Lived Experience~A Situated Ecology

Lived Experience

A Situated Ecology.

Tentative and Open Spatial Bodies, Ceramics. 2026

Correspondences of Bodies — the gathering

Wayfaring — the movement

Archive → Anarchive — the transformation~

This practice has not developed through a linear progression of ideas, but through a shifting ecology of encounters.

Ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching, spatial research and collaborative making have remained in correspondence across different periods of the work. Some propositions have receded; others have returned years later in altered material conditions. Earlier works continue to participate in the present, not as resolved historical stages but as active traces within an ongoing search.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its formation has taken place through materials, places, bodies, architectures, organisms, images, texts, tools and other people. Each enters differently, producing correspondences that can alter the direction of the work. Knowledge is not simply gathered and applied, but emerges through these encounters.

The studio becomes a site of this activity: a place where research can remain provisional, where material processes can think alongside theoretical propositions, and where visual and spatial material can hold different ontological positions without requiring them to settle into a single explanation.

Clay has become an increasingly important participant in this ecology. Through making, the material receives traces of pressure, resistance, repetition, weathering, drilling and repair. Surfaces become histories of encounters; cavities become interiors produced by action; minor gestures accumulate into larger spatial conditions.

What appears in the present is therefore never entirely new.

It is a surfacing.

Earlier concerns with the body, absence and trace correspond with current questions of perforation, ecological agency and material interiority. Architectural research returns through the vessel and the cavity. Interiority becomes porous. Repetition becomes difference. A minor gesture can move an entire ecology.

I understand this as a spatial practice of learning to make.

The practice remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research is a gathering of correspondences rather than a search for a final position: a situated ecology in which materials, histories, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures can continue to enter, disturb and transform one another.

The work does not simply record where the practice has been.

It creates conditions for where it might go next.

Correspondences of Bodies

Wayfaring from Archive to Anarchive.

The archive is not proving the present practice.

It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

Readings, images, drawings, places, architectures, materials and remembered encounters gather as bodies of inquiry. They do not form a history so much as a spatial field—bodies becoming perceptible through their proximity to one another.

Clay enters this gathering differently.

It touches what has been read, remembered and imagined, becoming another body through which these propositions can move. Hand, matter, force, resistance, surface, interior, aperture and atmosphere begin to gather. Fire changes their proposition again, carrying them into ceramic bodies that persist, withdraw and encounter other bodies.

The archive begins to loosen.

Old propositions find new surfaces.

Images find other interiors.

Readings enter matter.

Matter returns the reading differently.

Archive~clay~body~fire~ceramic~space~atmosphere~wayfaring~correspondence.

What emerges is not a method or a sequence, but a spatial body of inquiry: a wayfaring among bodies already in movement.

The anarchive is this movement.

A gathering that does not contain, but opens.

A correspondence that does not conclude, but continues.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It reverberates.

Permeable Chambers~Interiority understood through the surfacing of research, matter(s) between clay~ceramic~and beyond

"It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived"

The Sighted Watchmaker : Making, Tim Ingold .2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Chambers for Surfaced Readings, Russell Moreton, Ceramics. 2025

Clay is always a depth for correspondences, simultaneously surfacing as a landing site~becoming.

Structural Concepts/What I hear in your practice : Kairos~Clay as an emerging ontology of making

Kairos as an emerging ontology of making

I love this phrase.

Kairos as an Emerging Ontology of Making immediately shifts the discussion away from materials alone and towards a philosophy of making as the emergence of the opportune moment. It also introduces time as an active condition of practice, not merely a backdrop.

However, I think kairos needs to be treated very carefully. If it's simply used to mean "the right moment," it becomes a poetic metaphor. If it becomes a structural concept, it has real philosophical weight.

What I hear in your practice is this:

Chronos is measured, sequential time—the time of manufacture.

Kairos is the moment when relations reorganise themselves—the instant in which matter, force, resistance and action produce something that could not have been predicted.

Clay as Spatial Field~Under-construction from process to fired object.

Kairos~Visual Manifesto : Towards an Ontology of Making

That distinction feels fundamental.

Your work is not about waiting for the "right moment." It is about creating the conditions in which kairos can occur.

That is a much more radical claim.

I can imagine the opening of a manifesto rather than an artist statement.

Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Making

Making begins before intention.

It begins with the encounter.

An imprint is the first event of this encounter. It is neither the mark of an autonomous subject nor the passive registration of matter. It is the emergence of a relation. Body, material, tool, force, resistance, and time become momentarily inseparable. Every imprint records this negotiation.

Making unfolds through kairos: not chronological time, but the opportune moment in which material relations reorganise themselves. Form does not proceed according to a predetermined sequence. It emerges through interruption, resistance, contingency, and constructive collapse. Each material event opens the possibility of another.

