Ceramic Deconstructions of Hidden Architectural Interiors : Spaces/Surfaces/Interiors on Solitude/Sensuality

Sensing Architecture : Movements of  Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Thinking/Making within gestures of drawing spatial speculation.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/53757637955/in/dateposted-public/

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold.

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.

Thresholds of The Body Image/Body Boundary

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Drawing/Dwelling.

Thresholds of The Body Image/Body Boundary.

Drawings and their haptic experiences which include the entire body give fundamental meanings to visual experiences. The extra-personal space of drawing, haptically and psychically touching the space occupied with others. The body is the source of a 'personal world' which generates many of the meanings by which we experience the whole world. When we consciously stare at an object, the body boundary 'hardens' and there is a heightened sense of separation, whereas a casual viewing weakens the sense of separation and encourages instead a psychic fusion with the object.

Seated Woman with bent knee.

Her haptic experiences of space, the push and pull of gravity on her sense 'inside' of a centred body.

The Artist's Wife.

Egon Schiele. 1917

Readings beyond the success and failure of Life Drawing.

Art/Effrontery-Affect/Attraction/The Abject 

Drawing/Feeling through the framework of the body

Bachelard, on images, of pulling away from framing concepts.

The Drawing/Physical Self, with others in the  life class/in solitude in the studio.

Drawings/Graphic Correspondences, represent time spent searching the figure, finding its form.

Drawings present ways of/responses to seeing feelings.

Working From Corporeality.

Skin/Sensuality/Tensioned/Compressed Flesh.

The Situation/Observation and Criteria of Drawing from The Body.

Drawing on the hapticity of the living/sensing body.

Drawing from/present with the Body of Others.

Drawing from/working from the Images of Others.

Departures/Innovations/Differences from 'institutional drawing' situations and their outcomes.

The Figure/Human Form scrutinized/represented via the framing nature/device of the picture frame and its sensing gathering surface.

Painting/Drawings, mark making through abstraction and figuration.

Drawing intimacy/closeness with the drawn images, sensing self from their physical presence.

Life Drawing Re-Imagined.

Drawing from the Human Form.

The Nude in Art.

The Naked Human Form in Contemporary Art.

Drawing Bodily Transactions.

Private and Social Properties.

Egon Schiele.

Eros and Passion.

Klaus Albrecht Schroder.

In Schiele, the artist is always there, similarly in the drawings the exaggerated perspective, the striking angle of sight which situates every viewer of a Schiele drawing in a specific location of observation which defines the active relationship between artist and model. Schiele makes the process of observation his theme by giving thematic status to the observer.

Schiele's nudes are unsanctioned by any artistic genre, in his art  aesthetics disowns itself and art disowns its tradition.

Squatting Couple. 1918

Egon Schiele.

This painting appeared in the 1918 Secession catalogue as Squatting Couple, but after the death of Schiele and his wife it was retitled The Family.

Body-Fragmented-Modernity.

The Body of the individual in terms of isolation and alienation.

Fractured figures, bodies made from parts/areas of bounded/blemished flesh.

Schiele's fractured 'figure types' make visible the conflict, archetypal of its period between the whole and its parts. The points, areas of fracture, the angularities of their crooked members show each part independent of the others.

Drawings made of parts, areas constructed by components resulting in bodies being isolated from a somatic whole. Balanced though Schiele's compositions are in physical terms via his sureness of hand, the figures themselves have no core, the mobility of their limbs does not derive from any psycho-physical centre.

Looking Into Other Criteria.

Drawings Unpacking 1997-2017.

Expressive Content/The Body Exposed.

Selected From Living Bodies.

Selected From Other Images.

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

Drawing on Life : Bento's Sketchbook/A Hut of One's Own : John Berger/Ann Cline/Bento de Spinoza

In the backyard of where she was living, Cline once decided to build a hut inspired by Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea.

As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaning fulness. "I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use," Cline concludes.

The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

This may seem a bold conclusion given the modesty of the hut throughout history, and the modest ambitions of its makers, but this is Cline's point, that the experiment in solitude and simplicity is bolder than any social or culturally-sanctioned experiments or projects, simply because the latter are contrived and unnatural, even anti­ natural.

https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/cline.html

Then the days of working at home on it. The image in my head was often clearer than the one on the paper. I redrew and redrew. The paper became grey  with  alterations and  cancelations.  The drawing didn’t get better, but gradually she, about to stand up, was more insistently there.

