuous argument about the hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity. 

Felt Relations~Sympathy : What things feel when they shape each other.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond.

Philipp Schorch, Martin Saxer, Marlen Elders.

In The Gathering Shadows of Material Things.

Tim Ingold.

The Sympathy of Things.

Lars Spuybroek

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

Original research material from Interiors UCA Farnham 2014.

With a refined selection of materials, Zumthor creates a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. In doing so, he emphasises the role that the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The garden is enclosed on all sides yet open to the sky: an architectural setting that offers both protection and openness. Zumthor describes such spaces as "sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

For Zumthor, the garden is more than a collection of plants. Every species evokes distinct memories of light, smell, sound, and touch. Gardens become places where sensory experience and memory are inseparable:

"Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

He continues by describing the garden as the most intimate form of landscape:

"A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The enclosed garden becomes a sanctuary—a small protected world held within a larger landscape. As Zumthor observes, "something small has found sanctuary within something big" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The medieval illustration Orchard from the Bible of Wenceslaus IV (Austrian National Library, Vienna) visualises this idea through the illuminated depiction of husbandry and communal labour within the secure enclosure of a walled garden. The image presents pastoral work as both productive and contemplative, echoing Zumthor's conception of the hortus conclusus as a protected space where cultivation, community, and intimacy converge.

Working with one's hands, cultivating the earth within sheltered spaces, becomes a shared pastoral practice that binds people to place.

Zumthor reinforces this pastoral character by placing a pavilion at the centre of the garden. He imagines it as a place for future gatherings and quiet contemplation, anticipating "the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves" (Zumthor 2011: 15). The garden is therefore experienced not only visually but through the full range of the senses.

Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck similarly evokes an intimate relationship between landscape and human experience. The taste of wine becomes inseparable from the soil that produced it; earth and wine are of the same substance, united by locality and landscape.

Alexander Kluge develops a related idea in Gardens Are Like Wells, suggesting that every person possesses an "enclosed garden"—an inner space of reflection that exists regardless of one's outward life.

He writes that monasteries in medieval Europe functioned as wells in which "the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith." At the heart of these monasteries lay an enclosed garden, where the finest plants and medicinal herbs were cultivated (Kluge 2011: 19).

Significantly, Kluge argues that these gardens existed outside the ordinary routines of monastic life. They were timeless places, dedicated to the Virgin Mary while remaining open to classical and alternative traditions, including Homer, Ovid, and the Gnostics. The enclosed garden therefore became a place where literature, contemplation, and spirituality could coexist. It represents an interiority capable of uniting mind and perception amid the complexity of contemporary life.

Kluge concludes that civilisation requires spaces that remain outside systems of production and utility:

"Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety." (Kluge 2011: 21)

This sentiment resonates with Richard Sennett's assertion that "we need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning." Such spaces provide opportunities for reflection, remembrance, and emotional renewal beyond the demands of everyday life.

The Development Company for Television Programmes (DCTP), in Gardens of Information, also adopts the emblem of the hortus conclusus. Here, the enclosed garden symbolises the relationship between barren landscapes and places of meaning. Their ambition is "to rescue facts from human indifference" and "to make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information" (Kluge 2011: 21). The garden becomes a metaphor for transforming fragmented knowledge into coherent and meaningful experience.

This understanding connects with ideas of spatial practice in the twenty-first century. Rather than forming relationships through abstract systems, institutions, or grand narratives, meaning emerges through inclusive practices rooted in particular places. The hortus conclusus can therefore be understood as a model of concentrated identity—an inquiry, a person, or a practice held within an intimate setting where thought, making, and community come together.

Keywords:

hortus conclusus, spatial situatedness, diffraction, hospitality, alienation, atmosphere, inhuman touch, withdrawn ceramic, permeable chamber, ceramic interiority, interiority, sensory experience, Peter Zumthor, Alexander Kluge, Tim Ingold, material correspondence, material persistence, heuristic inquiry, form~~forming, spatial propositions,

Reading Apparatus as Atmosphere/Interiority

Indexical~Sensate Bodies as visual participants through which that matrix becomes active. This preserves a useful distinction: the matrix describes the movements of correspondence; the images and ceramics are not examples of those movements but bodies that make them possible to encounter.

Hortus Conclusus ~ Indexical Bodies ~ Diffractive Hospitality

The hortus conclusus returns as a situated body of inquiry, encountered now through other indexical~sensate bodies. The garden's earlier propositions of enclosure, cultivation, intimacy and care are neither preserved unchanged nor displaced. They are diffracted through material encounters in which bodily presence becomes uncertain, surfaces retain traces of contact, and interiors emerge through relations between bodies.

In the dispersed figure, petals, pigment and linear marks trouble the body's apparent limits. Organic matter becomes detached from its originating body, entering another material arrangement. Presence persists through dispersal; the body remains perceptible while becoming unfamiliar to itself. In the perforated ceramic bodies, enclosure acquires another condition. Weathered surfaces retain the traces of making, while apertures and the interval between forms allow a chamber to emerge through proximity rather than containment.

Hospitality becomes inseparable from this troubling of bodily identity. To receive another body is not necessarily to assimilate it, nor to guarantee its belonging. The hosted body may remain unfamiliar, resistant or only partially available. Alienation therefore does not simply oppose hospitality; it marks the difference that hospitality must encounter without resolving. Diffraction keeps these relations active, allowing the garden, the image, the ceramic and the reading body to enter correspondence without converging upon a single account of interiority.

