Corporeal Traces ~ Ceramic Interiority ~ Things Doing

Corporeal Traces ~ Ceramic Interiority ~ Things Doing

From sensate encounter to spatially persistent bodies

Corporeal Traces ~ Ceramic Interiority ~ Things Doing

This reading apparatus approaches drawing, clay and the withdrawn ceramic as correspondent bodies within a sensate, heuristic inquiry.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

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

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 The withdrawn ceramic remains capable of entering new encounters with bodies, spaces, atmospheres and other material presences.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clay ~ Material Migration ~ Spatial Interiority

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

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

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

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

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

The withdrawn ceramic ~ Persistent correspondence

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

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

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

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

Things doing~being ~ Theory and matter in correspondence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The work persists, but its proposition remains in play.

Reading the Portfolio

https://russellmoreton.tumblr.com/archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arts and The Humanities : The inherent finality of the human condition is concisely and eloquently measured and mapped.

Drawing/Image.

The Active Body : From Trace to  Hosting Permeability. 

The traced body becomes a field rather than a boundary. Cyanotype moves through the drawn figure, botanical traces enter its surface, and astronomical markings exceed the body that appears to contain them. Presence and absence begin to occupy the same material territory. The image becomes a body of traces—part registration, part seepage, part cartography—where what is gathered cannot remain entirely within its assigned limits. Read through the current practice, the work begins to open towards permeability: the body as a threshold through which other bodies, times and forces pass.

Speculative inquiry 190926

This is perhaps the most interesting question I would carry forward:

What happens when the trace is no longer evidence of a body, but becomes a body capable of carrying other bodies?

That moves the work from indexical trace → permeable body → ceramic body.

The old cyanotype already contains the proposition that the boundary of the body can be exceeded by material movement. The current ceramic practice could be understood as taking this further: permeability is no longer simply represented on the surface; it becomes materially constructed through aperture, porosity, chamber and firing.

That feels like a genuine correspondence rather than a retrospective explanation.

.

Russell Moreton  Spatial Practices MA, UCA Canterbury.

Visual artist who currently uses simple descriptive gestures and processes drawn directly from the human body. His practice continues to explore issues around "Spatiality" and the "Postmodern Human Condition." The use of site specificity and materials "at hand" are employed to further underpin the practitioners sense of place, memory and dwelling. His descriptive working narratives are in effect physical working ideas, spatial  entanglements between the relations of  life and art.  

Drawing.

Installation and Working Sites

Architectural Glass and Ceramics

Liquid Light and Pinhole Photography

OUTLINE

Drawings by sculptors that place the relationship of the line derived from the body on the same field as material/media residues. These configurations give rise to conceptual associations and meanings. This contemporary approach is in evidence in a number of artists work where the per formative aspects of drawing are the key issue. To put it simply there is a growing awareness of the gesture of drawing as the work, and not just simply the representational merit of recognition that has previous acquainted skill and draughtsmanship. I am talking about the authentic gesture of inscription, the combination of both the trait and trace that the trait has circumscribed. This almost primal visual rendering from a sensation of blindness is captured succinctly in the myth of Butades, or as it has come to be known "the birth/origin of painting” This myth preserved through the device of its very nature contains an irony trapped, almost withheld until the contemporarily of its content could be recognized. It is my aim to expand on these issues using the situation of my own practice as a bridge to attempt to illustrate some of the complexities unearthed.

Analysis of a drawing.

Crafting the mind : Human Inhumation/Containment

Julian Stair

Quietus/The Body Politic

Morality

Jonathan Sacks

Jozef Van Wissem

Grand Central Confessional.

More Speculation~Other Bodies.

A body appears, but it does not remain entirely its own. Botanical traces, photographic fluids, celestial markings and the drawn line gather across its fragile surface. The cyanotype seeps beyond the territory of the figure, while the astronomical markings seem to pass through it from another side. The body becomes a host for other bodies.

What happens when a boundary begins to host what exceeds it?