The effort of my  corrections and  the endurance of the paper have begun  to resemble the resilience of Maria’s own body. The surface of the drawing - its skin, not its image — make me think of how there are moments when a dancer can make your hairs stand on end.

We who  draw do  so  not only  to  make something  observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

The bodies of dancers with their kind of devotion are dual. And this is visible whatever they are doing. A kind of Uncertainty Principle determines them; instead of being alternately particle and wave, their bodies are alternately giver and gift.

They know their own bodies in such a penetrating way that they can be within them, or before them and beyond them. And this alternates,  sometimes changing  every  few seconds,  some­ times every few minutes.

The duality  of each  body  is what allows them,  when  they perform,  to  merge into  a single entity.  They  lean  against,  lift, carry, roll over, separate from, co-join, buttress each other so that two or three bodies become a single dwelling, like a living cell is a dwelling for its molecules and messengers, or a forest for its animals.

The same duality  explains why  they  are as much  intrigued by falling as by leaping, and why the ground challenges them as much as the air.

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

Sensing Spaces/Creative Imagining : Making through emergent/speculative practices

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Vitamin D

New Perspectives in Drawing.

The Spell Of The Sensuous

David Abram.

Outpost 130624

Clay Nests/Alloplastic/Malleable/Reciprocal.

Environment/Self.

Spatial Boundaries : Cell/Court/Domain

To experience the poetics of a space through the 'poetic image' that is itself about the function of inhabiting.

INTIMUS.

Interior Design Theory Reader. 2006

Developing architectural practice through a phenomenologically rich creative discourse, that lies in their capacity to create 'images' rather than in their 'prudence' as actualisable architectural works.

Notes on Digital Nesting : A Poetics of Evolutionary Form.

Mark Goulthorpe.

Drawing on/Dwelling in the poetics of 'nesting'

Bachelard's chapter on Nests seems to articulate forms that were predigitally imaginary but which now merit consideration in their actuality by architects. He muses on the nest as an intricate imprint of the inhabiting body, adjusted continually as a soft cocoon that outlines the aura of movement of the bird's rounded breast. This raises the spectre of an environment adapting to our bodies and continually recalibrating to suit the vulnerability of our relation to the environment. 

For Bachelard, the mesmeric geometries of shells, their outer appearance, actually defeat the imagination: the created object itself is highly intelligible; it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious. The essential force of a shell being that it is exuded from within, the secretion of an organism; it is not fabricated from without as an idealised form. The shell is left in the air blindly as a trace of a convulsive absence, the smooth and lustrous internal carapace then exfoliating in its depth of exposure to the air, a temporal crustation.

Goulthorpe shares Bachelard's concern to interrogate the very manner of creative imagining, and is eager to implicate the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis. 

It is the processual capacity of a digital medium that is its most compelling attribute.

The poetic reverie of form generated by inner logic, by generating 'images' from internal and poetic imagination rather than through fabrication of an idealised external form. The implication for the interior when considered as an 'implosion,' a force of egress trapped in form, is a malleable relationship between self and environment in which 'forms of absence' indicate the function of inhabitation. Critically, Goulthorpe projects a dream of imagination enhanced and actualised by digital generation that uncovers the need to address an 'image' adequate for inhabitation of a displaced spatial sense.

An Evolutionary Architecture.

John Frazer. 1995

Ceramics+Space+Life

Gate/Wall/Pavilion/Object.

Clay as a material of creative 'implosions,' matter that gathers up, and becomes a force of egress that is made malleable/reciprocal into ceramic forms. 

Sensing Spaces.

The Life Class.

Drawing : Lines of Seeing/Lines of Looking

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces : Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

 Outpost 200423

A4 Ruled Notebook.

Blue/April 2012.

Amongst Lightness and The Reverberation of Material.

Ceramic installation in white cube space.

Open Pit Firing, Shards, Ash, Ceramic Pieces, Low Table, White Cloth, Human Outline

We maybe more sophisticated in material ways, but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the axial age, and because of our suppression of mythos, we may even have regressed.

The history of myth is the history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, link us to our ancestors and each other.

A Short History of Myth.

Karen Armstrong. 2005 

Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire.

Stone Circle, Storytelling, King Stone, Whispering Knights, Witch,

A Summer's Work.

