Withdrawn Ceramic Bodies : The ceramic withdraws from making, but not from correspondence.

What Kind of Body Gathers a Chamber?

Diffraction~Hospitality~Atmosphere: A Spatial Matrix of Moreton’s Spatial Inquiry

Cromer Open Exhibition 2026

A situated spatial proposition.

Persistent Bodies .

The withdrawn ceramic as a material body that remains spatially receptive without becoming infinitely malleable or fully knowable.

For Moreton the spatial proposition is situated between persistence and openness. The ceramic's material condition has changed decisively, but its capacity to enter new relations has not been exhausted. Its futurity lies neither in a return to clay nor in an imagined future object, but in the encounters its persistence continues to make possible.

The ceramic withdraws from making, but not from correspondence.

Withdrawn Ceramic Bodies ~ Interiority, Persistence, Correspondence

The withdrawn ceramic body occupies an interval between the completion of making and the continuation of spatial relations. Firing changes the condition of clay, carrying provisional gestures, pressures, resistances and material negotiations into a persistent ceramic body. Yet this withdrawal from the immediate activity of making does not constitute an ending. The ceramic remains available to other bodies, architectures, atmospheres and encounters that its formation could not have anticipated.

Interiority emerges through this altered condition. It is not confined to a cavity or enclosed volume, but develops through relations between surface, aperture, shadow, light, air and surrounding space. The ceramic body gathers these relations without containing them. Its material persistence allows earlier encounters to continue differently, while its withdrawal preserves an element of unknowability: what has become materially present cannot be reduced to the intentions or events through which it was made.

The withdrawn ceramic therefore becomes a persistent body of correspondence. It carries traces of making into situations where they can be encountered, altered in significance and furthered through new relations. The work does not resolve the propositions gathered within it; it gives them another material condition from which to continue.

Withdrawal is thus not the opposite of hospitality. It is another condition through which hospitality becomes possible. The ceramic does not remain available to every form of intervention, yet it continues to receive light, atmosphere, movement and the attention of other bodies. Its persistence holds this tension between material resistance and relational openness.

The spatial proposition remains unfinished in a particular sense: not because the ceramic has failed to reach completion, but because its capacity to enter correspondence exceeds the event of its making. The body persists; the relations continue; the proposition remains~in~play.

In What Kind of Body Gathers a Chamber?

Russell Moreton brings two withdrawn ceramic bodies into a spatial correspondence through proximity, surface and aperture. Their weathered surfaces retain the material traces of gesture, pressure, abrasion and the uneven accumulation of slips and residues. Perforations interrupt the ceramic planes, opening their materially persistent bodies towards one another and the surrounding environment. Their offset arrangement establishes a spatial interval that is neither fully enclosed nor simply given in advance.

The work proposes a chamber that emerges through the relations between bodies rather than being contained within either one. Its spatiality is not reducible to the dimensions or formal characteristics of the individual ceramics. It develops through the conditions of their gathering, through the differences that remain active between them, and through the possibilities of encounter that their arrangement makes available.

This proposition provides a situated instance of Moreton’s developing spatial inquiry, articulated through the matrix Diffraction~Hospitality~Atmosphere. These terms identify three interdependent operations through which spatial relations become perceptible, consequential and open to further forming. They do not constitute successive interpretive stages, nor do they impose a theoretical explanation upon an otherwise completed work. They identify the conditions through which the ceramic bodies operate as a propositional form of spatial practice.

The question is therefore not simply what kind of object constitutes a chamber, but what kind of gathering allows a chamber to emerge. The work approaches this question through the material persistence of the withdrawn ceramic bodies and the continuing spatial relations they make possible.

Diffraction: the production of consequential difference.

Diffraction concerns the differences produced and made perceptible through the encounter between bodies. In Moreton’s work, the two ceramic panels are neither identical units nor independent objects whose spatial significance can be established in isolation. Their distinct surfaces, perforations, orientations and relative positions become consequential through their proximity.

The material surfaces retain heterogeneous traces of making. Incisions, abrasions, deposits and changes in colour establish an uneven field in which no single mark or material condition governs the whole. The perforations further trouble the apparent continuity of the ceramic plane, producing an interplay between surface and depth, opacity and passage, material density and spatial opening.

The offset arrangement intensifies these differences. One body partially obscures the other, establishing a relation in which visibility is conditioned by position. The bodies become perceptible through one another without becoming interchangeable. Their correspondence produces a spatial situation that cannot be attributed to either ceramic independently.

Diffraction therefore operates not as a general celebration of multiplicity, but as a means of understanding how relations produce differences that matter. The chamber is not the sum of two completed forms. It emerges through their arrangement, through the intervals they establish and through the spatial possibilities that become perceptible in their encounter.

This reading also troubles the distinction between object and environment. The apertures do not merely function as formal features within the ceramic surfaces; they establish conditions through which the surrounding space participates in the work’s spatial proposition. The bodies remain materially distinct, yet their spatial consequences extend beyond their individual boundaries.

Diffraction thus identifies the first operation of the matrix: the production of spatial significance through differences that emerge in correspondence.

Hospitality: gathering without convergence.

Hospitality concerns the conditions through which bodies gather while retaining their differences. In What Kind of Body Gathers a Chamber?, this operation becomes perceptible through the tension between the material density of the ceramic bodies and the openings that interrupt their surfaces.

The perforations suggest receptivity, but they do not render the bodies wholly accessible. The ceramics retain their opacity, weight, resistance and material particularity. Their surfaces register the contingencies of making, while their apertures establish passages through which the relation between interior and exterior becomes unsettled. Hospitality is therefore neither unrestricted openness nor the disappearance of boundaries.

The chamber emerges through a gathering that does not require convergence. The two bodies do not merge into a unified architectural form, nor does their relation resolve the differences between them. Instead, their proximity establishes a provisional condition of shared spatiality in which each body contributes to the other's perceptibility without relinquishing its own material specificity.

This understanding of hospitality extends beyond the metaphor of an open container. The ceramic bodies do not simply receive other bodies into an already constituted interior. They participate in producing the conditions under which an interior, an interval or a chamber might become perceptible at all.

Hospitality consequently becomes an operation of spatial forming. It concerns the willingness of a body to enter relations through which its own conditions may be altered, while acknowledging that such alteration need not be symmetrical or complete. The chamber remains provisional because its gathering does not exhaust the possibilities of what may enter into correspondence.

Within Moreton’s spatial inquiry, hospitality therefore names a mode of relation in which difference is sustained rather than overcome. The bodies gather without becoming one, and the chamber persists as a condition of encounter rather than a completed enclosure.

Atmosphere: the sensate emergence of spatial relations.

Atmosphere concerns the conditions through which these relations acquire sensate and affective intensity. It is not an aesthetic effect added to the ceramic bodies, nor is it a quality contained within their surfaces. It emerges through the relations between material, arrangement, light, surrounding space and bodily attention.

The chamber becomes perceptible through the particular disposition of the two ceramics. Their relative positions establish depth and partial concealment; their apertures interrupt the surfaces and direct attention towards passages between bodies; their weathered materiality retains the visible consequences of making. These conditions invite an encounter in which the spatial relation cannot be reduced to a frontal view of two objects.

