What else can thinking do?

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning. 

The spatial body has moved closer to touching. Earlier encounters with architecture, drawing, apparatus and site opened spaces through bodies, movement, ritual and repetition. Working with clay~ceramic, these spatial questions become more intimate and material. The vessel, surface, aperture and interior are not simply forms or descriptors, but places where bodies meet and relations pass through. Clay becomes an atmospheric body—receiving, resisting, registering and shedding traces of encounter. In and out of material, inside and outside, touch and space continually fold into one another. Making becomes a reciprocal attentiveness: a becoming~in~touch with other bodies, their patternings, forces and murmurings.

Yes. I think this is another very coherent spatial correspondence~cluster, and it is slightly different from the previous four. The previous cluster traced the development of scaffolding, situation and spatial bodies; this one brings vessel, drawing, ritual, repetition, apparatus, memory and the human body into much closer proximity.

There is a particularly interesting movement across these four:

apparatus → body → vessel → overlapping space → repetition → interiority

And Inside This Clay Jug becomes a crucial hinge because the clay body is already explicitly described through its sensuality, interiority and architectural capacity. The post asks us to think about the vessel not simply as an object but as a way of investigating our experience of interior and exterior space.

Molecular Sieve / Performative Apparatuses

A spatial apparatus becomes a body in motion. Carried through the temporal conditions of a site, the Molecular Sieve gathers light, movement, memory and encounter through its small aperture. The chamber of the camera becomes a place of attention: something between inside and outside, between looking and being situated. Photography here is less an image-making procedure than a way of becoming~in~touch with a place, allowing time and material presence to register through the body of an apparatus.

Inside This Clay Jug

The vessel opens a question of interiority. Clay becomes more than a surface enclosing an empty space; it becomes a body through which interior and exterior can be sensed together. Touch, volume, air, light and memory gather within the vessel, making space something experienced rather than simply described. The clay body carries traces of its making while opening onto other bodies and spaces. Here, ceramics begins to become a way of thinking through the intimate correspondence between material, body and the spaces we inhabit.

Drawing Into the Human Form / The Architectural Body

Drawing becomes a way of moving between bodies. The human body and the architectural body are not fixed forms but spaces of relation, scale, movement and inhabitation. Through drawing, gesture and trace, one body begins to enter another. The image becomes less a representation of space than an encounter with it—a way of sensing what happens between body, surface, interior and surrounding space. Drawing opens a spatial vocabulary that is tactile as much as visual.

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces

Spaces are never encountered only once. Through presentation, ritual, repetition and movement, each encounter leaves another registration, another layer of memory and material presence. Space becomes something continually made and remade through bodies and their actions. Repetition does not reproduce the same situation; it alters it. The trace becomes a form of remembering, while the surface becomes a place where encounters accumulate. These overlapping registrations begin to suggest space as something lived, touched and continually becoming.

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.

Correspondences~Relational Fields : Other Affordances : Analogous Experience~Clay~Thinking

Clay~Making : The Analogous Atmosphere of  Experience.

Clay+Ceramic : Immersed in a self entertaining relational field.

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation.

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning. 

Poetics of Spatial~Small Gestures

For Bachelard : Reverberations~Conduits between philosophy~poetic writing relations of human and spatial bodies.

The artwork featured in the image is titled "Apparatuses: A Litany of Echoes~Resonances" by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist's Practice: Russell Moreton is a visual fine artist who explores themes surrounding "making," architectural space, and the interplay of materials like clay to demarcate and construct environments.

Materiality: His work frequently investigates the imprint of the artist and the metaphysical, immersive nature of his chosen media, often utilizing processes that evoke construction and the physical manipulation of materials.

Architectural Inspiration: Moreton is notably drawn to the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, often using his practice to engage with the concept of architecture as tranquility.

The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret. The significance of the hut.

"He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar."

Gaston Bachelard.

 

"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.

AI Overview

This artwork is a sculptural assemblage by Russell Moreton, featuring ceramic vessels and forms. 

The work explores themes of reverberation, innerness, and volume through a processual approach to clay. 

Moreton's practice investigates the interconnection of making interior spaces, demarcating and folding material into spatial forms. 

These pieces are described as 'extreme atmospheres' or 'fired clay labyrinths,' utilizing textural surfaces and industrial-like perforations

Reliquaries for experience : Wayfaring/Lines and Interior Spaces : Materials of movement and attention.

Reliquaries.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton

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

2024

Ceramic

170mmL x 240mmH x 60mmW

Wayfaring/Lines and Interior Spaces : Materials of movement and attention.

Processual clay+ceramic constructions that articulate through processes of mark making and intermediaries, surfaces spatial bodies and interiors all entangled in a complex scaffolding of its own making.

"Makers work in a world that does not stand still, Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations" Tim Ingold, 2010.

The Quiet Mind : Silently without resistance. Books/Reliquaries : Working of matters and the exteriority of their relations. Marking/Wayfaring Inscriptions : Clay+Ceramic

(Sound of barking) Do you listen to that dog? Wait, wait. Silently? Listen to it completely silently, which means without any resistance, without any irritation, just listen to it. When you listen quietly there is no resistance, there is no irritation, you do not identify yourself with the dog and the barking of it, your mind is quiet. Krishnamurti.

Meditation The meaning of that word is to measure, basically (for oneself).

Exploring Ceramic Art: Movement and Attention

This title targets specific keywords like ‘ceramic art’ and ‘movement’, enhancing SEO by attracting audiences interested in art processes.

Meditation and Art: The Quiet Mind in Ceramics

Combines popular search terms ‘meditation’ and ‘ceramics’, appealing to those exploring mindfulness in creative practices, increasing search visibility.

Wayfaring Through Clay: Art and Perception

Focuses on the unique concept of ‘wayfaring’ linked to clay art, appealing to niche audiences and improving content relevance in search results.

Clay~Vessel~Ritual~Body : Drawing Forms and Vessels

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

10/03/2017

CLAY : Speculative City : From Pilgrim to Tourist
From Pilgrim To Tourist (or a short history of identity). Zygmunt Bauman.

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation

Clay drawing/situation/collage based on a performative script/reading

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 2010.

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 2010 into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking” States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself.

This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)