Odyssey/Beauty/Struggle.

The Material Acts.

Summer 1994 : Artist's Studio.

The viewers nevertheless allow themselves to be drawn into his game, in order to 'see' as though for the first time the pure existence of things. 

Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

Art is contemplation and must act upon our consciousness.

Objects/Things are part of the artist's immediate existence.

Contemplative experiences become truly meaningful when they occur in everyday life and when nirvana or the state of superior awareness blurs into samsara or ordered time.

For Tapies, repetition is above all else a perpetual questioning or a perpetual becoming.

A working process that is additive, which incorporates changes and accidents and as such his methods are hardly erasing anything that is already present on the canvas.  

A Summer's Work, Antoni Tapies.

The Embodiment of Minimal Gesture.

The Solitude and Discipline of Firing. 

Heja Chong.

Drawing from the philosophy and traditions of Bizen, she has undeniably developed her own aesthetic identity, embracing the raw materials of her new world, the pots and firing responding to the evolving nature of her life and environment. Adhering to the principle of Bizen, she is conscious  that her level of involvement within this tradition, may not always be recognised or understood by others.

Viewpoint/Distance/Synthesise Forms.

Framing a Figure in Space.

Drawing is not the form, it is the way of seeing the form.

Edgar Degas.

The foreignness of the intimate or the violence and charity of perception.

R. Bruce Elder. 

Raveningham.

The Autonomy of The Natural Environment.

Sculpture/Playing with the existence of things.

Field Studies : Pathways around the Sun.

Drawing : Assemblage of Lightness and Weight.

Enmeshed Space : Working Drawing with Handwritten Notes.

Lawn Deliberation/Mappings of Human Agency/Space/Time.

Space projected from the body is biased towards the front and right.

The future is ahead and 'up.'

The past is behind and 'below.'

Time as a structure/place to observe things in constant motion/relation.

Drawing Site/Spiral Windings/Diagram/Spherical Markers

Terracotta, lime wash/lamp black/blackboard paint/chalk/ink

Ground Pegs/Labels/Text Markings/Archival Information

Points becoming lines, Tim Ingold.

Spatial Construct : mediated space anticipating a destination, as seen through the fragmented myths, movie locations or souvenirs that vanguard the real place, access to places through their likenesses.

The workshop proposes strategies to confront our bodies with the multiplicity, unpredictability, directness and autonomy of the natural environment. The aim is to explore and develop consciousness of the body itself being an ever evolving landscape within a greater surrounding landscape.

Body/Landscape

Frank van de Ven.

The Psychology of Time.

Temporal Perspectives.

Relative Orientations/Past/Present/Future.

Time is  often referred to as 'the tacit dimension' within psychology because unlike other types of perception, it is not directly available to any sensory organ but can only be apprehended through change and the dynamic flow of environmental events. And yet despite its ephemeral nature, time is a dimension that has a significant impact upon a wide variety of psychological behaviour. 

From a cognitive perspective, it can be demonstrated that the orderly nature of one's environment stems, in part, from the fact that events' spatial characteristics are structured in and over time. Music, speech, body movements and walking gaits are among the many events in which the sequence of notes, words, or actions unfold with a characteristic rhythm and tempo over a given time span. The particular arrangement of this spatial-temporal structure not only influences how an event is perceived and remembered, but also the overall accuracy with which the event's velocity and total duration are subsequently judged.  

Different cultures have different conceptualizations of time which can be reflected in the types of metaphors that are used to describe time as well as the overall pace of life.

Curriculum Making.

The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

An Ontology of Dwelling.

The dwelling ontology we want to describe rejects any possibility of living in the world through mental schemas of the world, and insists that the material-relational world is the only world in which we live, the only source of our capacities to communicate and learn, the only world in which our activities take effect, and the only world in which meaning inheres.

Greg Mannion, Hamish Ross.

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who has looked at the interface between people and the environment. In The Perception of the Environment, he argues that ecological psychology and the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the world becomes  meaningful through active inhabitation, or 'dwelling', rather than cognitive representation. 

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces #2

Public intimacies, personal dialogues in social spaces.

'Blocking In' of a private studio space of creative inquiry into the public realm as a permeable intervention.

Main reception area, UCA Canterbury 2010

Russell Moreton, Spatial Practices MA.

Explorations around dwelling/site based ontologies : Site/Life-specific/animate installations.