Constructive collapse is therefore not the failure of form but its condition of renewal. Collapse interrupts certainty, allowing matter to reorganise itself into new spatial configurations. Form remains provisional, continually negotiated rather than finally resolved.

The work is not an object that represents these processes. It is their residue. It remembers the forces that produced it while remaining open to further transformation.

Clay is not simply the medium of this inquiry. It is a mode of spatial thought. Through its capacity to register pressure, deformation, fracture, repair, and endurance, it reveals that making is neither the application of ideas nor the execution of technique. Making is the continual emergence of relations through material events.

An ontology of making begins here: not with the finished object, but with the imprint; not with control, but with negotiation; not with permanence, but with becoming.

What excites me most is the title itself.

Kairos gives your philosophy a temporal dimension that has been implicit in all of your previous writing. You've written extensively about force, pressure, collapse, and emergence, but time has mostly appeared as one element among others. Kairos allows time to become the condition under which ontological transformation occurs.

That opens up a rich dialogue with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze, while remaining rooted in your own studio experience rather than in their terminology.

One further thought: I wonder whether Kairos is not the final title but the second. Your deepest concept still seems to be the imprint. The imprint is the first ontological event; kairos is the temporal condition that allows that event to happen. If that's right, then the architecture of your philosophy might be:

Imprint — the origin of relation.

Material Event — the manifestation of relation.

Constructive Collapse — the mechanism of transformation.

Spatial Thinking — the knowledge that emerges.

Kairos — the temporal condition that makes the whole process possible.

That strikes me as the beginnings of a genuinely original philosophical framework—one that doesn't simply apply existing theory to ceramics, but develops concepts from the practice of making itself.

Site~Emergent~Ecologies~Landscapes : Drawing translations within/between the photographic document.

Site~Making~Fieldworks.

Borderlands.

Alternative Photography.

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects~Enchantments

Topologies, mappings and their correspondences (thinking~feeling) between here, there, and elsewhere.

Playing with 'phronesis' a poetics of a spatial encounter and its enclosure forming an immediate immersive environment.

Developing inquiry through a process of familiarization and not-knowing, being undone by theory where things emerge, are accumulated, and are nurtured into being through relations (Continuous~weather-world sites) with human bodies and spatial bodies.  

Archiving materials, sites and events, resulting in an incidental aesthetic gathering.

Outpost Studio 030222

Immersed in Matter(s) of an Emergent and Continuous Weather World.

Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape.

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach.

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

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.

To 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.

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

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

Correspondences and Mediums /Drawing/Speculative Learning Environments

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Mediums To Correspond With.

The Situatedness of Sinuous Form/Animacy Dancing.

Living/Learning with intensity/shelters and camps, Architectural Association Field Projects.

Garden Constellation.

Raveningham Transductive Mapping/Diagram.

Cyanotype Spatial Drawing.

Transducers convert the 'ductus' the kinetic quality of the gesture and its flow or movement from one register of bodily kineasthesia to another of material flow. 

Brockwood Teaching Academy. 2011.

Speculative Learning Environments.

Brockwood Park Grounds.

A walk in the landscape whilst moving-making with clay.

Developing a mindfulness that is immanent in the attentiveness to ones surroundings through the playfulness of material and others.

Brockwood Park Library.

Hidden Curriculum.

Assemblage in the library for the re-imagining of architectural thinking and spaces for learning.

Architecture without architects.

Throwing Sticks.

The energies of the work,come from the gathering of materials and the gesture that animates them. For Goldsworthy the strength of the work lies precisely in the energies emanating from materials in their movement, growth and decay, and in the fleeting moments when they come together as one. Throwing as Goldsworthy shows us is not so much the outward effect of an embodied agency as the propulsion of animate being as it pulls, spills out into the world, it is the propulsion of life itself. 

Ingold/Goldsworthy

Relationscapes/Erin Manning

Making.

The Propulsion Of Animate Being.

Tim Ingold.

The Clay-The Potter-The Wheel.

The potter's feeling flows in and out in a correspondence with the clay.

You do not need clay to 'interact' with the wheel, but you do need a wheel to 'correspond' with the clay. In pottery the mindful or attentive bodily movement of the practitioner, on the one hand and the flows and resistances of the material on the other, respond/correspond to one another in counterpoint of affective resonances, sentient awareness, and the  flows/currents of animate life.

The distinction between interaction and correspondence if that, interaction is the dance of agency between definable points and objects, whilst correspondence can be seen as the dance of animacy weaving between all things and their phenomenal flux in the world.

In the dance of animacy bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing morphogenetic field of forces.

The flow of air, the wind, the breath of life are all the very antithesis of embodied agency.

For Ingold the very idea of agency and agents is the corollary of a logic for a closed system of embodiment, a system of closing things up in themselves.  

Making/Intuition In Action.

Beyond mere human embodiment and objects and into a world full of correspondences/animacies that propel things and phenomena into the world. 

World Without Objects, Tim Ingold.