Atmosphere emerges through this correspondence as a sensate condition of material and spatial exchange. It gathers through surfaces, apertures, colour, light, organic traces, proximity and the movements of attention. The interior is no longer understood solely as a protected space within an enclosing boundary. It becomes a provisional condition continually produced and troubled through relations with other bodies.

The hortus conclusus is thus revisited not as an image of enclosed harmony, but as a persistent spatial proposition. Its questions of shelter and intimacy remain in play, acquiring further capacities through bodies that disperse, receive, resist and endure. What persists is not a completed meaning of the garden, but the possibility of encountering its relations otherwise.

Indexical and Sensate Bodies.

What kinds of bodies can gather a place, and what forms of alienation must remain possible for that gathering to stay open?

Hortus Conclusus ~ The Troubled Hospitality of Interiorities 2026.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere: A Situated Spatial Inquiry

1. The sheltered place and its conditions of hospitality

The hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, offers an early proposition within Russell Moreton’s developing spatial practice. In the earlier Interiors MA material, the garden is approached as a place of sensory experience, contemplation, cultivation and spatial identity. Drawing upon Peter Zumthor’s account of sheltered places of intimacy, the enclosed garden establishes a particular relation between protection and openness: it gathers a world within boundaries while remaining open to the sky, to light, weather and the movement of living things.

The garden is consequently more than an architectural enclosure. It is a sensate gathering in which material, memory, cultivation and bodily attention become implicated in the experience of place. Its intimacy emerges through the particularity of relations between soil, plants, light, smell, sound and human activity. The garden becomes a place through the ongoing correspondence of bodies and conditions rather than through enclosure alone.

Alexander Kluge’s account of the enclosed garden as a space of reflection beyond ordinary utility extends this proposition. The garden offers a form of interiority that cannot be fully assimilated into the demands of production or instrumental purpose. Its significance lies partly in sustaining a space whose value cannot be exhausted by what it produces or how efficiently it functions.

Read through Moreton’s later spatial matrix, however, the sheltered garden becomes a more troubling proposition. What does it mean to offer shelter? Which bodies can enter? What remains outside? How does the intimacy of an enclosed place depend upon the differences it gathers, excludes or renders less perceptible?

These questions do not invalidate the garden as a hospitable space. They make hospitality more consequential. The enclosed garden becomes a situated body whose capacity to shelter is inseparable from the boundaries through which its interiority is established.

2. Diffraction ~ the difference within enclosure

Diffraction introduces a way of understanding the garden beyond the opposition between enclosed interior and open exterior. The wall does not simply divide two already constituted spaces. It participates in establishing their differences, regulating passage and shaping the conditions through which bodies encounter one another.

The garden’s enclosure produces intimacy by distinguishing an interior from its surroundings. Yet this distinction is never absolute. The sky remains present above the walls; light, air, weather and seasonal transformations enter into the garden’s conditions. Plants extend through growth, decay and reproduction, while cultivation brings human gestures into relations with material processes that cannot be fully controlled.

The garden is therefore neither entirely separate from its environment nor simply continuous with it. Its interiority emerges through a relation that simultaneously gathers and differentiates.

Diffraction allows this relation to be understood without treating difference as a problem that must be resolved. The sheltered interior and the surrounding world remain distinct, but their distinction becomes consequential through the ways they affect one another.

Within Moreton’s spatial inquiry, this operation extends to the withdrawn ceramic body. Its surface establishes a material boundary, while its apertures and spatial relations trouble the apparent completeness of that boundary. As with the enclosed garden, interiority is not simply a pre-existing space contained by a body. It is produced through the relations that establish and unsettle enclosure.

The garden and the ceramic thus become different but corresponding spatial bodies. Neither is reducible to the other, yet both make it possible to investigate how a boundary can shelter while remaining exposed to relations beyond itself.

3. Hospitality ~ the intimacy of shelter

Hospitality names the conditions through which a place gathers and sustains bodies. In the hortus conclusus, shelter offers protection and the possibility of remaining. Cultivation requires care; intimacy develops through duration, repetition and attention to the particularities of living matter. The garden is hospitable not simply because it is enclosed, but because its conditions allow relations to be maintained.

The earlier material’s emphasis on shared cultivation is important here. Working with the hands becomes a practice through which people and place are brought into correspondence. The garden is not merely an image of intimacy; it is a condition of activity, care and material engagement.

Yet hospitality cannot be understood as an uncomplicated openness. The garden’s capacity to shelter depends upon its capacity to establish boundaries. It gathers particular bodies and conditions while remaining selective about what it protects, cultivates or allows to flourish. The same enclosure that affords intimacy may also produce separation.

Moreton’s later formulation of hospitality makes this tension explicit. Hospitality is not the dissolution of boundaries, nor the guarantee that those who gather will become familiar to one another. It is a willingness to sustain encounter while allowing difference to remain consequential.

The garden consequently becomes a troubling host. Its intimacy is neither innocent nor complete. It depends upon relations of care and exclusion, proximity and distance, cultivation and resistance. These conditions do not simply negate hospitality; they reveal its material and spatial complexity.

The withdrawn ceramic body extends this question into another register. Its apertures offer the possibility of passage, but its material density remains. Its surfaces retain their resistance, and its interiority is never wholly available. The ceramic gathers without becoming an unrestricted container. Its hospitality consists in the spatial relations it makes possible, rather than in the promise of complete access.