The atmosphere of the work is therefore relational. It arises through the way the bodies gather, through the distances and interruptions between them, and through the attention brought to bear upon their material and spatial differences. The chamber is encountered as a sensate condition whose significance develops through proximity and duration rather than through the recognition of a predetermined architectural form.

Atmosphere also extends the proposition beyond the immediate arrangement of the ceramics. The withdrawn bodies remain available for encounters in which the conditions of perception may change. Their spatial significance is not secured by a single viewpoint or exhausted by their visible configuration. The work's atmospheric possibilities depend upon the continuing correspondence between its material particularity and the bodies and environments through which it is encountered.

Atmosphere thus identifies how the gathering becomes felt. It carries the consequences of diffraction and hospitality into the sensate experience of spatial relations, without resolving those relations into a single interpretation.

The matrix: three operations, one spatial inquiry.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Atmosphere constitutes a spatial matrix through which Moreton’s work can be understood as an ongoing propositional inquiry. Each term identifies a distinct operation, but none functions independently of the others.

Diffraction makes differences consequential within the encounter. Hospitality sustains the possibility of gathering without requiring convergence. Atmosphere describes the sensate conditions through which that gathering becomes spatially perceptible. Together, these operations allow the chamber to emerge as a relational proposition rather than a pre-existing form or an enclosed volume.

Their interdependence is central to the matrix. Without diffraction, hospitality might be mistaken for an uncomplicated openness in which differences become secondary. Without hospitality, diffraction might remain an account of difference without attending to the conditions under which bodies sustain a shared encounter. Without atmosphere, the relation between the bodies might be understood only as a formal or conceptual arrangement, detached from its sensate consequences.

Atmosphere, however, does not simply complete the other two operations. It also troubles them. The felt character of an encounter may reveal differences not initially apparent, while a change in bodily attention or spatial position may alter what becomes possible within the gathering. Hospitality can therefore be reconsidered through the atmospheric conditions of encounter, just as diffraction can be re-entered through the relations that atmosphere makes perceptible.

The matrix is consequently recursive rather than sequential. Each operation can alter the conditions of the others, allowing the spatial proposition to remain active beyond a single reading.

The withdrawn ceramic body and propositional forming.

The concept of the withdrawn ceramic body provides a material basis for this understanding of spatial practice. Through firing, clay undergoes a transformation that establishes a different mode of material persistence. The ceramic withdraws from the provisional plasticity of clay, yet this withdrawal does not conclude the relations through which the body becomes spatially consequential.

The surfaces retain traces of pressure, abrasion, incision and material resistance. The apertures establish continuing relations between the ceramic bodies and their surroundings. The arrangement allows these materially persistent bodies to participate in a chamber that remains open to further encounter.

This distinction between material persistence and spatial closure is important. The ceramics persist as particular bodies, but the chamber they gather is not permanently secured by their material endurance. Its spatial significance continues to emerge through the relations in which the bodies participate. The work is materially particular without being propositionally exhausted.

Here, form~~forming provides a further articulation of the matrix. Form names the particular configuration through which the ceramic bodies become encounterable; forming names the continuing activity through which their relations acquire further spatial consequences. The chamber is not simply a form that has been completed. It is a spatial condition that continues forming through the correspondence of bodies, apertures, surfaces and environments.

The withdrawn ceramic body therefore operates as a persistent spatial proposition. Its material state endures, while the relations through which it becomes perceptible remain capable of alteration. The work does not contain a finished account of the chamber. It sustains the conditions through which the chamber can continue to be encountered and thought otherwise.

Cromer as situatedness and further correspondence.

Presented within Cromer Open Exhibition 2026, What Kind of Body Gathers a Chamber? becomes available for encounters beyond the circumstances of its making. The exhibition establishes a further situation in which the ceramic bodies can be approached through different bodily positions, readings and relations.

This situatedness should not be understood as a contextual explanation that determines the work's meaning in advance. The significance of Cromer as a particular place would require further investigation of its material, historical, architectural, social and environmental conditions. What the exhibition establishes is the opportunity for the work to enter another field of correspondence.

Within Moreton’s spatial inquiry, such an encounter may be understood through diffractive hospitality. The exhibition does not simply receive an already completed proposition. It provides conditions through which the proposition may become available to other bodies, while those encounters may alter how the work is perceived and understood. The ceramic bodies remain materially persistent, but their spatial consequences are not exhausted by the studio or by the intentions that informed their making.

The work thus enters a wider ecology of spatial practice in which making, material persistence, situated encounter and further forming remain interconnected. Its future is not a predetermined extension of its original conception. It lies in the possibility that the relations it establishes may be re-entered, troubled and altered through encounters that cannot be fully anticipated.

Conclusion: what kind of body gathers a chamber?

What Kind of Body Gathers a Chamber? proposes that a chamber need not be understood as a completed enclosure or as a volume contained within an individual object. It may emerge through the relations between materially persistent bodies whose differences remain active, whose gathering remains provisional, and whose spatial consequences continue to develop through sensate encounter.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Atmosphere identifies the matrix through which this proposition operates.

Diffraction makes differences consequential; hospitality sustains gathering without convergence; atmosphere allows the relations between bodies to acquire spatial and affective intensity. Their interdependence enables the chamber to emerge as a relational condition rather than a predetermined form.

Moreton’s spatial inquiry is propositional because it makes such conditions available for encounter without determining their eventual consequences. The withdrawn ceramic bodies are not simply representations of architecture, nor are they objects whose spatial significance ends with their production. They are materially persistent bodies through which further spatial relations can form.

The chamber therefore remains unfinished, not because the ceramics are incomplete, but because their spatial proposition is open to further correspondence. The work gathers without containing, persists without closure and continues to form through the bodies and environments with which it may become otherwise.

The chamber is not simply what the ceramic bodies enclose. It is what becomes possible through their gathering.

Attentiveness as a Sensate~Heuristic Inquiry : A Spatial Practice.

I think the distinction we have been developing allows attentiveness to become much more than a general artistic virtue. In Moreton's practice, it can be understood as a sensate mode of inquiry: a way of knowing that occurs through bodily exposure to materials, spaces, atmospheres, images, histories and other bodies.

Attentiveness as Sensate Inquiry

For Moreton, attentiveness is sensate because the practice does not locate knowledge exclusively within conceptual reflection or detached observation. Knowing emerges through the body's participation in situations: through looking, touching, moving, listening, inhabiting, making and responding to the resistances and affordances encountered within particular spatial and material conditions. Attentiveness is therefore not simply a concentration upon something already constituted as an object of knowledge. It is an openness to the ways in which an encounter may alter what is available to perception and thought.

This distinction is important to Moreton's understanding of site-based practice. A site is never encountered as a neutral geographical container within which artistic activity subsequently takes place. It is already constituted through material, architectural, historical, atmospheric and bodily relations. To attend to a site is consequently to become situated within these relations. The body encounters temperature, scale, texture, sound, light, weight, movement, spatial enclosure and exposure alongside memory, association, reading and imagination. These registers cannot always be separated into discrete categories because their significance emerges through their correspondence. The sensate is therefore not simply sensory experience understood as a collection of perceptions; it is the condition through which heterogeneous registers begin to matter to one another.