Outpost 240123

Harleston 170923

Speculative/Creative /Geographies/around Moving Bodies of Thought.

Rethinking The Animate, re-animating thought, Tim Ingold. 

Overlay, Contemporary Art and The Art of Prehistory, Lucy R. Lippard.

Homes and Graves and Gardens. 

The Architecture Of Luis Barragan, Emilio Ambasz.

Intimately bound to Barragan's sensitivity for colour is his animistic feeling for matter. In a culture exhausted and irreparably fragmented, the walls surrounding Barragan's gardens are perhaps the last defences to preserve centuries of thought and emotion.

Explorations around dwelling/site based ontologies.

Dwelling/Person/Environment/Engagements.

The simple fluid 'flat' making ontologies of bringing/bonding clay forms together.

Worlding/Water/Performative/Intraventions.

A Practice of Transformational Modalities.

The Processual Character of Form.

Organic life, as I envisage it, is active rather than reactive, the creative unfolding of an entire field of relations within which beings emerge and take on the forms they do, each in relation to the others. Life is the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.

Ingold.

For Ingold, there is no environment without the folding and enmeshment that is the process of life. Organisms are not folded in on themselves and surrounded by an 'environment'. Instead organisms are points of growth of environment, and whose relations are rhizoidal; and the environment is better understood as a domain of entanglement.

 

Making/Curriculum/Dwelling/Landscape/Place.

Re-imagining Education.

Brockwood Park School.

Understandings of place and agency.

Development/Growth/Knowledge/Skill.

Studies in Philosophy and Education.

Discussions around epistemology and ontology.

Improving Human-Environment Relations.

Dwelling.

Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought.

Tim Ingold.

Ingold insists on a flat,continuous and processual ontology of dwelling and becoming.

Curriculum Making as the Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

Empirical Research.

Participation.

Poetics of Space.

Reverberations/Dwelling.

Gaston Bachelard.

Why is everything we think we know about ecology wrong?

Being Ecological.

Timothy Morton.

Architecture has the capacity to be inspiring, engaging and life-enhancing. But why is it that architectural schemes which look good on the drawing board or the computer screen can be so disappointing 'in the flesh'?

The Eyes Of The Skin.

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Marking The Line.

Ceramics and Architecture.

Formal/Monumental/Archetypal Vessels.

The giving jug/the receiving bowl.

The making by pressing clay into a mould and then manually hollowing and adjusting the form is clearly a sculptural one-off procedure as opposed to industrial repetition. However, the obsessive working of the surface- post-firing pigments, hand painted layers and final waxing- is reminiscent of the prototyping of industrial design and automotive design products in a mimesis of an envisaged perfected shell.

The Present in the Past, Eric Parry.

  

Site/Life-specific installations.

Building a bridge between ceramics and architecture.

Shared ground, both pursuits are primarily occupied with the use of space, scale, volume and materials.

220923

Requiem: 

Drawn to that moment.

Thoughts on disappearances opposed as assemblages/John Berger.

False Hope/Short Movie/Laura Marling.

Wonderful World/Nocturama/Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

Atom and Cell/Snow Borne Sorrow/Nine Horses.

The Faster I Breathe The Further I Go/The Wind/P J Harvey.

Balamory Death Chant/Songs for Lonely Americans/Sir Vincent Lone.

The Temple of Love (1992)/Touched By The Hand Of Ofra Haza/The Sisters Of Mercy.

Ruins/When Shall This Bright Day Begin/Josef Van Wissem, Zola Jesus.

Fall/Some Ancient Misty Morning/Jackie Leven.

Maternal Body/Dwelling Place : Clay Impression and Fragmented Form/Raku Beaker Form

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand.

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

 Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.

Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency 2010

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.
My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.

Immaterial Architectures : Raveningham Pavilion and The Architecture of Natural Light

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Other Architecture

Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION

Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION

Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."

Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Process and Reflection : Landscape of the Metropolis of Death (Hebrewedition)

Process and Reflection : Landscape of the Metropolis of Death (Hebrew edition), a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Hyde Abbey Gatehouse/ Chamber, photograph on lead roll.

Hyde Abbey Gatehouse/ Chamber, photograph on lead roll., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Localities : Movements, Marks and Surface Details.

Localities : Movements, Marks and Surface Details., a set on Flickr.

Spatial Drawings (moments of reflection) on glass and paper.