4. Alienation ~ the unfamiliar within the sheltered place

Alienation introduces a necessary disturbance into the intimacy of the garden. It names the strangeness that persists within a gathering, even where care, familiarity and protection are established.

A sheltered place does not eliminate the unfamiliar. Plants, soil, weather and other material processes exceed the purposes assigned to them. The garden changes through conditions that cannot be wholly anticipated. Its living bodies participate in relations whose consequences may remain uncertain, resistant or beyond human understanding.

Alienation therefore need not be understood simply as exclusion from a place. It may also emerge within the place itself, when what is encountered cannot be fully assimilated into an existing understanding of its interiority.

This distinction troubles the assumption that hospitality culminates in familiarity. The garden may be intimate without being entirely knowable. Its shelter may sustain relations whose differences cannot be reconciled, and its interiority may remain open to conditions that unsettle the very identity it appears to protect.

For Moreton, this provides an important correspondence with the withdrawn ceramic. The ceramic persists as a materially particular body, but its relational capacities exceed the meanings assigned to it. Its apertures, weathered surfaces and material traces invite attention without guaranteeing comprehension. The body may become intimate through encounter while remaining strange.

Hospitality and alienation are thus not mutually exclusive. They are interdependent conditions through which the limits of an encounter become perceptible. Hospitality allows a relation to continue; alienation prevents that continuation from being mistaken for complete knowledge or possession.

The sheltered place becomes productive precisely where its intimacy remains troubled.

5. Atmosphere ~ the sensate life of interiority

Atmosphere brings these relations into the register of bodily experience. In the earlier garden material, sensory memory, light, smell, sound and the movement of plants contribute to the experience of an intimate landscape. The garden’s atmosphere does not reside in any single element. It emerges through the correspondence of bodies, materials, architectural boundaries and temporal changes.

The garden is therefore not a static container for an atmosphere that has already been formed. Its atmosphere develops through the conditions of shelter and exposure, cultivation and weather, proximity and movement. The enclosure participates in the atmosphere without determining it completely.

This understanding extends to Moreton’s ceramic bodies. Their surfaces, apertures and spatial arrangements establish particular conditions for light, shadow, bodily attention and surrounding space. Atmosphere emerges through these relations rather than being added as an aesthetic quality to the finished work.

The relationship between garden and ceramic becomes especially productive here. Both gather conditions of interiority while remaining exposed to transformations beyond their boundaries. Both establish a particular spatial situation without fully containing the relations through which it becomes sensate.

Atmosphere is therefore the field through which hospitality and alienation become felt. It allows intimacy to persist alongside strangeness, and it carries the consequences of spatial gathering beyond the limits of an individual body.

6. Inhuman touch ~ the more-than-human interior

The garden also opens the earlier material towards the question of inhuman touch. Its sensory life cannot be reduced to human perception, even though human experience remains central to the garden’s cultivation and appreciation. Soil, plants, water, light and weather participate in material relations that exceed the intentions through which the garden is designed or maintained.

This does not require the garden to be understood as a self-contained organism or as a harmonious ecological whole. Its relations may include dependence, resistance, interruption and transformation. The garden’s aliveness emerges through interactions whose consequences are not fully determined by human intention.

Read alongside Moreton’s correspondence with Karen Barad, this unsettles the assumption that the human subject encounters an entirely separate material world. The boundaries between bodies and environments become consequential through the relations in which they participate. Inhuman touch names a proposition through which the material conditions of encounter are understood as active rather than merely passive.

The withdrawn ceramic offers a different but related material situation. It is not alive in the same sense as a plant, nor does it need to be anthropomorphised to participate in an ecology of relations. Its material persistence, apertures and surfaces affect the conditions through which light, atmosphere and bodily attention become possible.

The garden and ceramic therefore remain distinct while troubling the boundary between human-centred experience and the more-than-human relations that sustain it. Their correspondence allows interiority to be reconsidered as an active, permeable condition rather than a space possessed by an autonomous subject.

7. From the hortus conclusus to the Permeable Chamber

The earlier garden proposition and Moreton’s later Permeable Chamber can now be brought into correspondence without treating the ceramic as a translation of the garden.

The hortus conclusus gathers intimacy through enclosure, cultivation and protection. The Permeable Chamber gathers through the material persistence of ceramic bodies, their apertures and their relations with surrounding space. Both make interiority available as a situated experience, but they do so through different material and spatial conditions.

The garden’s enclosure establishes a sheltered interior that remains open to the sky and to the transformations of living matter. The ceramic chamber establishes a provisional spatial relation through bodies that gather without fully containing the interval between them. In both cases, interiority becomes consequential through the relation between gathering and exposure.

The difference is equally important. The garden’s hospitality may be understood through practices of cultivation, care and shelter. The ceramic chamber troubles these conditions through material withdrawal, resistance and the persistence of bodies that cannot be fully assimilated to human purposes. Its openings do not guarantee access, and its gathering does not resolve alienation.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere therefore provides a matrix through which these two spatial propositions can enter correspondence. Diffraction identifies the differences produced through their distinct modes of enclosure and permeability. Hospitality considers how each gathers bodies and sustains relations. Alienation preserves the unfamiliarity that remains within those relations. Atmosphere describes how their spatial conditions become sensate and consequential.

The matrix does not collapse the garden and ceramic chamber into a single model. It allows each to trouble the other, making possible a more complex understanding of interiority as a condition that shelters while remaining exposed, gathers while retaining difference, and persists without becoming fully resolved.