This makes attentiveness inherently relational. Moreton's practice does not treat the perceiving body as an autonomous observer standing outside a world of objects. The body is itself one participant within an encounter that includes materials, architectures, apparatuses, images, texts, weather, light and other bodies. Attending to clay, for example, means becoming responsive to its plasticity, weight, moisture, resistance, drying, fracture and transformation. These are not merely technical characteristics of a material. They become active conditions within which decisions, gestures and propositions are continually revised. The material consequently participates in the production of what can be known. Making becomes a form of inquiry because the act of making changes the situation from which further understanding can emerge.

Here heuristic inquiry and sensate attentiveness become inseparable. Heuristic describes an inquiry whose direction is discovered through the encounter rather than fully determined in advance; sensate describes the bodily and material register through which that discovery occurs. Moreton's practice therefore does not proceed from a conceptual proposition towards its material realisation in a straightforward movement. It moves through an iterative field of encounter, response, resistance and adjustment. The process might be understood as:

encounter ~ attention ~ making ~ resistance ~ adjustment ~ correspondence ~ further encounter

Wayfaring attentiveness names the movement through this field. To wayfare is not simply to travel from one predetermined point to another. It is to make one's way through an environment whose conditions continually participate in the journey. Moreton's movement between site, reading, image, drawing, collage, architecture and clay operates in this manner. A text can redirect a reading of a site; a site can alter a material proposition; material resistance can produce a new drawing; a photographic image can return through a ceramic form; a ceramic body can subsequently alter the perception of the architectural environment in which it is encountered. The pathway is consequently produced through movement itself.

This also clarifies why Moreton's research collages are important within the practice. Their fragments, annotations, images, diagrams and architectural references do not merely document thought that has already taken place. They provide a spatial condition in which thought can remain in movement. Reading becomes a sensate activity because the eye moves across fragments, pauses, returns, makes connections and encounters interruptions. The collage becomes a heuristic apparatus through which relations can be tested without requiring immediate resolution. Thought is spatialised through the body of the reader.

The same principle extends into Moreton's photographic assemblages and ceramic bodies. In each case, heterogeneous registers are brought into proximity, but proximity alone is insufficient. The more significant movement is from gathering towards correspondence. Bodies begin to affect the conditions of other bodies. This is where the notion of timbre becomes useful. Timbre can be understood as the sensate quality of a relational accord: not a property possessed by an individual body, but something produced through the way bodies, materials, spaces and forces enter into correspondence.

The analogy of the flute makes this distinction particularly clear. The timbre of a flute is not contained within the instrument, nor is it produced by the breathing body alone. It emerges through the encounter between breath, body, instrument, air, material resistance, resonance and architectural environment. The player listens to the sound produced and adjusts the body again; the instrument responds to the altered breath; the room participates in the resonance. The bodies do not simply gather. They wayfare together.

Moreton's sensate attentiveness operates similarly. It seeks neither to master the material nor to dissolve the distinction between bodies. Instead, it develops an attentiveness through which bodies can enter into reciprocal adjustment. This is why correspondence is more useful than simple relation. Relation can describe a connection between things; correspondence suggests an ongoing process in which the participants are changed by their encounter.

Within this framework, atmosphere is not an additional layer placed around the work. It emerges through the sensate correspondence of bodies, materials and spatial registers. Topophilia may describe the attachment through which a place begins to matter; interiority describes the gathering and folding of relations; timbre describes their sensate resonance; atmosphere describes the wider field that becomes perceptible through this resonance. These are not separate stages but overlapping conditions within an ecological spatial practice.

The withdrawn ceramic makes this particularly evident. Firing withdraws clay from its provisional state and gives the material a new persistence, but it does not terminate the relations through which the work can continue to matter. Its apertures, cavities, surfaces, traces and intervals remain capable of encountering light, architecture, atmosphere, movement and other bodies. Its interiority is therefore not simply an enclosed physical space. It is an open capacity for further correspondence.

This is what allows the notion of infinite interiority to become productive. The ceramic does not contain an infinity of meanings or preserve every encounter that has contributed to its making. Rather, its interiority remains inexhaustible because no encounter can finally determine what it may become in relation to another body. The ceramic registers without exhausting; it persists without closing; it withdraws without becoming isolated.

Attentiveness is therefore sensate because it is fundamentally concerned with what bodies can do together. It is an embodied form of inquiry in which perception is already participation, and participation is already a form of knowing. The practitioner does not first perceive a world and then act upon it. Perception, making and thought continually modify one another.

Moreton's wayfaring attentiveness can consequently be understood as an ethics and poetics of responsiveness: an ongoing willingness to remain exposed to what materials, places, architectures and other bodies might disclose. Its purpose is not to arrive at a definitive knowledge of the site, the material or the work, but to sustain the conditions under which further correspondence remains possible.

Attentiveness is sensate because it is not attention directed towards a world from outside. It is the body's participation in a world that is already moving through it.

And this gives us, I think, a very strong conceptual chain for the practice:

sensate attentiveness ~ heuristic inquiry ~ wayfaring ~ correspondence ~ accord ~ timbre ~ atmosphere ~ further bodies

The crucial point is that timbre is not the destination of this sequence. Like the sound of the flute, it is the quality of an ongoing accord. The bodies continue to wayfare; the resonance changes; another encounter becomes possible.

Attentiveness ~ Timbre ~ Wayfaring

A reading apparatus for sensate heuristic inquiry

Attentiveness here is not a looking towards something from outside. It is a becoming involved with what is already moving between bodies.

The site is encountered through temperature, scale, texture, sound, light, weight, memory, architecture and atmosphere; clay through resistance, moisture, gravity, fracture, surface and transformation. These are not simply sensations gathered by a perceiving body. They become correspondences through which the body, material and environment begin to alter one another. Russell Moreton: Correspondence

The heuristic therefore begins in the sensate.

Reading, walking, making, drawing, photographing and inhabiting become ways of moving through an uncertain spatial field. A text can redirect a site; a site can redirect material; material resistance can redirect a drawing; an image can return through ceramic. The pathway is made through the movement itself.

Perhaps this is why the flute offers such a useful sounding.

Breath does not simply enter the instrument. Breath, body, flute, air, material resistance, architecture and listening enter into an accord. Timbre is produced between them. The bodies do not merely gather.

They wayfare together.

The same possibility begins to appear within Moreton's spatial bodies. Research collages hold thought in movement. Photographic assemblages construct provisional environments. Ceramic bodies withdraw from clay while remaining open to further correspondence. The gathered does not become contained; it becomes available for another encounter.

Timbre names something of this felt middle: the sensate resonance of bodies entering correspondence without becoming identical.

The withdrawn ceramic extends this condition. Its apertures, surfaces, cavities and intervals do not close its interiority. They allow it to remain receptive to light, architecture, atmosphere, movement and other bodies. Its persistence is therefore not an ending but a capacity.

Sensate attentiveness ~ heuristic inquiry ~ wayfaring ~ correspondence ~ accord ~ timbre ~ atmosphere ~ further bodies.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It continues to resonate.

Attentiveness — how the body becomes receptive

Heuristic inquiry — how knowing emerges through encounter

Wayfaring — how the inquiry moves

Correspondence — how bodies alter one another

Accord — how they begin to move together

Timbre — how that accord becomes sensately perceptible

Atmosphere — how the resonance extends between bodies

Further bodies — how the proposition remains open

AxisWeb : Making, Correspondence, Spatial Practice, Heuristic Inquiry and Speculative Learning.

