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

 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.

Hortus Conclusus~As a Shared Ecological~Creative Practice : A Serious Place, Peter Zumthor on sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

Your draft has strong ideas and rich references, but much of the writing is in note form, and some sentences are long or repetitive. Below is a revised version that keeps your academic tone while making the argument clearer, more fluid, and easier to follow.

This version has a stronger narrative flow. Rather than reading as a sequence of research notes, it develops a continuous argument about the hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity. It also reduces repetition while preserving your quotations and references.

chatgpt.com

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.

Shadow Theatre/Sculpting In Time : Visceral Compositions~Gatherings

A Resultant Complication of  Agencement.

Shadow Theatre for a  Performative Interior.

Enfolded Structures : On a sympathy of correspondence.

Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.

Photographic Documents : Domain-Court-Cell : Research Collages

Spatialities and Interior Spaces~Apparatuses for Diffractive Thinking.

Science~Inside The Church : Spatial Documentation~Defractive Readings.

VISITORS : Collage/Waverley Project/Exploratory Practice 2015.

Cyanotype Process

Modern/Primitive

Collage/Fragment from Dom Hans van der Laan

Cell/Court/Domain

Visitors

Godfrey Reggio 

Research collage with photographic document, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Disjunction and Event/Processual Research : Collage/Constrained Spaces/Spatial Body

Processual Making/Messy Entanglements : Creating sustained flows of engagement resulting in some connections that can occur but not others, working practices that can create a pattern or field of relations/resistance or constraint.

Movement is Material.

Mobility/New Social Assemblages

Ingold/Thrift

Movement creates differences, it resists and perpetuates between human bodies/spatial bodies.

Constrained spaces shaped by the tensions of the environment.

Combined works/conceptual frameworks with research as an integral part of the practice to produce ways of sensing/making ecologies of  knowledge.

Ecology-as-Assemblage

An assemblage is able to retroactively affect its parts.

Human identities and bodies are inherently multiple, relational and dependant on more-than-human presences. 

On Landscape Ontology, Bryant. 2011

The co-existence of such heterogeneous dimensions and demands makes up the 'event.' The event is a sudden intensity generated by the juxtaposition and superimposition of differences. The event tends to exacerbate differences rather than making everything similar.

Disjunction and Event.

Bernard Tschumi.

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

Matter-Feels-Converses-Suffers-Desires-Yearns and Remembers.

New Materialism/Interviews and Cartographies.

Ann Arbor, Karen Barad, Dolphijn and Tuin. 2012

Agency is about an ability to respond, to change things, about the possibilities of worldly reconfigurations, in this way it enlists non-humans as well as humans.

Human capacity becomes distributed rather than situated in a hegemonic subject-object relationship. Rather it is a result of complex heterogenous entanglements, networks, imbroglio's, assemblages and ecologies. In this perspective, agency is not something possessed solely by humans or for that matter, non-humans.

Choreography of existence : Holloways and making of landscapes.

Dimitrij Mlekuz.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Creative Ecologies/Drawing Concepts : Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

Propositional Drawing/Speculative Architecture.

Drawing Inscriptions : Situatedness in Ceramics

Notes Towards a Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Shallow - Space Constructions

Veils

Structural Cuts : Skyspaces

Skyspaces : Autonomous Structures

Site Specifity

Dark Spaces

Autonomous Structures : Models

Perceptual Cells

James Turrell

Fundacon 'la  Caixa' 1993.

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

The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.

Volume And Space.

Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, 'Man Pointing,' is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.

Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.

Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.

Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.

The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.

Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.

Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold. 

Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.

The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Affordances of Things.

Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.

Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.

Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.

An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.

Matter and materials are lively and require attention. 

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.

Aleatory, by chance, lots of the 'acts' of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry' He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.

Wrapped Body : Tacit Auguries/Sacred/Secular Spaces

Speculative art objects/intermediaries on the inwardness of things.

Norwich, Sacred Spaces, 
Body Fragments/Tacit Auguries : Care and Constraint 2019
Ceramic/Textile/Wire and Wax on Gesso.

Exploratory Forms. Bandages/Rust : Tacit Collage, Drawing 2019

"All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency."

Jacques Monod,

The Human/Straw Dogs, John Gray.

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