Conclusion ~ the troubled hospitality of interiority

The hortus conclusus remains a significant body within Moreton’s spatial practice because it offers an early proposition concerning the relation between enclosure, sensory experience, contemplation and care. Revisited through Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere, however, the sheltered garden becomes more than an image of protected intimacy. It becomes a situated condition through which the limits and responsibilities of hospitality can be examined.

The garden gathers, but does not escape the differences through which its interiority is established. It shelters, but cannot wholly determine the relations that enter its boundaries. Its atmosphere emerges through bodies and processes that exceed the intentions of its cultivation. The sheltered place is therefore hospitable without being entirely knowable.

The withdrawn ceramic body carries this difficulty into another material register. It persists without closing its spatial proposition, offering a body through which intimacy, resistance and indeterminacy may become consequential. Its chamber is neither wholly enclosed nor entirely open; it gathers relations without resolving their differences.

Moreton’s spatial inquiry develops through this correspondence between situated bodies. The earlier garden and the later ceramic chamber remain materially and conceptually distinct, yet each allows the other to be encountered otherwise. The spatial matrix does not provide a final synthesis. It sustains the conditions through which these bodies can continue to trouble and extend one another.

The proposition is therefore not simply that a place should be hospitable. It is that hospitality becomes spatially consequential when it remains responsive to the alienation, difference and more-than-human material relations that its gathering cannot fully resolve.

The sheltered place persists, but its interiority remains in formation. It gathers bodies without possessing them, sustains intimacy without guaranteeing familiarity, and remains open to the atmospheric indeterminacies through which further spatial propositions may emerge.

Corporeal Traces ~ Ceramic Interiority ~ Things Doing

Corporeal Traces ~ Ceramic Interiority ~ Things Doing

From sensate encounter to spatially persistent bodies

Corporeal Traces ~ Ceramic Interiority ~ Things Doing

This reading apparatus approaches drawing, clay and the withdrawn ceramic as correspondent bodies within a sensate, heuristic inquiry. Corporeal traces are not simply representations of an absent body; they are material events through which bodily presence, gesture, movement and dispersal become spatially perceptible. Drawing establishes an indexical relation between body and ground, while fluids, residues, incisions and erasures unsettle the boundaries through which the body is distinguished from its material surroundings.

Clay introduces another set of conditions. Its plasticity, resistance, weight and capacity to retain or transform an impression enable corporeal traces to enter a different material field. The movement from drawing to ceramic is not a direct translation of image into object. It is a material reworking in which traces encounter the clay’s own capacities for resistance, alteration, enclosure and passage. Cavities, apertures and surfaces produce forms of interiority that are made through material action rather than simply represented.

Firing changes the proposition. The clay withdraws from its provisional state and becomes a materially persistent ceramic body. Yet this persistence does not resolve the relations gathered through making. The withdrawn ceramic remains capable of entering new encounters with bodies, spaces, atmospheres and other material presences. Its interiority is therefore neither wholly contained nor exhausted by its visible form.

Things doing~being names this continuing material activity. The ceramic is not a passive object carrying the residue of an earlier intention; it participates in the production of spatial relations and further knowledge. Corporeal traces become available for renewed correspondence, not as fixed meanings but as propositions that can be encountered, altered and extended.

The inquiry remains open between bodily trace, material transformation and spatial persistence. The work does not conclude with the finished ceramic. It acquires another capacity for futurity through the relations the ceramic continues to make possible.

At the centre of Russell Moreton's spatial practice is an ongoing inquiry into the ways bodies become perceptible through their encounters with other bodies, materials and environments. His drawings, material experiments and ceramic constructions approach corporeality not as a stable identity represented through an artistic medium, but as a condition continually produced through touch, pressure, residue, resistance and transformation. The body emerges through the material relations that make its presence possible, while remaining exposed to forces and encounters that exceed its apparent boundaries.

This sensate inquiry is particularly evident in Moreton's engagement with indexical traces: the impressions, residues and material disturbances through which a body becomes perceptible without being fully present. Water, rust, wax, pencil, charcoal and cyanotype do not simply describe bodily presence. Their material operations participate in its emergence. A trace locates an encounter, but it also disperses the body into the conditions through which that encounter becomes visible. The resulting figure is neither wholly contained within its outline nor entirely dissolved into its surroundings. It persists through an unstable relation between presence and absence, intimacy and distance, bodily specificity and material dispersal.

Abject(ion) provides a particularly generative register for understanding these relations. In dialogue with Zuzana Kovar's Architecture in Abjection: Bodies, Spaces and their Relations, Moreton's practice can be considered through the material intimacy by which bodies and their environments continually affect one another. Kovar's account challenges the separation of the body as subject from space as object, attending instead to the processes through which living organisms, bodily residues, building matter and inhabited environments become implicated in one another. 

Within Moreton's work, abjection consequently becomes more than a disturbance of bodily identity. It offers a way of sensing how the body's apparent exteriority is already implicated in the matter through which it becomes perceptible. The absent body persists through rust, water and waxed surfaces; the drawn figure becomes entangled with its ground; the material trace acquires an intimacy that cannot be attributed exclusively to either the body or the substance through which it is registered. These encounters produce a touching~interiority in which bodily presence is neither recovered as a complete image nor reduced to a generalised condition of material flux.