Russell Moreton : A Visual Fine Artist

A site-based practice developing through speculative learning, creative propositions and spatial practices.

Russell Moreton is a visual fine artist whose practice explores making as a relational and speculative encounter between bodies, materials, space and thought. Working across ceramics, drawing, photography, collage and spatial practice, he is interested in the imprint not simply as the mark of an artist upon material, but as the trace of an encounter between body, material, force, resistance, movement and time.

His site-based practice develops through heuristic inquiry and wayfaring attentiveness, exploring how craft, theory, art and architecture might enter into correspondence. Through speculative making spaces, spatial assemblages and material experiments, he develops creative propositions for knowledge production in which different bodies and disciplines can remain in dialogue without needing to converge.

Moreton's practice is increasingly concerned with spatial bodies, interiority, atmosphere and the timbre of relational encounters: how materials, places, architectures, images and bodies might enter into accord and wayfare together.

A site-based practice of heuristic inquiry in which bodies, materials and spaces enter correspondence, develop an accord and wayfare together.

Moreton's site-based practice develops through a form of heuristic inquiry grounded in wayfaring attentiveness. Site is understood not simply as a geographical location but as a situated field in which bodies, materials, architectures, images, memories, histories and atmospheres enter into changing relations. Rather than beginning with a predetermined outcome, Moreton works through encounters, allowing the conditions of a site and the resistance of materials to alter what can be perceived, thought and made.

Wayfaring attentiveness describes the movement of this inquiry: a mobile, embodied and receptive practice in which reading, walking, making, drawing, photographing, collaging, inhabiting and material experimentation become interconnected modes of spatial thinking. Knowledge emerges through correspondence rather than through the detached observation of a pre-existing object of study.

The practice therefore moves beyond gathering. Heterogeneous bodies enter correspondence, and through repeated encounter may enter into an accord—a wayfaring together in which each body alters the conditions of the others. Timbre names the sensate quality of this relational accord: the resonance produced between material, bodily, spatial and affective registers. Atmosphere emerges through this resonance rather than being imposed upon the work.

Ceramic becomes particularly significant within this ecology because firing produces material persistence without securing the proposition. The withdrawn ceramic remains capable of entering further correspondences with bodies, architectures, light, atmosphere, memory and movement. Its interiority is therefore not a closed container but an open and potentially inexhaustible capacity for further resonance. The ceramic persists, while the proposition remains in play.

Moreton's site-based practice can consequently be understood as an ecology of wayfaring bodies: a spatial practice in which making becomes a form of inquiry, correspondence becomes a mode of knowing, and material persistence creates conditions for encounters that have not yet happened.

Visual Workings~Collage Material : Spatial & Ceramic Practice: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought:

Visual Workings~Collage Material : Spatial & Ceramic Practice: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought:: Research Collage ~ Persistent Bodies of Thought: Spatial Bodies~Intermezzo~Alchemy : Nomadic Photographic Assemblage. Heuristic Devices~Appa...

Reading Interiority : Drying Rooms~Spaces and Intervals in Clay

Interiority / Atmosphere

This foregrounds the drying room as a spatial and atmospheric condition, rather than treating the post primarily as a theoretical text.

The drying room becomes a spatial condition of reading: clay is still changing, neither fully provisional nor materially settled. The reading body encounters this condition through touch, while Barad's writing opens that touch towards responsibility, otherness and a futurity that cannot yet be fully inhabited.

Clay as a troubling interiority of reading and as an material interval that becomes available for a developing spatial inquiry.

Clay allows us to reach out, as it touches us, touchings~bodies reaching out into the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never touch. Their touching is to respond~In~correspondence.

For Karen Barad.

Living compassionately requires recognizing and facing (touch~ing) our responsibility to the infinite of the other (that we are) welcoming the stranger whose very existence is the possibility of touching and being touched.

The stranger who gifts us with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come (a futurity perhaps of the withdrawn ceramic that was touching compassionately the bodies of stranger~in~clay.

 

Reading Interiority ~ Drying Rooms, Spaces and Intervals in Clay

A drying room is neither simply an interior nor a space of waiting. Clay occupies a changing condition, gathering the traces of its making while moving towards another material state. Its persistence is not yet secured; its possibilities have not disappeared.

Reading enters this interval as another form of touching. Words, materials and bodies encounter one another without becoming the same. Through Barad, touching becomes a question of correspondence and responsibility: how bodies reach towards an otherness they cannot fully know, and how this encounter changes what it means to respond.

The clay body is already situated within a weather~~world, exposed to forces through which its condition continues to alter. Reading does not stand apart from these movements. It becomes another body within them, carrying soundings that may surface through making or withdraw into the material relations of the ceramic.

Perhaps the drying room is a space of such ambiguous inhabitation: where the provisional persists, where the withdrawn remains available, and where the stranger is not simply encountered but helps to make another encounter possible.

Reading~clay~ceramic. Touching~being touched. Persistent bodies, still~in~~play.

What might pass between bodies without becoming their possession?

interiority,

spatial practice,

reading body,

clay~ceramic,

correspondence,

touch,

material thinking,

Karen Barad,

threshold,

speculative learning,

Spatial~Agencements : What is gathered is never simply contained~it reverberates~

Spatial~Agencements

A Research Ecology of Making.

A practice begins somewhere between things.

A reading encounters an image.

An image recalls a place.

A place produces a movement.

A movement gathers a material.

A material resists the hand.

The resistance changes the making.

Nothing quite remains where it began.

Spatial Agencements describes this movement through a practice that gathers bodies without finally containing them. Clay, ceramic, drawing, architecture, landscape, photography, memory, reading and walking enter into provisional correspondence. Some relations become visible; others remain latent, waiting for another encounter.

The wayfarer gathers.

But gathering is not accumulation. It is a temporary bringing-into-relation.

A fragment may become a drawing.

A drawing may become a spatial proposition.

A spatial proposition may enter clay.

Clay may become ceramic.

The ceramic may enter another room, another atmosphere, another body.

The practice moves through these transformations without requiring them to resolve into a single narrative.

Here, the archive becomes mobile.

Old images, forgotten texts, abandoned propositions and previous material encounters can be returned to and disturbed by the present. What was once documentation can become material again. What appeared peripheral can become central. What seemed finished can reopen.

Archive → anarchive.

The studio consequently becomes less a place where things are produced than a situation in which bodies encounter one another.

Clay is one such body.

It receives, resists, absorbs, fractures, records and transforms. Fire changes the conditions again. What was provisional becomes persistent, but persistence does not mean closure. The ceramic withdraws from the immediacy of making while remaining available to light, atmosphere, architecture, movement and other bodies.

The work becomes a spatial body.

Not because it represents space.

Because it participates in relations that produce space.

Keywords.

spatial agencements, research ecology, wayfaring, gathering, correspondence, spatial bodies, bodying, material reciprocity, speculative learning, situated ecology, making, clay~ceramic, archive~anarchive, walking, landscape, interiority, permeability, threshold, futurity, In~~Touching,

Russell Moreton's current practice operates as a spatial ecology of making in which ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, landscape, interiority, teaching, reading and remembered experience remain in active correspondence.

Rather than developing through a linear progression of ideas, the practice moves through encounters. Materials, images, texts, places, bodies and previous works are gathered, displaced and returned to in altered circumstances. Earlier propositions do not become resolved stages within a history of development; they remain available as active bodies within the present.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its spatiality does not reside simply in the production of objects with architectural or sculptural characteristics. Space emerges through the relations that form between bodies: between material and gesture, surface and interior, object and atmosphere, architecture and movement, reading and making.

The studio becomes an expanded environment in which these relations can be tested.

Making is not understood as the execution of a pre-existing idea. It is a mode of inquiry through which thought becomes distributed across material, body and situation. Clay participates in this process through its resistance, plasticity, weight, fragility and capacity for transformation. Pressure becomes trace; cutting becomes aperture; excavation becomes interior; repetition becomes difference. The ceramic body emerges through these material events rather than simply receiving a predetermined form. This emphasis on making as an active mode of knowing is already central to Moreton's recent formulation of the studio as a site of continuous exchange. 

Gathering

A recurring figure within the practice is the wayfarer.

The wayfarer gathers.

Readings, images, fragments, materials, spatial memories, drawings, architectural propositions and encounters are collected not as information to be accumulated, but as bodies that might enter into correspondence.

The gathering remains provisional.

Something is carried.

Something is placed beside something else.

A relation appears.

The bodies may then disperse, only to return through another material or situation.

Gather ~ carry ~ encounter ~ release ~ return ~ gather again.

This movement is central to the practice's relationship with the archive.

The archive is not treated as a stable repository of completed knowledge. Through collage, drawing, rereading and making, archival material becomes mobile. The old text encounters the new ceramic; the image encounters another body; a forgotten proposition becomes perceptible through a changed material condition.

The archive begins to become an anarchive.

Not because its contents are discarded, but because they begin to move again.

The archive is not proving the present practice. It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

This is why the practice can be understood as a research ecology rather than a research method. It does not establish a fixed procedure through which knowledge is extracted. It creates conditions in which different bodies of material can encounter, trouble and transform one another.

Wayfaring

Wayfaring provides a corresponding spatial logic.

The practice moves through environments rather than simply representing them. Walking, looking, gathering and making become ways of attending to the relations already present within a place.

The wayfarer does not simply move across a landscape.

The landscape participates in the movement.

This extends into the studio. Materials, tools, surfaces, texts and images become part of a field through which the practice navigates. The resulting work is less a destination than a temporary constellation: a gathering of forces that remains open to further movement.

The spatial body is therefore not a body that contains movement.

It is a body that becomes through movement.

Correspondent bodies

Theoretical and artistic references enter this ecology not simply as sources of authority but as correspondent bodies.

Tim Ingold's thinking around correspondence and wayfaring, Karen Barad's account of intra-action and diffraction, Erin Manning's attention to movement and the anarchive, Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of interiority, and the architectural propositions of Arakawa and Gins and Zuzana Kovar all become possible bodies with which the practice can think.

They are not applied to the work as explanatory frameworks.

They enter the work.

They alter its vocabulary.

The material encounters them in turn.

A reading can become pressure.

A theoretical proposition can become an aperture.

An architectural question can become a chamber.

A spatial memory can become surface.

The relation is reciprocal.

The ceramic body

Within this ecology, clay has become an increasingly significant participant.

The clay body gathers what has passed through the practice, but it does not simply contain it. It troubles what has been gathered through its own material resistance.

This is where the practice moves towards the idea of the Permeable Chamber.

The ceramic body is neither simply vessel nor sculpture, container nor architectural fragment. Its apertures, surfaces, cavities and thresholds produce relations between interior and exterior, enclosure and permeability, withdrawal and correspondence.

The body becomes through what passes through it.

Fire changes this proposition again.

What was provisional in clay becomes materially persistent in ceramic. The fired body withdraws from the immediate responsiveness of making, but the relations of making continue through its surfaces, apertures, weight, atmosphere and spatial presence.

The ceramic is withdrawn from making, but not withdrawn from correspondence.

It enters another temporality.

Light touches it.

Air passes around it.

Shadow inhabits it.

Architecture situates it.

Another body encounters it.

The ceramic becomes a spatial body not because spatial characteristics have been added to it, but because it continues to participate in spatial relations.

Interiority as movement

Interiority consequently becomes less a place than a movement between bodies.

It may occur within a cavity, across a surface, between an aperture and light, within the atmospheric field of an installation, or within the encounter between a viewer and a withdrawn ceramic body.

The interior is not necessarily what is contained.

It can be what emerges between.

This allows Moreton's earlier concerns with architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching and spatial research to remain active within the present practice without being reduced to historical influences. The current ceramic work becomes another site through which those concerns can be materially re-entered.

The practice is therefore less concerned with defining what a ceramic object is than with asking what relations a ceramic body can make possible.

In~~Touching

This movement brings the practice towards In~~Touching.

Touch is understood here not simply as physical contact but as a distributed condition of correspondence. Bodies can touch across distance, through light, atmosphere, memory, surface, material resistance and spatial relation.

To touch is to be altered.

To become in touch is to become responsive to what another body is doing.

The practice consequently attends to the world's patternings and murmurings: forces, traces, residues, atmospheres and movements that pass between bodies without necessarily becoming fully visible.

The ceramic body carries these murmurings forward.

But they are never its possession.

They continue elsewhere.

A spatial ecology of making

Moreton's present spatial practice can therefore be understood as a research ecology of making: a field in which gathering, wayfaring, correspondence, material encounter and transformation remain continually entangled.

Its movement might be traced as:

gathering → wayfaring → correspondence → troubling → making → firing → withdrawal → reverberation → gathering again

This is not a method.

It is a condition of practice.

The work remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research does not seek a final position but creates temporary conditions in which different bodies can encounter one another and become otherwise.

The spatial emerges through this movement.

The ceramic body becomes spatial through correspondence.

The archive becomes anarchive through movement.

Making becomes a way of learning.

And the practice continues to wayfare.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates. 

A Troubling Spatial Study of Bodies, Atmospheres and Correspondence.

Reading Apparatus.

Speculative spatial inquiry / practice-based research.

This is not a study of interiority. 

It is an attempt to stay with the movements through which interiority becomes perceptible.

Permeable Hosting : Around Moreton’s Interiority is an exploratory spatial study emerging from a practice of clay, ceramics, drawing, photography, fieldwork and material inquiry. It considers interiority not as an enclosed place but as a movement between bodies, surfaces, atmospheres and materials. Through the ideas of permeable hosting, correspondence, ecological bodies and the Permeable Chamber, the text follows how spatial relations emerge through trace, immersion, material duration and withdrawal. It is deliberately unresolved: a spatial text~script intended to remain open to further encounters.

surface → trace → field → body → host → atmosphere → threshold → chamber → withdrawal → correspondence

Permeable Hosting : Around Moreton’s Interiority

Interiority becomes a movement rather than a place.

This proposition begins to gather something that has been moving through Russell Moreton’s spatial practice for some time: an understanding of interiority not as an enclosed condition, nor simply as the space within a body, but as something produced through the correspondence of bodies, materials, atmospheres and forces. Interior is not necessarily what lies behind a surface. It can emerge across a surface, within a field, through a trace, between bodies, or within the temporal unfolding of a material encounter.