The question is not simply where the body ends, but what begins to happen when other matter(s) enter, pass through and alter its territory. The body becomes atmospheric: not an enclosure, but an immersive condition of correspondence.

Can an atmosphere be produced through the correspondence of bodies rather than exist around them?

Here, trace becomes more than registration. It becomes a movement between bodies—seed, paper, light, fluid, hand, image, celestial map, memory. Each leaves something behind while carrying something elsewhere.

The host does not simply contain. It is changed by what it hosts.

The figure is therefore neither wholly present nor absent. Its outline fixes a body even as the materials moving through it undo that fixity. What appears as a final marking becomes another opening.

Body-as-site becomes body-as-host.

And perhaps the host becomes something stranger still: an immersive atmosphere of corresponding bodies, a temporary spatialisation in which nothing is quite contained by the thing that carries it.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It reverberates.

That feels much closer to the spatial script you are describing.

The bold questions aren't really questions requiring answers. They are apertures in the text. They alter the direction of reading. The declarative phrases then become propositions, while the questions open them again.

Nature Boy.

He said that in the end it is beauty

That is going to save the world, now.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

THE PHYSICAL

THE EMOTIONAL

THE CONCEPTUAL

First Intension (noun) Medicine the healing of a wound by natural contact of the parts involved.

Fecundity, Fertility, Creativity, Inventiveness, Fruitfulness, Productiveness. What response within ones subjectivity created the desire and its necessity to be embodied, to be brought into the realm of things?

CREATIVE POST-MORTEM 19.08.2010.

Outline of a female body on light-weight Chinese paper, life size, laid out as if in the process of making passage through a fluid. The body stance seems tensioned with arms outstretched and together above the head, as is it is being propelled, or conversely the feet together might signify the body is sinking into a space occupied by a fluid. The body seems to be caught in some sort of stasis, between sliding back or diving head first. This outline has been in places in filled with a blue photographic material ( cyanotype).

This material that displays a floral print caused by the displacement and actuality of seed heads having been placed directly in contact with the paper. This floral marking occupies only part of the territory which was once occupied by the body. There is evidence that this fluid substance (blueprinting of a fecundity) has transgressed, seeped through the boundaries of the traced form. It has done so through the cyanotypes fluidity and the absorbency inherent in the structure of the paper. Within the territory of the body, there are spaces void of the cyanotype material, these appear as barren areas, unfertile yet they seem to suggest an infinite space which gives the cyanotype surface its ability to both record an actuality and suspended it. This appears to question the spatio-temporal aspect of the relations between the application of the fluid and the drawing of the trace. 

What is apparent is that they have become superimposed and strangely contingent. There exists a sense of transition between fluidity of the cyanotype and the fixed “registration” of the hand drawn trace this creates different senses of temporalities on the same surface. The residues left over from the cyanotype process are still clearly visible, channelled into a flow which is delivered to a reservoir at the foot of the trace. The outline in what appears to be black marker pen preserves a permanence against this flow. This same marked permanence records an intervention of two back slashes which tags a closure of performance of the trace with a date simply stated across the foot. One might be tempted to consider if this marking and its proximity might have associations that reference the labelling of the mortuary corpse. 

The inclusion of this precise date marking, renders other material traces some sort empirical touchstone, an observation point clearly defined from which to see other phenomena present. This observational mode of inquiry is perhaps promoted by what appear to be astronomical markings that are only "‘present” within the territory of the body, curiously they appear to have been inscribed from the reverse side of the paper. They appear akin to body markings, tattoos or some other form of writing information on the body. 

These marks suggest some sort of cartography which can only be read by others, this information is clearly “hosted” for the benefit of others, a message that might contain an augury. The host body might be a vessel for these speculations, but it is clearly not their author in fact the astronomical details place their own authorship right through the vessel of this un-gendered female form. Given that the astronomical markings have been assigned to a human form, a form of mobility the knowledge of these marks therefore exceeds the temporality of the host form, in the literal sense this is already confirmed by an existence only recorded by its trace, its absent presence. 