The significance of these earlier workings lies partly in the way they establish making as a sensate mode of inquiry. Knowledge emerges through the body's participation in material processes rather than through the detached observation of a predetermined object. To touch, trace, draw, absorb, resist or erase is to enter a field whose conditions are not entirely known in advance. The material encounter modifies what can be perceived, while the act of making gives that modification a particular form. Moreton's heuristic inquiry thus proceeds through a reciprocal movement between bodily attentiveness and material response: an encounter becomes perceptible through making, and making opens the encounter to further possibilities of thought.

Clay ~ Material Migration ~ Spatial Interiority

The movement of these corporeal traces into clay marks a significant change in their material and spatial capacities. It is not simply a translation from drawing into ceramic form, nor a transfer of bodily imagery from one medium to another. The relations encountered through drawing enter a different material situation, where they are reworked through clay's plasticity, weight, moisture, resistance, drying, collapse and eventual firing. What migrates is not an intact image or a fixed theoretical proposition, but a sensate intensity capable of acquiring another material life.

Clay becomes a site of material negotiation in which corporeal relations can be altered rather than merely repeated. Pressure produces an impression; resistance changes a gesture; an aperture establishes a passage; a cavity develops an interior; a surface gathers traces of actions that exceed any single intention. These operations are not simply technical means for realising an already conceived form. They participate in producing the conditions through which the work can be thought and encountered. Material specificity becomes epistemically consequential: clay does not merely receive Moreton's ideas but modifies what those ideas can become.

This distinction is important to the development of ceramic interiority. In the earlier drawings, interiority emerges through the dispersal of the body's trace across a material field. Within the ceramic, interiority acquires another spatial persistence. Cavities, perforations, folds, apertures and layered surfaces establish relations between what is gathered within a body and what remains exposed to its surroundings. The ceramic interior is neither a sealed container nor a private space concealed behind the surface. It is a spatial condition produced through the negotiation of enclosure and permeability, resistance and passage, material persistence and atmospheric exposure.

The ceramic body consequently develops a capacity to affect from within its own material organisation. Its interiority is not limited to the representation of an absent body, nor does it depend upon the viewer recovering the intentions that accompanied its making. It emerges through the relations established by the ceramic itself: between its surfaces and cavities, its openings and obstructions, its material weight and the light, air, architecture and bodily movements with which it subsequently enters correspondence.

The withdrawn ceramic therefore marks neither the end of bodily relations nor their simple preservation. Firing changes the material condition through which those relations persist. Clay withdraws from its provisional state, becoming a materially enduring body whose subsequent encounters can no longer be equated with the immediate activity of making. Yet this withdrawal does not secure a final meaning. The ceramic persists as a body capable of entering relations that were not fully available, or even imaginable, during its formation.

The withdrawn ceramic ~ Persistent correspondence

Moreton's notion of the withdrawn ceramic can be understood through this distinction between material persistence and relational closure. The fired body acquires a relative material independence from the gestures, pressures and circumstances through which it was made. Nevertheless, it remains available to further encounters. Light moves across its surface; shadows enter its apertures; architectural conditions alter its appearance; other bodies approach, withdraw, touch or move around it. These relations do not merely add context to an otherwise complete object. They participate in the continuing spatial life of the ceramic.

The ceramic's persistence is therefore not equivalent to the preservation of an original experience. What persists is a capacity for correspondence. The material body carries the consequences of its formation without containing every relation that contributed to it. Its surfaces and interiors make certain encounters possible while leaving others unresolved. The work becomes materially persistent but propositionally open: sufficiently formed to endure, yet never exhausted by its present configuration or by any single interpretation.

This understanding also changes how the ceramic's interiority might be approached. Its interior is not a hidden store of memories, meanings or bodily experiences waiting to be decoded. Rather, it names the continuing capacity of a spatial body to gather and alter relations. The withdrawn ceramic can carry the material consequences of corporeal traces while allowing those traces to become available in unfamiliar situations. What was once encountered through drawing, bodily inscription or abject residue may acquire another resonance through ceramic apertures, surfaces, cavities and their encounters with an architectural environment. Such correspondence does not establish a fixed continuity between the works. It allows their differences to remain active.

The ceramic body thus becomes a persistent body of inquiry. Its capacity to generate thought does not end when its making is complete, because its material persistence enables further encounters through which its spatial and affective propositions can change. The inquiry becomes lodged in the work, not as a completed argument but as an unfinished capacity for further correspondence.

Things doing~being ~ Theory and matter in correspondence

The phrase things doing~being offers a way to articulate this activity without reducing the ceramic to either a passive object or an autonomous agent. The withdrawn body does not simply exist as a finished thing upon which human meanings are subsequently imposed. Nor does it operate independently of the bodies, materials and environments with which it enters relation. Its activity emerges through the specific capacities of its material organisation and the encounters in which those capacities become consequential.

Things doing~being names this condition of material persistence in which existence and activity cannot be entirely separated. The ceramic is a body that continues to do: to interrupt a spatial field, to redirect attention, to receive and return light, to establish an interior, to produce an interval, to solicit proximity or to resist an anticipated relation. These are not necessarily actions in the conventional sense. They are material and spatial consequences through which the ceramic participates in the world.

Theory enters this process not as an explanatory framework applied retrospectively to the object, but as another body of thought capable of entering correspondence with material practice. Concepts such as abjection, interiority, permeability and corporeal dispersal become more than interpretative labels when they are tested and altered through the operations of making. Conversely, the behaviour of clay, the persistence of ceramic surfaces and the spatial consequences of apertures and cavities provide occasions for reconsidering what those concepts might mean. Theory and matter remain distinct, but their distinction does not prevent mutual alteration.