Moreton’s fieldworks begin from this instability.

A troubling spatial study does not resolve the spatial. It makes the spatial capable of further correspondence.

Clay, charcoal, wax, cyanotype, paper, photographic residue, light, weather, dust, earth and other relatively simple matter(s) are brought into situations where their distinctions can become unsettled. These materials are not employed simply as means towards representation. They become active bodies within an expanded field of relations. A charcoal mark can register pressure and movement while simultaneously becoming atmosphere. Wax can act as a skin, receiving, obscuring and holding. Clay can become surface, field, trace or body. Cyanotype can receive light and weather over duration, allowing an atmospheric condition to emerge through its exposure.

The field is therefore not a neutral ground upon which things are placed.

The field becomes a body through the relations moving across it.

What appears as an indexical body can begin to dissolve into its surroundings. Figure and ground lose their certainty. Trace merges with material residue; drawn bodies become absorbed into atmospheric surfaces; photographic processes allow light, fluid and weather to become participants. The body is still perceptible, but its edges are troubled. It becomes difficult to say precisely where one body ends and another begins.

This troubling is important.

The work does not seek to resolve the body back into a stable form. Instead, it attends to what becomes possible when bodies remain partially merged, when their differences continue to act upon one another. The resulting field is immersive not because it surrounds the viewer with an effect, but because it proposes another spatial condition: a space in which bodies are already implicated in one another.

What happens when a body is understood as something capable of hosting what exceeds it?

Here, permeability becomes more than a physical quality. It becomes an activity of correspondence.

A permeable body receives. It is affected. It changes through what enters it, while also changing what it receives. Hosting is therefore never a neutral accommodation. There is no unchanged host. The hosted body is altered, the hosting body is altered, and the threshold between them becomes an active interval.

This is where Moreton’s interest in the simple matter(s) of the weather world becomes significant.

Weather is not treated as a subject to be represented. Light, moisture, atmosphere, temperature, duration and exposure become ecological participants. The cyanotype made through a pinhole intermediary over hours of sunlight is one such condition: an image emerging through the passage of light, weather and time. The photographic surface hosts forces that cannot themselves be held as objects. Something of the weather world becomes materially present through its effects.

The work becomes an emergent atmospheric condition.

It is an ecological body enacting its presence through its unfolding durational existence.

This is close to the piddock, but not the same. The piddock makes its presence through the removal of matter: boring, excavating, inhabiting, producing a chamber through its activity. The cyanotype works differently. Its presence accumulates through exposure, registration and duration. One leaves a cavity; the other leaves an atmospheric trace. One makes absence perceptible; the other makes an elusive presence perceptible.

Both, however, trouble the assumption that a body simply occupies a material world.

Bodies make worlds through their activities within matter.

This becomes increasingly important across Moreton’s fieldworks. The indexical body is not merely a record of where a body has been. It is a material event through which other bodies become perceptible. A rubbing carries something of the surface encountered. A photographic exposure carries something of the light that produced it. Charcoal carries pressure, movement and gesture. Wax receives and holds traces. Clay absorbs force, resistance, touch and time.

The trace therefore becomes more than evidence.

The trace becomes another body.

And when traces gather, they produce an atmosphere.

This is perhaps where the spatial practice moves beyond an understanding of interiority as architecture or enclosure. The interior can be produced without a conventional inside. It can occur within the density of a material field, within the interval between bodies, within an aperture, or through the atmospheric relations of a situation.

Could the interior begin before enclosure?

Could a chamber emerge through correspondence rather than construction?

The clay~ceramic body takes this question somewhere else.

Field clay remains immersed in the instability of making. It can be folded, scraped, pierced, smeared, layered, collapsed and reworked. Its interiority remains close to the movement of the hand and the contingencies of matter. Clay is open to intervention.

Firing changes the proposition.

What was fluid becomes materially persistent. What was provisional becomes a body that can no longer be entered through making in quite the same way. The ceramic withdraws from the hand while becoming available to other bodies. Its surface carries the pressures and traces of its making, but its interior is no longer simply recoverable. It becomes atmospheric, spatial and withdrawn.

The body withdraws, but correspondence continues.

This withdrawal is not closure. It is another form of hosting.

The ceramic body carries something of the immersive field into another material condition. Its apertures allow light and air to pass. Its surfaces receive atmosphere. Its chamber gathers shadow. Its material persistence holds something of what happened while making itself available to what has not yet happened.

The Permeable Chamber emerges here.

It is not simply the interior of a ceramic form. It is an interval between retention and release, surface and depth, immersion and withdrawal. It gathers without completely containing. It hosts without remaining unchanged. It becomes spatial through its capacity to encounter other bodies.

The chamber is produced through correspondence.

This also changes the meaning of touch.

Touch is not restricted to direct physical contact. Light touches a photographic surface. Weather touches paper. A piddock touches clay through excavation. Fire touches clay through transformation. Air touches a ceramic aperture. A viewer's body touches a withdrawn ceramic through perception, proximity and duration.

In~~Touching therefore becomes an expanded ecological condition.

It is an attentiveness to how bodies become perceptible through the forces by which they affect and are affected by other bodies. Touch can occur across an interval. Correspondence can happen without contact becoming literal. A body can be touched by something it cannot hold.

The spatial practice gathers around this possibility.

Fieldwork, drawing, photography, collage, walking, architecture, clay and ceramic are not separate activities so much as different material situations in which interiority can move. The field merges bodies. The trace carries an encounter. The atmosphere troubles the boundary. The aperture enables passage. The chamber gathers. The ceramic withdraws.

Field ~ trace ~ body ~ host ~ atmosphere ~ chamber ~ ceramic.

These are not stages towards a final form. They are active conditions within a larger ecology of making.

Perhaps this is where Moreton’s spatial practice now gathers most intensely: not around the production of spatial objects, but around the possibility that space is continually produced between bodies that remain capable of affecting one another.

Interiority is consequently not a place waiting to be entered.

It is something that happens.

It gathers across surfaces and within bodies. It moves through atmosphere. It becomes perceptible through traces, apertures, residues, pressure, light and duration. It can immerse, trouble, withdraw and return.

Interiority becomes a movement rather than a place.

And the spatial body becomes the body capable of hosting that movement—permeable, attentive, troubled and open to correspondence with other ecological bodies.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates.

Spatial Practice; Interiority; Permeable Hosting; Spatial Bodies; Correspondence; Atmosphere; Ecological Bodies; Materiality; Permeability; Clay~Ceramic; Indexical Bodies; Thresholds; In~~Touching; Futurity, Weather~World; Fieldwork; Material Reciprocity; Immersion; Withdrawal; Permeable Chamber; Trace; Duration; Ecological Practice, 

It reverberates.

It troubles.

So the text itself becomes a small Permeable Chamber.

It gathers fieldworks, indexical bodies, weather, clay, charcoal, wax, cyanotype, piddock, atmosphere, firing and ceramic withdrawal — but doesn't close them into a system.