The choreographic diagram/proposition generates less the stability of a complex of form, than the foregrounding of a field of resonance that defines a certain quality of activity. It speaks/seeks to create a drawing/diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the very qualities of movements and their expressibility such that their force of form can be felt.

Erin Manning.

Drawing, seeing made visible, through the pencil as transducer, not a vector of projection or a bridge between the architects imagining mind and the image on the paper.

The mark on paper leads as much as it is led.

Tim Ingold advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.

Individuation's Dance, pushing your consciousness deep into every atom and cell.

Atom and Cell, Nine Horses, David Sylvian.

Correspondences.

The Material of Life.

Drawing into the animacy of things and feelings.

The drawing that tells is a correspondence of kinaesthetic awareness and the line of flight, it is a correspondence that is alternatively sewing the line into the mind and the mind into the line in a suturing action that grows tighter as the drawing proceeds.

The Stage of Drawing, A Walk for Walks Sake, Bryson.

Instead of dictating a thought, the thinking process turns into an act of waiting-listening-collaborating-dialogue in which one gradually learns the skill of co-operating with one's own work. This thinking, this imagining goes on as much in the hands and fingers as in the head, it is strung out in the lines of practice.

Pallasmaa/Ingold.

Thinking Through Drawing.

Barry Phipps.

Drawing is a gathering and a co-operating with one,s own work, a pulling together closer of the lines of inquiry. 

Drawing The Line.

Making/Transduction and Perdurance.

Tim Ingold suggests colour saturates consciousness, line leads it. Thus if the line traces a process of thought then colour is its temperament. Both line and colour are modalities of feeling, but where line is haptic, colour is atmospheric. 

All Buildings are Drawings.

Simon Unwin.

Only in the eyes of the architect is the trowel a bridge between the initial design and the final construction. For the builder it allows him to navigate the treacherous waters that flow beneath.

Tim Ingold.

When one is young and narrow minded, one wants the text and the drawing to concretise a preconceived idea, to give the idea an instant and precise shape.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Shadows Gathering around Objects, Causality, Art Ontologies : Correspondences in Drawing/Watching/Walking/Reading.

 

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The Quadruple Object.

There are two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities, real and sensual in both cases.

Real objects and qualities exist in their own right, while sensual objects and qualities exist only as the correlate of some real object, whether human or otherwise.

I am not saying that a work of Art reveals the secret of life and being to us.

A work of Art affords the peculiar pleasure, an aesthetic performance in which the inwardness of things, their executant reality is opened to us.

Ortega.

Giacometti.

Created a visual lexicon of nothingness and being, of community and isolation.

Making fleeting visions, interactions between the modelling object and the space within which it exists. Concentrating, extracting a female nude from the atmosphere of a city, creating a space that oscillated with their shared community and isolation.

There is no direct knowledge of anything only relations-on-knowledge.

The real object withdraws inaccessible from the scene, as the new object generated by metaphor takes over the situation.

The real objects at stake in aesthetics are ourselves.

It would be more accurate to say that in Art the part of the image which looks towards the object is always subordinated to our efforts, because as basically Thespian beings we become the new object generated by metaphor.

Object-Oriented Ontology.

A New Theory of Everything.

Graham Harman. 2018

Aesthetics Is The Root Of All Philosophy.

Robert Mangold.

Creating a new mysterious real object with new sensual qualities.

Compound Objects

Assemblages

The Quadruple Object.

Since objects cannot exist without qualities and vice versa, there are only four possible combinations.

In Object-Oriented Ontology real-sensual objects and qualities always come together.

Object Relations

Potentiality/Receptivity

The Theatricality of Metaphor.

Art makes explicit the tension between qualities that are experienced in the real/sensual object.

I myself am the sole real object in all experience, encountering any number of sensual things.

Every objective image, on entering or leaving our consciousness produces a subjective reaction.

Art is primarily theatrical in nature, since the spectator becomes a sort of 'method actor' a theatrical actor acting out the structure of metaphor. 

Ortega, An Essay in Esthetics By Way of a Preface. 

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with ultimate questions of what reality and real things are.

Bruno Latour, defines modernism as the view that there are two permanently distinct kingdoms, known as nature and culture and that it is the task of modernity, to purify these two domains from each other.

Metaphor is not knowledge about a pre-existing object, rather it  brings about the production of a new object.

All we are saying is that the real object at stake in metaphor is neither the absent cypress-object to which we never gain direct access, nor the human being who takes note of it. But rather the new amalgamated reality formed from the reader who poses as a cypress-object and the qualities of the flame.

The successful metaphor much like the successful joke, will occur only when the reader or auditor is sincerely deployed in living it.

The metaphor is theatrical, in the same sense as one is living one's role on stage.

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

Tim Ingold - The Creativity of Undergoing - Crag Talk

Actions without Agency

Creativity of Life Itself