This is not a claim that clay thinks in the same way as a human subject, nor that material processes independently resolve theoretical questions. It is a proposition about the production of knowledge through material engagement. Making becomes the middle through which conceptual and material registers encounter one another, each changing the conditions under which the other can be understood. The resulting work is neither the material illustration of theory nor the unmediated expression of bodily experience. It is a spatial body in which thinking becomes materially consequential and material encounters open further possibilities for thought.

Moreton's practice can therefore be approached as an ecology of sensate inquiry in which corporeal traces, material transformations and spatial propositions remain in active correspondence. The drawing locates bodily presence through its dispersal; clay reworks that dispersal through its own material conditions; the withdrawn ceramic gives the resulting relations another duration and another capacity to affect. Each body gathers and alters what has passed through it without exhausting the possibilities of what may follow.

Corporeal traces ~ Material arousal ~ Clay's becoming ~ Ceramic withdrawal ~ Spatial interiority ~ Things doing~being ~ Further correspondence

The ceramic body does not contain the body's disappearance, nor does it restore an identity that has been dispersed through material encounter. It gives those relations another spatial persistence. Through the withdrawn ceramic, touching becomes a condition that can continue beyond the immediate act of making; interiority becomes available to other bodies; and theory and matter remain capable of altering one another through encounters not yet known.

The work persists, but its proposition remains in play.

Reading the Portfolio

https://russellmoreton.tumblr.com/archive

The works gathered here are different material encounters within an ongoing spatial practice. They do not illustrate a single idea or follow a linear development. Rather, images, surfaces, fragments, spaces, gestures and materials continually re-enter one another.

A photograph may become a memory within clay. A drawing may open a spatial interval. A painting may carry an atmosphere that later surfaces through ceramic. A collage may propose an interior that becomes materially withdrawn. The encounter changes as it moves between bodies.

Making is therefore less an act of bringing a predetermined idea into form than an attentive ecology of becoming. Each work gathers something, alters it and releases it again.

What is encountered here may already have been encountered elsewhere — differently.

The practice does not seek to resolve these movements. It keeps them available.

What matters is not what the work finally means, but its capacity to generate another encounter.

Making Intensified Surfaces~Spatial Propositions

Making Intensified Surfaces : A Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

My practice begins somewhere between the hand and the structure.

Clay is not simply a material to be formed. It is a body in negotiation: resistant, absorbent, unstable, enduring. Through making, I enter into a process of continual adjustment in which the work is never entirely known in advance. Form emerges through a reciprocal encounter between intention, matter, gesture, tool, surface, gravity, failure, and time.

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

I am interested in ceramic bodies that begin to exceed their own material designation. Slab-built, perforated, scored, drilled, painted, weathered, and reconfigured, they occupy an unstable interval between vessel, sculpture, architectural fragment, diagram, ruin, and spatial apparatus. Their surfaces become intensified fields of activity. The hole is an aperture; the grid is a structure; the line is a proposition; the surface is a record of becoming.

Making is therefore not the execution of an idea but a mode of inquiry.

I understand the studio as an expanded environment: no longer a retreat from the world, but a site of continuous exchange. Ideas enter through materials, bodies, texts, places, conversations, architectures, and acts of attention. The work develops through an iterative process of monitoring, correction, combination, and transformation.

My site-based practice extends this inquiry into environments and situations. I construct provisional spatial compositions in which craft, architecture, theory, drawing, sociality, and embodied experience become entangled. These works are not fixed objects but relational propositions: spaces for inhabiting, encountering, sensing, imagining, and thinking.

I am interested in what happens when the distinction between object and environment begins to collapse.

A ceramic body becomes a spatial body.

A surface becomes a threshold.

A structure becomes an event.

Making becomes a way of producing knowledge through the material, the embodied, and the situated.

The work emerges through an excess of form: something always remains unfinished, unresolved, overspilling the structural integrity of the object. This excess is not a failure of construction but its generative condition.

I work within this instability.

Between craft and architecture.

Between matter and thought.

Between the body that makes and the space that is made.

Between the object and the world it begins to produce.

Drawing(s) on the sensate perceived and interiorities~affect of other bodies.

Outpost 090124

Indexical and Sensate Bodies

Drawing(s) on the sensate perceived and interiorities~affect of other bodies.

I am interested in the sensate nature and social interiorities that are surfacing through drawing.

Shivering Openings : The image is not an object but a process.

Changefulness. The Sympathy of Painted Light. 2025 

Ceramic 170mmW and 270mmW x 260mmH x 80mmD.

The Exhausted.

For Deleuze the point is the image doesn't define itself through the sublimeness of its content, but through its form, its internal tension or through the force it gathers to make the void or to bore holes. To loosen the grip of words, to dry-up the oozing of voices so as to disengage itself from memory and reason.

A little alogical image, amnesic, almost aphasic, now standing in the void, now shivering in the open.

The Tentative Trace ~ From Living Body to Ceramic Body

Moreton's Indexical Bodies as Spatial Research.

In Moreton's later ceramics, the gathered interiority of reading and spatial collage begins to become unstable. The opening emerges not simply as an aperture within an object but as a force~middle: a material event through which accumulated relations can escape their enclosure. In Shivering Openings: The image is not an object but a process, the ceramic is understood through changefulness, painted light and the force gathered to make voids and bore holes. 