That makes “troubling spatial study” more than a subtitle. It describes the mode of inquiry:

EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS/Innerness → Permeable Chamber : Performativity/Unbounded Outcomes

Interiority / Atmosphere

Wayfaring a spatiality that is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

The space of the vessel is already more than an enclosure. Surface and interior become mutually perceptible, light moves towards darkness and back again, and the body of the pot becomes a site of correspondence between maker, material and inhabitant. Walking extends this relation into place: paths connect, scatter, remember and open outward. Read through the current practice, innerness begins to move away from enclosure towards permeability. The interior is not simply what is inside the body; it is something produced through contact between bodies, surfaces, atmospheres and movement. The chamber becomes active because it remains capable of encounter.

Active Thresholds~Hosting Permeability.

Speculative inquiry 190926

This post opens perhaps the most important architectural question for the current ceramic body:

What if interiority is not what a body contains, but what happens between bodies?

That is a substantial shift.

The earlier vocabulary is:

vessel → interior → innerness → dwelling → surface

The current vocabulary can re-enter it as:

body → threshold → aperture → permeability → correspondence → chamber

And this is where the old architectural research becomes materially redistributed through clay.

The hut, pot, interior, path, ruin, walking body and atmosphere do not have to become references for the ceramic. They become correspondent bodies that have already been thinking through the spatial questions that clay is now materially troubling.

MATERIAL and AFFECT

EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS

RUINS and SUBJECTIVITY

Encounter with place through transpositions/re-deployment of materials/technologies and design.

The rules followed by medieval cathedral builders could not and did not prescribe their practice in every detail, but instead allowed scope for action to be precisely fine-tuned in relation to the exigencies of the situation at hand. The cathedral and the laboratory, MAKING, Tim Ingold

PATHS alert us to how we are scattered as well as affirmed by the places through which we move. Edward Thomas.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF WHAT HAPPENS: SPACE, POLITICS and AFFECT.

Nigel Thrift

VISUAL FINE ART / TRANSACTIVE through Digital Technologies POETIC / EVERYDAY ABSTRACTIONS

MAKING / MANIFESTING FORMS / STRANGE TOOLS

INDEXICAL / ITERATION ( new version, repetition, closer approximation, scrutiny, observations, sequence, finding a solution/perception to a problem)

UNBOUNDED OUTCOMES / ITERATION becomes the starting point of the next iteration PROGRESSION through PERFORMATIVITY

AGAINST SPACE

Making : anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.

Tim Ingold

Immaterial architecture creation and contemplation artist and architect

The contemplation of art is primarily a form of visual awareness, of a single object by a single viewer, in which sound, smell and touch are as far as possible eradicated. Placed in a hermetic enclosure and protected against decay, the artwork is seen and not used. The viewer leaves no trace or mark because touch would undermine the artwork’s status as an idea and connect it to the material world.

To translate the drawing into the building requires an intimate knowledge of the techniques and materials of drawing and building.

ATMOSPHERES

THE EPIPHANY OF ARCHITECTURE

CIRCULATION, ENCLOSURES and their LIGHT

TOTAL ARCHITECTURE, Walter Gropius

TOTAL ART, Theo van Doesburg/DE STIJL

GESAMTKUNSTWERK, all embracing aesthetic, where art becomes architecture and architecture art. A synthesis, and revolving intersection where each medium exists at the service of formal innovation; a kind of essentialist discourse or tradition that might be buried in the past.

Brian Clarke, Nerves of Ecstasy by Robert C. Morgan, PACE 2013.

ARCHITECTURAL FORMS OF ENCOUNTER/DEBATE

HISTORIES, PHILOSOPHIES, AESTHETICS

Katsura Detached Palace. Kenzo Tange, Walter Gropius. 1960

(extended in a modular fashion and adapted to changing royal needs over the centuries)

Katsura consolidates all qualities in history but not in a creative way. Since it lacks in the strength of its unifying all members, its impression is lyricism but lacking unifying tension. KenzoTange

Ise : Prototype of Japanese Architecture. Kenzo Tange, Noboru Kawazoe. 1961

(Ise Shrine rebuilt every 20 years with new materials)

Ise Shrine manifests primate yet powerful, simple yet noble, and serene yet ecliptic qualities, which cannot help moving us. Tange

THE PRIMATIVE

JOMON POT, 2000 BCE, (Jomon period 14,000 BCE-300 BCE)

Jomon, (means Rope pattern) wildly decorated pottery, idols, and thatched pit dwellings. The style comes to stand for the savage and dynamic.

Jomon appeals to us with the flooding energy of the fundamental life of the people. It has a resilient strength and a sense of mass, which comes out of through their wild battles with nature: it also has a free and agile sensitivity. Kenzo Tange

THE ARISTOCRATIC

YAYOI EARTHENWARE, 350 AD, (Yayoi period 300 BCE-250 BCE)

In the Yayoi period, earthenware becomes more refined, and structures like granaries are raised on stilts, building developments reflect the emergence of social hierarchies.

In Yayoi, man and nature are synthesized to create a calm lyricism, acknowledging nature’s blessings. A passive attitude, submitting to the surroundings prevails. A flat equilibrium and quiet balance with no dynamism are left in a transient mood.

Kenzo Tange is originally drawn to the Yayoi style, but starts to oscillate with the Jomon style in the late ‘50s’ For Tange and the future Metabolists there is no conflict in their simultaneous study of tradition and modernism. Tange insists on exploiting tradition as a means of innovation, while building prolifically in a modern mode and strategizing the high-tech avant-garde of Metabolism.

There’s more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvised builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don’t need permission for them. There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.

Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees. Roger Deakin.2007

PAO, a structure that you can repeatedly put up and dismantle. Because of occupant’s nomadic life, it needed to be lightweight, and be able to be built very quickly and have the ability to be taken apart and re-built many times. Even materials that have already been used can be reused so long as they are disassembled correctly and preserved properly.

To maximize the reuse of components one needs to standardize them so they can be pre-fabricated. The order of construction becomes important as it influences the disassembling of the structure; the technical features of joints, assemblages of materials and their localities can become both conceptual to the experience of the space and its architectonics and to the actual innovative building process.

In the Mesopotamia city of Ur, they bricked over houses buried in the mud and built new houses in the same spot over and over. Its been learned that they repeated this eight times. There was apparently a very strong impulse to create an eternal building.

Kiyonori Kikutake

Rem Koolhaas

SO THE MUD HOUSE BECAME THE RENAISSANCE AND THE TENT BECAME METABOLOLISM?

Kiyonori Kikutake

YES, IT BECAME A METABOLIST STRUCTURE MADE OF WOOD. AND I THINK THE NOTION OF ATTAINING ETERNITY WITH A MUD HOUSE-OR ATTEMPTING TO-IS REALLY FASCINATING.

In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. 

Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.

Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment. 

Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.

Defined Interiors : By material, agency and social and private architectures. 

Interiors of Pots : Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude. Fragment as a broken shard, from notebook March 2014.

Innerness

The light of reflection and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light; from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.

The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.

The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.

Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).

Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.

Reflections on Heidegger,

We traverse from light to dark many times as we gather in the pots (thingness) as it were unfolding in our presence (nearness).

Vessels as Spatial Metaphors around Innerness and Difference. 

The Jar

Heidegger as a pouring and gathering social metaphor. Anecdote of the Jar.

Dominion over the Unmade.

Wallace Stevens, poem cited by Edmund de Waal.

WORKING at the transitional surface/stage in the HUMANITIES as it re-boots itself into THE POSTMODERN.

A SOMATIC ARCHIVE, of subjectivities whose perceptions and environments are going to change forever; like the particularities of the analogue trace in photography that is now becoming a distant experiential condition, an orphan extinct from the subjectivities of its originating culture/organism.

The imagination and process aesthetic of the Posthuman Condition 

A Theoretical and Semantic search amongst Ruins and Archetypes 

Historical Perspectives

Dwelling/Poetics Heidegger Archetypes/Symbols Jung

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Flesh and The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze/Bacon 

Feminist Geographies The Posthuman

Posthuman thought inscribes the contemporary subject in the conditions of its own historicity.

Posthuman Subjectivity : Rosi Braidotti 

LIGHT into SOMANTIC SPACES

Continuum and Chora (light and the shadow of chora)

Life expresses itself in a multiplicity of empirical act: there is nothing to say, but everything to do. Life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualiizing flows of energies, through codes of vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networked systems. (Braidotti, 2013:190)

De Architectura, Vitruvius

Architecture consists of order, arrangement, proportion or eurythmy, symmetry and decor, and distribution.

Arrangement as an “Idea” refers to the Aristotelian notion of “Image­ representation” as phaantasia a precondition to drawing, effectively occupying and revealing a space between Being and becoming.

INTERIOR DESIGN UCA FARNHAM

DESIGN AND RESEARCH PROJECT 2015 SPACE BETWEEN PEOPLE.

SITE-PLACE-DIALOGUES

THE RUINED ABBEY, stands as architectural remnants of a pastoral community now set in parkland and open to the public as a site for recreation.

The Abbey and its experiential values and feelings have been employed as both a reality of a lived experience and as a virtual diffractive site for thinking through contemporary issues in arts (relational aesthetics), and architectural design through exploratory spatial inquires with the specifics of place studies.

What this project is not

Gift Shop and Visitors Centre What this project might become

Proposal for a symposium,

Personal Structures, artists and writers talk about “Time, Space and Existence”. Setting for an exhibition that can promote the symposium.

A room containing a virtual work of design that challenges and opens up the physical architecture.

A design for a interactive (mobile) component, a structure that can act as an interlocutory apparatus in the transposition of the phenomena of place.

Building Partitioning of Space.

Architectures as atmospheres that promote the contents and support the interaction of things including humans.

Design as a tool of transposition, of layering and collaging different spatial values both cultural and experiential.

Painting Subjectivities, matter drawn and crafted from site inquiry.

LIGHT VALUES

The Transmission of Light,

Instantaneous psychological effect that stimulates the senses. The Specificity of Colour

Synergistically working with place and symbolizing abstract concepts and thoughts.

Humans use colour in their surroundings for decorative purposes or to chronicle their every day lives and other important events.

Earthy, Corporeal, Spiritual, Pastoral. Capricious.

Colour has always been used symbolically, whether pained directly on the body or worn in garments to announce the wearers’ social status, their tribe or country’ or other significant group.

The Abbey, On-Site (qualitative research with stained glass samples) Analogous Colour Fields with Monochromatic Features, utilise complementary colours or forms to focus the difference and diversity of the design installation.

Red, Flashed Ruby glass.

Brown is the ultimate earth colour associated with a “durability” of terra-cotta, clay.

Amber, Light, Medium and Dark. Yellow, Orange, Imagination/Enlightenment, Intensity, Sunlight.

Purple, Red/Blue, Spirituality, New Age, Cutting Edge Technologies. Diversity, Complexity, Artistry, Uniqueness.

THE ABBEY AND THE CISTERCIAN ORDER

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION : Caruso St John

HISTORY IS THE RAW MATERIAL OF ARCHITECTURE. Aldo Rossi

TRADITION AND MODERNISM

CONTINUITY-LEGACY-TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION

Today the nuances of language that make up these architectures only exist as an intellectual discourse and do not operate at the emotional level that would have engaged the original inhabitants, or audiences of these buildings. And yet we are still emotionally affected by these structures. Denied access to the specific culture of their iconography. We respond, at a more visceral level, to the more general culture of their construction.

Adam Caruso on the medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire.

Towards an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing. 2002

Thinking with Walking/Paths/Huts

WALKING was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings; Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.

The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot. Robert Macfarlene

ON REFLECTION

What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?

What does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

For Edward Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses-between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events.

HE IMAGINED HIMSELF IN TOPOGRAPHICAL TERMS

HEIDEGGER’S HUT

A TOPOLOGY OF BEING, PLACE, WORLD. Jeff Malpas

METHODOLOGIES OF DESIGN

GESALT, GRISAILLE, LEITMOTIF, MATRIX, FORMAL PATTERN, SURFACE

VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio

MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM

THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR

A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN

THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :

The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.

THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.

CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES

THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL

PAINTING, Robert Mangold.

TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY

BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO

ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS

WORKING NOTES 20 August 2018

Fragments/Thoughts CONSTELLATIONS NIGHT DRAWINGS

OUTPOST URBAN FROTTAGES/ Drawing Strategies

SCULPTURE TRAIL/ Minimalist, Post Modem, elements, assemblage, collage REFLEXIVITITY / AGENCY / POST STUDIO

Mobius Strip, experiential feedback into REAL LIFE / NOWNESS SEARCHING for creative anthropologies from the landscape.

ACTIVE and creative engagements. PERFORMATIVITY LANDSCAPES

SENSORY WALKS

USING the topology close to hand, the unique geographies of the rivers from source to sea.

The four together

I think these four should not be made to look like a chronological development. Their power is in the fact that each contains a different activity that the current practice can return to.

Older post Active body now

The Arts Trace → permeability

Lightness / Synthesis / Solitude Multiplicity → gathering

Time / Action / Diagram Kairos → futurity

Emotive Spatial Encounters Innerness → permeable chamber

And there is a really interesting movement across them:

Trace

↓

Gathering

↓

Movement / Kairos

↓

Interior / Atmosphere

↓

Clay

↓

Ceramic

↓

Permeable Chamber

↓

Futurity

But I wouldn't put that as a diagram explaining the archive. I think it is better understood as a wayfaring possibility through the archive.

The deeper speculative proposition

What I think is emerging from these four posts is that the current spatial practice may not simply be about making ceramic bodies spatial.

Spatiality is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

The earlier work repeatedly approaches this through different media:

cyanotype allows material to seep beyond the traced body;

collage and montage allow fragments to occupy a shared field;

diagram allows temporal and spatial relations to remain in movement;

the vessel allows surface and interior to sense one another;

walking allows place and body to continually alter one another.

Clay now becomes a particularly intense site for all of these propositions because it can receive, resist, absorb, register, perforate, enclose, open and transform.

Then firing changes the proposition again.

The archive gathers the activities through which spatiality was already becoming perceptible: trace, movement, multiplicity, innerness, atmosphere and encounter. Clay does not resolve these bodies into form. It troubles them into correspondence.

The spatial practice was already there, dispersed across bodies. Clay became the place where they could touch.

That last sentence feels particularly close to what you are now calling In~~Touching.