This terrestrial being with its absent presence marked and dated is further appropriated into a territory containing celestial mappings and traces from its own host planet. The inherent theme of fecundity and fragility supported by the inherent finality of the human condition is concisely and eloquently measured and mapped. Like a shroud this work is delivered to reaffirm the body as a site.

There is no authority in the gesture, it is an act of reassurance, he is fixing reality. James Salter

The post is much more interesting for the current practice than its title initially suggests. The cyanotype, traced body, seepage, astronomical markings, date, absence/presence and cartography already bring together several things you are now calling body, trace, chamber, correspondence and futurity. The cyanotype is particularly important because the material does not simply stay within the traced body: it seeps across its boundary.

Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties~forces and emergent spatial thresholds

Outpost Correspondence 270224

Studio 3.16 Russell Moreton

The Minor Gesture : Manning/Artaud / Newman

Within the body of knowledge there is a mind in the flesh, quick as lightning.

Drawing ultimately corresponds to a mobile field of properties.

* The haptic engagement.

* The stage of drawing.

* Gesture and act.

Drawing exists in a state of potentiality. It is the instability of the framed image or object that resists definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself as at its suggestion—its possibility within a formation that has yet to occur. The drawing remains suspended in becoming, producing an uncertainty, and with it an anxiety, about what stage of language it inhabits.

To look with the eye and touch of an artist is to observe with sustained scrutiny while remaining aware of the social conditions from which forms emerge. The connection between the drawings in the exhibition lies in the value given to gesture as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace upon the paper.

— Catherine de Zegher, on Avis Newman

Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.

Within the realm of visual representation, drawing functions as an act of tracing absence.

The mark both opens and closes. It is an inscriptive game that is simultaneously motional and emotional, allowing an active participation in, and temporary mastery over, separation anxiety, while also marking the child's movement towards independence.

The earliest drawings are guided less by the visual exploration of space than by an exploration of movement and spatial relations.

Drawing begins in bodily response. Through acts of inscription it attempts to bring forth a visible language. Gestural traces reveal a continuous process of situating being within becoming.

Drawn from the body of knowledge onto the surface of experience.

For me, drawing continually manifests the endless repetition of remaking. As sensation, it occupies the space of anxiety—perhaps even a childhood anxiety.

## Moving Bodies / Spatial Thresholds

Architecture is entered physically, but also imaginatively. We inhabit not only space but its poetics.

### St Jerome in His Study (1474–75)

Antonello da Messina examines earthly limits through the image of St Jerome seated within a carefully constructed study, seemingly dissected to expose its interior. The room becomes both a place for thought and an architecture of the mind: a space containing books, writing, and the material conditions necessary for intellectual cultivation.

The painting suggests that space may be crossed by a mind capable of moving beyond physical boundaries. This capacity to transcend limits is shared by architecture itself.

In the work of Carlo Scarpa, particularly at Brion Cemetery, physical thresholds become poetic thresholds. Crossing from one space to another also becomes a passage between life and death, humanity and nature, memory and landscape. Alongside the tangible forms of architecture exists an invisible architecture of transition.

Brion Cemetery — Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione, 2017.

## Enric Mestre

### Architectures for Silence and Meditation

Building models become blueprints for larger constructions.

Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed, and the enclosed.

Enric Mestre's work draws equally upon the principles of classical form and the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He possesses an exceptional sensitivity to mass, planar relationships, and spatial proportion, translating the language of architecture into intimate sculptural objects.

His sculptures are enriched by the subtle and controlled colouration of their clay surfaces. The patinas possess a quiet complexity, relating more closely to the fabric of buildings than to conventional sculpture. Rough textures and smooth planes temper the austerity of the forms, while restrained colours distinguish individual surfaces and volumes.

Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist architecture. It carries the same austerity and asceticism while evoking a profound sense of memorial and elegy. These are deeply contemplative objects that move beyond formal exercises in harmony, proportion, chromatics, and composition.

Their quietness contains an unmistakable sense of *memento mori*. David Whiting describes many of Mestre's sculptures as possessing a sepulchral quality: repositories of memory, perhaps, or silent sentinels of an unspecified commemoration. They invite the imagination to wander through unsettling landscapes of urban fragments and industrial architectures.

Their cenotaph-like solemnity produces isolation and stillness, leaving the viewer to construct their own narratives.

— David Whiting

## Invisible Cities

*Italo Calvino*

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire—or its reverse, a fear."

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears. Even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules

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

Outpost 090124

Indexical and Sensate Bodies

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

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

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

Changefulness. The Sympathy of Painted Light. 2025 

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

The Exhausted.

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

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

The Tentative Trace ~ From Living Body to Ceramic Body

Moreton's Indexical Bodies as Spatial Research.

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

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

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

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

Moreton gathers bodies until the material needs to open.

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

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

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

The opening shivers.

The image becomes process.

The ceramic withdraws.

And the research, rather wonderfully, escapes again.

Different chambers of the same spatial research.

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

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

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

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

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

They are different chambers of the same spatial research.

Drawing/Poetry/Images.

Sensing/Drawing Energy.

Water/Clay/Fire.

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

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

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

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

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

Joanne H. Stroud.

 

The Flame of a Candle.

Student Work.

Charcoal on paper.

Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw. 

Winchester School of Art. 2003.

 

Drawing The Line.

Affirmations from a Primal Site.

Corollaries between being and becoming.

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invented Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

The Moment/Instants of Engagement.

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

The Simultaneity of Effects.

A 'Graphism' In A Corporeal Field.

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

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

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

Acts Of Inscription.

Drawing on Bodily Impulses.

Images from the mind.

The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.

Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.

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

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

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

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

Avis Newman 

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

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

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

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

Catherine de Zegher

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

Avis Newman.

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

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

Avis Newman.

From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.

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

Organism-Person-Environment.

Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.

Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.

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

Conduits of perpetual potentiality.

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

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

Gestures and Acts.

Conversation/Correspondences.

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

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

Catherine de Zegher.

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

Avis Newman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversation, Avis Newman. Catherine de Zegher.

The Stage Of Drawing : Gesture And Act.

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.

Wayfaring Notes: Material Flows Between Form and Emptiness : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

Tim Ingold engages with Deleuze and Guattari by adopting their concepts of "assemblage" (agencement) and "lines of becoming" to emphasize a relational, process-oriented ontology. He translates their abstract philosophical ideas into a "meshwork" of walking, weaving, and storytelling, focusing on how life is lived along lines rather than between fixed points. 

Academia.edu

Key aspects of Ingold’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari include:

Meshwork vs. Network: Ingold contrasts the "network" (connected points) with the "meshwork" (interlaced lines of growth and movement), highlighting how beings and materials constantly emerge and change through interaction.

Lines of Becoming: He interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s "becoming-animal/plant/molecular" as a process of world-making, where individuals are not static beings but are constantly in flux, "becoming with" their environments.

Wayfaring: Ingold uses the concept of "wayfaring" to represent life as a continuous movement or trajectory, aligning with the philosophical notion of navigating lines rather than occupying pre-defined positions.

Critique of Hylomorphism: He draws on their ideas to reject the traditional view that form is imposed upon passive matter (hylomorphism), arguing instead for an understanding of form-generation that emerges from the material flow. 

Ingold’s work often merges these perspectives with other thinkers like Gibson, focusing on how organisms and materials are entangled within their environments, creating a "topologically fluid" space. 

Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres.

Ceramic Building Technologies.

Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics.

Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature.

Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel.

Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay.

Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry.

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

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

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

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

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

Around Form and Formlessness.

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

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

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

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

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

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

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

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

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

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

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

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

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel.

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea1983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things.

A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino1996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10)

The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:11)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modern 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something.

The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities.

The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects.

Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes?

This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.

Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit 2002)

The pagan life that St Augustine (born 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)

Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?

Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, a kind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, W.H. Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into a “fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces.

Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.

Ceramics are like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasmaa“ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’.The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.