Here the image is no longer understood as a representation of a ceramic object but as another stage of its becoming. The photographed ceramic enters a further process of reading, where surface, light, opening, withdrawal and spatial tension produce another body of correspondence. “Shivering” names the instability of this threshold: an opening between interior and exterior, image and object, memory and forgetting, language and its exhaustion.

The ceramic consequently gathers and releases at once. It is a chamber, but also a perforation; an interior, but also an escape; an alluring body that simultaneously withdraws from possession. What has been gathered through years of reading, collage and spatial research does not finally become a unified form. It becomes a material force capable of generating further openings.

And perhaps the most concise proposition emerging from this particular work is:

Moreton gathers bodies until the material needs to open.

That feels very close to what we have been circling around.

The force~middle isn't simply where things meet.

It is where what has gathered becomes too alive to remain contained.

The opening shivers.

The image becomes process.

The ceramic withdraws.

And the research, rather wonderfully, escapes again.

Different chambers of the same spatial research.

How can a spatial condition gather bodies sufficiently for something to happen between them, while allowing what happens to remain partially unknown?

That question seems to be present in the 2010 chamber, the spatial collages, the Scriptorium, the reading archive, the ceramic chambers and now your institutional propositions.

And perhaps this gives us an even stronger definition of Moreton's interiority:

Moreton's interiority is the space generated when a body enters an apparatus of correspondence and leaves something behind that another body can encounter.

The trace, the collage, the ceramic, the archive and the institution are therefore not different subjects.

They are different chambers of the same spatial research.

Drawing/Poetry/Images.

Sensing/Drawing Energy.

Water/Clay/Fire.

The mental energy of engagement in drawing and how 'markers' of an action translate the murmurings of the mind.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, through a synthesis/reciprocity of reverberations of matter and its mental movement.

Gaston Bachelard illustrates how images bridge the sensate perceived world and the interior affective life.

Bachelard's seminal philosophical and phenomenological interests are always connected to matter. To what he calls the psychology of the familiar, the rapprochement with real objects, and the friendship of things. 

Matter sparks inner images which in turn imbue matter with memory and values. He creates an ever renewing reciprocity of the reverberations between inner and outer qualities, which obliterates any absolute separation between objective and subjective experience, a perspective recognized by modern physics. Bachelard explodes the potential imprisoned in an image. It is the quality of the 'livingness' of the flame that triggers Bachelard's musings of correspondences.

Joanne H. Stroud.

 

The Flame of a Candle.

Student Work.

Charcoal on paper.

Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw. 

Winchester School of Art. 2003.

 

Drawing The Line.

Affirmations from a Primal Site.

Corollaries between being and becoming.

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invented Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

The Moment/Instants of Engagement.

The conditions of making where the image was not a priori to its making.

The Simultaneity of Effects.

A 'Graphism' In A Corporeal Field.

I am concerned with the movement and process of articulation, of marking and sensing of things across the works surface/duration. I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation, both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind.

So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstances?

For Newman, it seems to me that the thing made becomes like a temporal spatial/sensate matrix, composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual, but similar inscriptions, and that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts, are only subsequently reflected on the image. Marking  the image, these marks suggest an endless repetition and while also existing as a series of relations. The marks suggest the thing could fall apart at any moment. 

Acts Of Inscription.

Drawing on Bodily Impulses.

Images from the mind.

The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.

Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.

Drawing on the sensation of seeing and sensing that always seems to register the endless repetition of remaking, as such drawing constitutes the space of anxieties. 

I understand the page to be a mobile space in the physical presence of its weightless surface and as such it is a place of time and movement. The evokes the consciousness of that limitless space that is embodied in the reality of the white page. Which I would say is a place of fragmentation that has since Modernity been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness.

In a drawing the page keeps open the gaps between the marks. It refuses closure and is an active participant in conjunction with the mark. It is part of a negotiated reality of void and presence. The limitlessness white space of the page disperses the notion of its body as substance, its body is phantasmic and intangible space/surface.

The notion of the white page as being boundless, also alludes to that space of our inner reality, where the immaterial world of dreams/imagination and the mental impressions that run through us and evaporate into other thoughts. They dissipate in the fragmented world of our senses and defy any totalizing.

Avis Newman 

Mark Making : On the fascination and the fear of the white page.

For Avis Newman, the paper is an undifferentiated space in that it references the primitive undifferentiated space of the infantile body that has to be claimed by the self.

Drawing is a site in which one enacts differentiation, as soon as a mark or sign is made, it changes the non-ness and establishes a place of action, as soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something, it moves towards, moves with its potentiality into language.

Could we state that one aspect of drawing tends to be more linked to the bodily impulse and the other to the mind?

Catherine de Zegher

The image that Antonin Artaud conjures when he says 'There is a mind in the flesh, a mind as quick as lightning,' situates it well for me. I have the impression that the act of inscribing opens a fissure through which some staged psychic event, operations of consciousness, take existence. They are primary forces with no particular visibility.

Avis Newman.

Marks both coded and uncoded originate in an urge from a space of uncertainty to participate in language. The potentiality of even a blank page is in itself the unbounded space of language. Drawing is both a system and a method of a sensing inquiry. To draw is often a paradoxical act in which two extremes of practice can exist in the same space.

When we come to look at another's markings in the world. We see an extraordinary event. We see attempts at articulating the unbounded space that momentarily binds that aspect of us that is eternally fragmented. Essentially in the very act of drawing we have a wish to externalize thought and communicate existence.

Avis Newman.

From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.

Bodily Boundaries : Transactions between body-intimate and the social body image.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.

Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.

In drawing some marks escape their visibility, because there is no dynamism to underpin the possibility of internal cohesion. There is no pressure from the outside inwards;  in drawing, it is all pressure from the inside outwards.

Conduits of perpetual potentiality.

The articulation of marking thoughts, which by definition are open-ended, in a state of flux in which things can pass through and are suggestive of a perpetual potentiality.

Some marks are seeing, some are feeling, some are for thinking, some are from memory, others from a blindness when seeing.

Gestures and Acts.

Conversation/Correspondences.

Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with the infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time. Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

Catherine de Zegher.

The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional to the boundary we project onto the work. When one looks for example at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17' ' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space, this is not part of drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Avis Newman.

In Drawing : One is not so much looking at the thing itself, as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. In that sense, drawing is both fugitive and embodies a lack, it is implying qualities of incompleteness and that which conjures to be only a trace of a thing.

Drawing/Corresponding to a mobile field of properties that only during the process of marking is a cohesion found, a somewhat precarious frame constructed, almost as a byproduct of the articulation of marking thoughts.

Drawings are beyond the conceptual anxiety found in connection to the frame of painting.

In drawing the surface maintains its separate existence. There is an ambivalence of status between the mark and its support, consequently the lack of integration has always been more complex, corresponding as it does to a mobile field of properties. 

Drawing as a site, a meditation of a self regarding consciousness. Where consciousness is understood/expressed as a process that 'figures/thinks' a state of existence. Drawing and the drawn become a site of inquiry, response and invention, and in that sensing space it becomes a philosophical activity.

Drawing, even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation. The fractured, open-ended, and incomplete that are inherent characteristics of drawing practice seem very pertinent as materializations of our present experience of the world.

It is that space of anxiety and fragmentation in contemporary practice that offers a potential of infinite diversity. Drawing is a record of the working of thought, that we see embedded in the drawn.

Conversation, Avis Newman. Catherine de Zegher.

The Stage Of Drawing : Gesture And Act.

Confessional Spaces~Spatial-Situationist Apparatuses : A Line of Flight, Vessel, Sculpture or Fiction.

Clay-Ceramic/Thinking Architectures/Interior Places.

2024. Ceramic. 260mmL x 350mmH x 160mmW.

Making Spatial Research Creation.

Interior Social Places : Perforated Inner Spaces

Pigeon Houses/Dovecotes for Philosophers.

This item resembles a handmade rustic bee hotel, often used in gardens as a wildlife habitat.

It features pre-drilled holes designed specifically to provide nesting spots for solitary bees.

The structure is typically constructed from wood, sometimes featuring recycled or scrap materials. 

A "line of flight" (ligne de fuite) is a core concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. It represents an act of escape, a sudden rupture, or a creative vector that allows a rigid system to break down and transform into something completely new.

What do I know?

Michel de Montaigne.

A house for confessing animals.

Michel Foucault.

What does Deleuze mean by plane of immanence?

Plane of immanence (French: plan d'immanence ) is a founding concept in the metaphysics or ontology of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Immanence, meaning residing or becoming within, generally offers a relative opposition to transcendence, that which extends beyond or outside.

Pink Cosmos : Research Collage~Diffractive Inclusions and Annotations

Google Lens

Panopticon~Peter Gabriel

The image shows an open book, "The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond," edited by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley. The book features a diagram of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison design. The Panopticon is a circular building design intended to allow a single observer to monitor all inmates without them knowing if they are being watched, which induces a sense of permanent visibility and self-regulation of behavior. 

Google Lens Artwork Details. Artist: Russell Moreton, a UK-based contemporary artist specializing in experimental drawing, alternative photography, and ceramic art. Concept: This piece forms part of his exploration into “Spatial Poetics” and the concept of “Fragile Architectures of Hapticity and Time,” which draws heavily from Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical readings regarding memory, refuge, and spatial daydreaming (reverie). Material & Structure: The artwork consists of slab-built earthenware or terracotta clay. It takes the minimalist silhouette of a house or primitive shelter, punctuated by precisely drilled circular apertures and incised linear markings that imply schematic cross-sections, architectural measurements, or coordinates. Surface Finish: The surface displays a heavily textured, matte, earth-toned finish achieved through slips, iron oxides, or specialized atmospheric firing techniques to simulate weathered stone, rusted metal, or aged brick. The philosophical concepts (like Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space) that inspire this work. The firing techniques used to achieve these specific earthy surface textures. Other pieces in this specific ceramic series.

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

What happens before a form becomes recognisable? Things accumulate, shift, overlap and begin to spill into one another. The ceramic body emerges here not as a stable boundary but as a place where forces become visible through displacement. Tension, excess, surface and material change remain active within the form. Something is always moving through it, even when the fired body appears still.

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.

This one is particularly interesting because it introduces movement rather than simply materiality. Jullien's “silent transformations” sit beside Architecture in Abjection, Bachelard, Piper and Fontana, while the post itself circles around “Things Superimposed,” “Spill” and “Overspilling Forms.”

I actually think this may be one of the most important older bodies to bring forward because overspilling connects directly to your present vocabulary of permeability, surface, force, abjection and bodies exceeding their boundaries.

First constellation — Ceramic Bodies

Making Matter(s)~Truth

Overspilling Forms

The Ceramics Reader / Brickyard Ceramics

Making Iterations / Procedures

Working Notes : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark