Showing posts with label figural. Show all posts
Showing posts with label figural. Show all posts

Sunday, 14 June 2026

Making as an Ecological~Intimacy : Trace~Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

Outpost 230824

Human Thicket : Matter(s) of Composition~Connectivity~Decay

Life Outside the Circle of Architecture.

A Hut of One's Own.

Ann Cline.


The Importance of The Hut in Contemporary Society.  


For Ann Cline the ostensible subject of this inquiry is the primitive hut, a one room structure built of common or rustic materials. She gracefully weaves together two stories: one of primitive huts in times of cultural transition, and another of diminutive structures in our own times of architectural transition. From these narrative strands emerges a deeper inquiry: What are the limits of architecture? What ghosts inhabit its edges? What does it mean to dwell outside it?


Of Huts.

An ecological intimacy, a return to veering towards both humans and nonhumans.


When we study attunement, we study something that has always been there, ecological intimacy, which is to say intimacy between humans and nonhumans violently repressed with violent result.

Tuning, Timothy Moreton.







Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces And Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.


The Raveningham Projects.

On the nature of crafting sheltering social spaces.

Site specific experiences on making/building/using.

A primitive attunement/dwelling, a return to the affective power between things.


A creative site specific study on 'dwelling, occupancy, and  hosting' through studying speculative architecture with its boundary conditions and formative structures. 


Simple 'undesigned' places valued for their timelessness and authenticity.


Philosophia/Socrates.

Philosophical love of wisdom rather than the possession of it.


A Philosophy of Solitude.

In Defence of Sensuality.

John Cowper Powys.


The Mythical City of Orion.

Storytelling through ceramics and explorative site markings, this sculptural intervention plays with archaeology, ceramic artefacts, and astronomy.


Sensing Self/Marking Realities.

Trace Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

Territories/Borders/Boundaries.










Art-Workings.

Being able to work with and appreciate ambiguity.

An aesthetic timbre of the inter connective causal perceptual qualities of things.


You don't know why you should care about this, isn't that what we are all feeling when we experience something beautiful/wonderous.


Care/Love as an ambiguous spectral aesthetic around ethical decisions.

Being/All Art is Ecological, Timothy Morton


The Working Drawing.

Critical Body Contour/Outline.


The Fossil Line.


A primitive gestural drawing underpinning a Palaeolithic idea on an inter-connective, causal perceptual aesthetic force that invokes and engenders a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy.


Spectral Aesthetics, OOO. 

A line of energy flowing around the extremity of a formed space.


The reserve of a papers surface retains both its former presence and its continuing absence held captive simultaneously.


The Figurative/Experiential Flatness between seeing and sensing self.

The remembered, reconstituted spatial dimensions rendered attractively into volumetric flatness.  





Thursday, 5 February 2026

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue : Colour as substance/the transubstantiation of matter.

Outpost 150722

Cyanotype Durational Sun Print.

Charcoal and Clay trace drawing.








Beuys Brown and Klein Blue

Magdalena Broska.


The Transubstantiation of Matter.


Beuys's materials are not to be understood literally, by their outward appearance.


Beuys emphasises that the brown floor paint is not just a colour but also a plastic substance.


I have chosen brown so as to present a plastic substance and thus express something that relates to every form of substantiality, just as I am trying to do with this superimposed red. I simply want to bridge the gap between a discussion about colour and the problem of substantiality.

Joseph Beuys, Drawings. 1979


For Beuys the real and the concretely employed material is only seemingly real, fully in a philosophical sense: a phenomenon from some essential being that is hidden behind appearances, and that is to be elicited by a kind of counter- image process.


Conceptions of Counter Images/Transformation.

The Homoeopathic Method/Like cures like.


Beuys's brown and Klein's blue form a pair of opposites: according to the hermetic-alchemical world view, such opposites contain the arcane power of polar dissimilarity that seeks to be augmented and joined together, a polar way of thinking that seeks resolution.


With his brown oil paint, Joseph Beuys assumed a counter-position to Yves Klein and his blue, which stands for immaterial manifestations, the sky, the sea, and the light of the south, and which conveys space and wide vistas.


In terms of consistency, Beuys's brown is purely coating paint, as commonly used for rust proofing.


Its visual appearance links it with earth, heaviness, darkness, and also blood.

Friday, 27 June 2025

Thresholds of The Body Image/Body Boundary

Outpost 291223


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.







Monday, 14 April 2025

Water at Hungate : Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

 Outpost 130723





Hungate Installation of Works.

Making Material into Paths-Of-Difference.








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


Working Fables/Visual Aphorisms.

The Poetics of The Pragmatic.

The Multivalence of Metaphor.






A series of three follies to accommodate the family, the on-site guardhouse and an art gallery.

Private Estate, Montana, USA, 1991.



I opted to be a fabulist rather than an ideologist because fables retain the ring of immutability long after ideologies have wilted.



Emilio's Folly as well as offering a figurative and allegorical manifesto of its author's idiosyncrasies, is also a catalogue of the metaphors that recur in his architecture: water and the earth, the house with a Mediterranean patio, subterranean architecture and the descent towards the depths. Emilio's island of folly tranforms the eighteenth century penchant for picturesque aesthetics into the narrative frame of a passage describing a private garden and in constructing a design image,  envisages a miniature theatre of memory in which the mechanism of memory is analysed and forgetfulness suspended.


Passing from the canopy at the entrance to the twilight glimmer of the misty cavity offers a didactic description of memory elaborated through cognition's subterranean strata, while simultaneously testifying to the hopes associated with the act of designing, evading paralysis by memory's repetition compulsion.

Fulvio Irace.



My work is a search for giving architectural forms to primal things: being born, being in love, and dying. They have to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level. I understand  architecture as the search for a spiritual abode. On the one hand, I am playing with pragmatic elements that come from my time, such as technology. On the other hand, I am proposing a certain mode of existence that is an alternative, a new one.

Emilio Ambasz.


Anyway, to come back to the story, yes, water plays an important role in what I do because it doesn't have a shape of its own; that is to say, it does have indeed have an immense power of its own, but the shape it adopts is the shape of the container you give it. To me water is important it can be nebulized.  I have used fog many times to evoke the presence of a building which isn't there, and its presence becomes very strong when the sun creates a rainbow. It cools you or warms you if you make those clouds of mist.


I use fog and its indeterminate form maybe because I am a prisoner of my time and afraid of making definitive statements. I seek to make statements which are constantly being reformulated. 


I always say there are two ways to cast a shadow: one is as a tree and the other as a cloud. I think that I chose to be a cloud.


Interview, Emilio Ambasz, Emerging Nature.



Working with the the force of a relational environment, expressing thought as an incipient movement being  articulated through sensation. 


Indexical Traces/The Flux of Processual Drawing.


Architectural Body/organism/person/environment


Bringing potential relations into actual experience.


Experiential experiments/proposals/inquiry expressing the force/nature of a relational environment.


Resonances that modulate her body, her own becoming, movement in tandem with the environment moving.



Hortus Conclusus, Centre Pompidou. 1989.


You always have the sense that behind the walls of these projects are absent presences or present absences. The notion of that which is in front of you and what happens behind the wall has always appealed to me. There is a certain anima or spirit behind the wall.

Emilio Ambasz.


The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and it is also the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity. 

Michel Foucault.




Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

The Art Of Colleagueship


It is a shared curiosity that ties individual creative actions into a dialogue of immanence. A special feature of which is the willingness of the participants to temporary suspend judgement so as to seriously entertain the open potential of our discoveries. That nothing occurs in a vacuum is an idea which is particularly true of human actions. So while the art of pure inquiry is uniquely individual, it does not take place in isolation.


Certainly the pure void of concept beckons the curious, and the unique motive for a pure inquiry of a pure subject is curiosity and the desire to know.


The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject-all that is out there-and the pure potential of the individual perceiver-all that is in here. Where the strength (clarity) of this inquiry lies is in its single motive-the desire to know.


What is key here is that certain ideas (possibilities) are immanent at particular moments. That in each time and place there exists a unique body of shared experiences, knowledge, and need, that marks our moment in time, and from which all inquiry steps off. Merleau-Ponty, in writing about the work of Cezanne, reflected that art may have an advantage over philosophy as a speculative thought form in that it has at once a tactile and a cerebral dimension.

Robert Irwin.


Hungate Group  Exhibition 'Water' 2023.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His  use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.


Sunday, 13 April 2025

Drawing Towards an Ecology of Materiality/Embodiment/Emotion/Affect

Outpost 280623







Relation-In-The-Making.




Spaces between objects, Giorgio Morandi.

Emergent Evolutions.


These micro-perceptions are perceptions without objects, hallucinatory tendencies in the sense that they express nothing but the emphasis on the quality of becoming. They do not give us a body fully formed or an object-in-place, rather they fold perception into a becoming-body-of-movement, creating the emphasis of quasi formation that is relation-in-the-making.



An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling.

Momentum Wheel : Lucie Rie Installation.


We perceive/perception is the force for the worlds infinite unfolding, with objects catching the edges of their contours, participating in the relation they call forth.

Erin Manning.


The smooth paint of the background turns out to be made of many translucent layers, intended to cover over outlines that Giacometti rejected, always in favour of a smaller and smaller head.

John Berger.


Diffractive Thinking/Reading abstractions in the middle of things and both ways at the same time.

Karen Barad.


MAKING

Anthropology

Archaeology

Art and Architecture.






Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making. For Ingold instead of treating art and architecture as compendia of objects for anthropological or archaeological analysis, he 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.



Hungate Site Visit.

Water/Light/Architecture.

Ceramic Vessels/Lead Tray/Water/Mirror.

Cyanotype Solution, unexposed, unwashed.


White gesso on biscuit ware.

White lead glaze.


Ceramics and Architecture.

Ceramics for a reflective solitude, an architecture of silence.

Figural Jars/Abstracted Human Clay Vessels/Cinerary Pots.


Sainsbury Centre.

Julian Stair.

Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Mezzanine Gallery.


Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Materiality, Embodiment, Nonhumans, Hylomorphism, Things.


One of the peculiarities of material culture studies over recent decades has been its virtual divorce from the traditions of ecological anthropology. This is odd, given that both fields are broadly concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Students of material culture are interested in people's relations with things. Ecological anthropologists study how human beings relate to their biotic and abiotic environments. For the former, persons and things are bound in relational networks; for the latter, human beings and other organisms are bound in webs of life. Yet practitioners of these two fields are speaking past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. 

Tim Ingold.



Archaeology, Volume 41, 2012.

The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect.

Sarah Tarlow.


When David Sylvester asked Giacometti about the thinness of the sculptures he had made without a model, Giacometti said 'they get narrow despite myself'.But then added, 'from life, they do this less'. Models put up a resistance to the thinning gaze, as if they were resisting Giacometti's willingness to let them go.


Drawings That Shrink.

Drawings that are extremely tense, a sign that the object/model is resisting.

Relations on the figure and the rejected lines and their borders on the drawing.


And so Yanaihara tilted and shrank, and sank down towards the bottom of the frame. As he shrank down, he also shrank away, back in space, away in time and perhaps in imagination, away from firm memory and towards insecure recollection. At some point Giacometti abandoned the drawing and began another.


Giacometti was fastidious about the placement of the easel, the canvas, and Yanaihara's chair, and he put little red blocks of clay under the stretcher to keep the canvas at a precise angle. None of that helped him anchor the figure: still it kept shrinking. The principle of its shrinking is clear in the dozen preparatory drawings, because many of the rejected lines remain visible. What mattered was the relation between the head and the borders of the drawing. That's why the drawings have drawn borders with lines scattered like matchsticks inside them.






On Drawing/Seeing to abolish the principle of disappearance, but it never can, and instead it turns appearance and disappearance into a game.


The crucial sadness of drawing  is it is unsurpassably close to the object, but always separated from it. Drawing bends my thoughts towards the nearly indescribable distance between the model and the motions of my hand, or should I say between the movements of my eyes as they pass over the model, and the sweep of my hand as it moves across the paper. Or the feel of the model, as I imagine it, and the texture of the paper as it slides under my hand.


The game of drawing is intricate enough with its slant rhymes between the feel of the model in my mind and the feel of the paper. It is made more difficult because drawn lines have the power to remake my own imagination. Every line I draw reforms the figure on the paper, and at the same time it redraws the image in my mind. And what is more, the drawn line redraws the model, because it changes my capacity to perceive. 


As I draw, the model becomes defective. The image in my mind is marred by the marks I put on paper. And so because a drawing cannot quite be touched, because it shifts when I try to fix it on paper, because it does not simply transcribe something in the world, because it can never bring back what I once loved – because of all that, drawing is an intense expression of the defect of distance.

John Berger.   


Sunday, 8 December 2024

Drawing The Body/Figure Event : The Luminescence Of Space.

Outpost 230323


Drawing, depicting something found through the process of making visible.






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


The Luminescence Of Space.

An Archaeological Inquiry Into Drawing.

Correspondences/Reclaiming the drawings.


The Affect and Memory of Drawing.

To interrogate ways of seeing/looking, John Berger. 


The world of the creative practitioner promotes conditions, gestures and responses that articulate social, political and other theoretical findings which are all 'present' at the inception of the work.

Colin Renfrew.


The Myth of Butades.

Figure/Ground Relationships.



Theoretical Thought : Diagram and map.

Neo-Sumerian temple plan on clay tablet from c. 2100BC.


The drawing/work may take the form of the result of an act or action carried out at a specific time but which itself does not persist.


Art can be the expression in the material world of a concept, or the transformation into one material form of a structure that exists in another.


Drawing/Substance/Memory/Display.

The artist's creative act, is of a self amongst others.

Material/Thinking Matter.

Drawings mediated by the distance of memory.


Art Works, subtle embodiments, visual markers both spatial and sociological.


Life/Drawing/Figuring It Out.

The Luminescent Dematerialization Of The Subject.

Expressions Of Both Figuration And Abstraction.

Phenomenological approaches to Drawing/Looking/Others.


Demarcation/drawing boundaries/wayfaring/paths on the land, re The Making of Space.



Walking/Movement is quiet literally what made us human.


The walk is a 'mark' laid upon thousands of other layers of human and geographical history on the surface of the land. Bipedalism is the precursor to the evolution of a large brain, creative intelligence and language.

Richard Long/Colin Renfrew.



Charles Mausson.

Walking Man, No. 3. 1990.

Oil, crayon, 203.0 x 137.0 cm.


Starting from a subject or a simple figurative form, Charles Maussion sets of like an explorer, in search of unexplored lands, looking for something spiritual. It is through walking/drawing/thinking that one can remain human even while seeking out, and without even knowing it, finding it, or finding yourself in lands which are thousands of light years from our society, whilst nevertheless being very close to it. A calm, a loudness, that is extreme, beautiful.

Robert Combas. 1993.

 


The simple presence of a figure is sufficient to suggest the unity of the individual in a universe which is patiently observed and precisely apprehended. There is a complete absence of any compositional device suggested within the canvas, all that emanates is a climate of strangeness, serenity and disquiet. 

Sophie Dupont. 1995.


The blurring of the conventional distinction between the figure and the ground, so as to capture an atmospheric effect, which sought to approximate the murkiness of visual perception.

The legibility of the photographic image was denied by the process of blurring the image.

Paintings, abstract identities of surface and material, introducing content via a dematerialization, so as to engage in a process of pure vision, pure silence, reincarnated, vibrant, alive.

William Jeffett. 1995. 


Drawing on the consciousness and corporeality of others, of figural dissolution of the traditional figure/ground relationships, and fragmentation/blurring of the human form. The contemporary body and its environments are experientially brought into abstracted absences, corporeal traces of visual matter, movement and dissolving/reappearing forms.


Figural Expressions.

Figural dissolution of a nude descending a staircase, Marcel Duchamp.

Stop-motion photography of the human body in motion, Etienne Marey.


Figural, paintings/drawings not as representations of tangible subjects, but as registers of a more abstract range of emotions, as a series of studies, always incomplete and never finished, a work in progress. The nude/ the human body has become mediated by the mechanical effects of photography and the distance/blindness of memory.


Notations.

Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process.

Fred Sandback.


The Drawing Room.

The Secret Theory of Drawing.



Jim Dine.

Figure Drawings, 1975-79.


The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.

John Eldenfield.


Manuel Neri.

Drawings/Relief Sculptures.


Naked To Nude.

Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.







Wednesday, 10 April 2024

Intimus/Spatial Practices : Drawing, Body Specificity, Space-Time, Place.

Outpost 300124

The Dematerialized Space of the Image.





Drawing does not proceed from the object of perception, because the drawing 'itself' is desperate to keep hold of an absence – it all began with a silhouette of a shadow – on the wall.


The act of drawing dismantles consciousness and plunges the self into a zone of sensation and experience. No longer expressing the history and intentions of a subject, or the closures of representation. The work/drawing becomes thought that thinks itself through the material. 


What drawing produces/proposes is a confrontation with the real of experience, prior to signification or the subject. It induces a 'sense'/'feeling' that stands in critical and often destructive relation to pre-existing codes of visual language or modes of interpretation.


To draw becomes to embody and manifest movement, which is neither the rhetoric of motion nor a parody of eros, but rather that what keeps the imaginary in the state of possibility and allows it to be both diachronic and synchronic, markings in times feeling.


In drawing there is no distinction between inside and outside. 

In drawing we are no longer in the realms of distinctions.

There is no inside-out and vice-versa, because the threshold and its distinction was never passed.


The harmony of marks touches body and matter. Harmony determines transparency; it maintains the  metonymic character of desire because it temporarily annuls the distinction between imaginary and image, between the labyrinth and elaboration. The imaginary keeps its own status of impalpability and moves in the interstitial where it loses the confines of here and now, inside and outside. 

Stella Santacatterina.


Drawing into a corporeal sense of place.

Marks in 'times' feeling.

An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporiness of the phenomenon joining a diffuse invisible flow of energy that wends its way ceaselessly through the world, animating it as it goes.

Vital Nourishment.

Departing from Happiness.

Francois Jullien.


Nonsense drawing is about remaining in the simplicity of our origins, free from concepts and representations that veil things. The nonsense drawing is becoming thought.

Inside This Clay Jug.

Jackie Leven.


A vessel that still contains a quantum of energy.

The Egyptian Pot.

Hans Coper.


Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness.

Sadhana, bearing the difficulties of existence.

Butades on loss, her lyrical and indexical inscription.

The awakening of inert objects (a table, a forest, a person that plays a certain role in the environment) which, emerging from their stability, transform the place where they lay motionless into the foreignness of their own space. 


Stories thus carry out a labour that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. 

They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces.

A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

The Practice of Everyday Life. 

Michel de Certeau. 1984  


Drawing as actualizations of spaces, a spatializing frenzy of inscriptions becoming a textual place.

Drawings on narrative actions that organize feeling and their perspectives determined by a phenomenology of existing in the world; producing a graphic of actions and findings that are indicative to a situated body within the space of a practiced place.


INTIMUS.

Interior Design Theory Reader.

Drawing On Body Specificity/Space-Time/Place

What is explored as distinct spatial experiences, how is text narration explored as a negotiator between that which is seen, mapped and stable, and that which is experienced, toured and individuated.


Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Georges Perec. 1999.

The Apartment.

Georges Perec, renowned for his literary work, takes time to question the banal and mundane activities occurring in the spaces of our inhabitation. In 'The Apartment' he discloses the ordinariness of space when considered alongside functionality of room requirements, particularly when mapped through a slice of time. Against this method of narration, Perec proposes several other spatial layouts generated by either functional relationships between rooms, or the functioning of senses, or days of the week, or thematic arrangements.

Every apartment consists of a variable, but finite, number of rooms.

Each room has a particular function.

It would seem difficult, or rather it would seem derisory, to question these self-evident facts. Apartments are built by architects who have very precise ideas of what an entrance-hall, a sitting-room (living-room, reception room), a parents' bedroom, a child's room, a maid's room, a box-room, a kitchen, and a bathroom ought to be like.

It's not hard to imagine an apartment whose layout would depend, no longer on the activities of the day, but on functional relationships between the rooms. It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses.

In sum, a room is a fairly malleable space.

I don't know, and don't want to know, where functionality begins or ends. It seems to me in any case, that in the ideal dividing-up of today's apartments functionality functions in accordance with a procedure that is unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral. The activities of the day correspond to slices of time, and to each slice of time there corresponds one room  of the apartment.


Inside Fear : Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings.

Anne Troutman.

I do not believe the house is a safe place. For me, it is a collision of dream, nightmare, and circumstance, a portrait of the inner life. The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears. Its interiors are a map of the conscious and unconscious, with conscious securities and insecurities visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces. There is danger in the house.

In this semi-autobiographical account of childhood spaces, Anne Troutman suggests that dwelling holds an intimate, mirror-like relationship so that we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us. This Freudian connection, dividing and connecting inner and outer selves, gathers hidden spaces with visible house, and cloaks the visual with other senses such as fear, terror, fright and anxiety. Discussed this way the storyteller's relived world is contingent on conscious and unconscious associations that redefine the interior through psychological space.

Intimus, Interior Design Theory Reader. Mark Taylor and Julieanne Preston.

Spatial Stories.

Spatial practices concern everyday tactics, they are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication, the beginning of a story  of which the rest is written by footsteps, to the daily news, to legends and myths. These narrative adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into the commonplaces of an order, do not merely constitute a 'supplement' to pedestrian  enunciations and rhetorics. They are not satisfied with displacing  the latter and transposing them into a field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it.

Michel de Certeau.


Drawing Space/Discourses of The Body.

Enunciative Focalizations ( the indication of the body within discourse).

Markings, utterances and graphic gestures caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a form dependent upon many different conventions, that are situated by the act of the present, (nowness) and modified by the translations/transformations caused by successive inscriptions and their contexts.  

Situated selves, of being situated by desire, indissociable from a direction of existence and implanted in the space of a landscape.

There are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences, the perspectives of which are determined by a 'phenomenology' of existing in the world.

M Merleau-Ponty.


Michel de Certeau establishes 'Spatial Practice' as the proliferation of metaphors/spatial trajectories (stories that traverse and organize places, that link and select, that can make sentences and itineraries). He is interested in the role narrative plays in both reading and acting in space as a theatre of actions that accumulates meaning and relevance over and through time, and that spatial experiences are specific to each body, time and place.


A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated/performed by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. 

In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way , an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.


Printed Drawing.

Figural markings and frottage on cyanotype surface.


Languages that inform on/and interrogate drawings.


DRAWING FORMAL ELEMENTS and vocabulary.

Found document, hand-out for students AS/A2 Brockwood Art Barn.


1. Format: portrait, landscape.

2. Scale and Proportion: Systems of measurement:

Calculating relative size by counting.

Outstretched pencil covered by thumb.

Linking up with markers suggested by other objects and intersecting lines within the environment.

3. Dynamic relationship: The straightness or curve of the central axis; relative angles of neck, limbs, to the rest of the body or surrounding furniture etc.

4. Composition and design: point of focus (close-up, distant view) featuring human figure in space. The whole sheet of paper must be owned - even where there are no marks, this is still part of the composition – positive and negative space.

5. Perspective: When drawing from life we translate what we see as 3D spatial relationships onto 2D picture plane. Recessional space or depth in a drawing is achieved through correct calculation of: Vanishing Points, Horizontal Line, Foreshortening, Volume.

6. Line quality: Outline is only used where a shadow is visible, very often not necessary.

7. Pattern: Mark making; repeated elements that contribute to the structure of the whole; organisation of the elements or parts, in the way that feathers are arranged in a bird's wing, or the leaves on branches of a tree.

8. Tonal values: Greyscale; highlight, shadow; colour of ground; distribution of weight in terms of light and darks.

9. Colour: Wet and dry media; combining complementary, secondary, tertiary relationships; also (as with tonal values) hues, tints and shades.


Helgate Proposal Review.

Anglian Potters.

Why clay?

How has clay shaped you?

Ceramics

Visual Fine Art.

Teaching in Art Education

Praesentia/Drawing and Assemblage : Cyanotype Exposure/Trace.

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency, of phenomena close at hand unfolding.



The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Friday, 28 July 2023

Reverberations of Reverie : Architecture as the source of insights.

 Outpost  170623


Private Stillness/Palpability/Tectonics

Architecture as the source of insights.

We exit the expected bounds of time and enter space.









Reverberations of Reverie

Gaston Bachelard.


Stretto House.

Two sequences of an aqueous space that creates a connecting point.

Rooms are flooded to reveal their prior emptiness or our inability to occupy them.

Holl/Tarkovsky


Perception At Its Limits.

Perception that must exceed the location of the body and enter the wider space that has no limits.


Weight persists in his work as a knowable presence.

Deceleration : A Collapse of Plastic Space.


Attributes are revealed via the slow occupation of use, in which new spaces are generated as frames are withdrawn and the space is imploding/collapsing/decelerating.


Steven Holl consistently reaffirms the interiority of each work, showing us a city of atomized lives, interiors, and private stillness. 



The internal core of a room is a reverie.


Bachelard in The Poetics of Space suggests that at the core of a rooms emptiness is a space derived not from the bounding closure of its walls, but from its deep, but absent source of palpable energy.


By the way of the body, lyrical explorations of space/surface relations.


The body creates situations with or without others.


Certainly a sense of melancholy is in this work, but ultimately I think it is a sense of weighted and corporeal subjectivity that is implied here, a form of reverie.


Spatial definition is ordered by angles of perception.

An architecture based in perception at its limit


Parallax is the dynamic change in spatial volumes due to the moving position of the body as it experiences space. The house is not an object, it is experienced in a dynamic relationship with the terrain, the angle of approach, the sky, and through light in which it creates a focus  on the internal axes of movement.


The change in the arrangement of surfaces, defining space due to the change in position of a viewer is the essence of parallax.

Steven Holl. 


It is the precision of Holl's formal work and his tectonics that give these spaces their amazing palpability. But like Hejduk, it is his teaching and his writing, and the degree to which his architecture is the source of his insights that is of most value. It is his concept of space that precedes all work written or architectural, and it is the effect of this space and the means by which it is ultimately perceived.



Sensing Spaces

Architecture Reimagined.

Royal Academy of Arts. 2014

Presence : The Light Touch of Architecture.

Philip Ursprung.


The heart of this exhibition is the interaction between three factors: the nature of physical spaces, our perception of them, and their evocative power.

Kate Goodwin.


Architecture.

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.

Edmund Burke.

An introduction on taste in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and  Beautiful. 1759


Architecture has a more direct influence on our lives than any other art form, but its ability to affect how we think, feel and interact is often overlooked. To explore the impact of built space on our lived experience, the royal academy has invited architects from around the world to create immersive installations for a groundbreaking exhibition.


Sensing Spaces : Architecture Reimagined, sets out to redefine what an architectural exhibition might be. Instead of displaying drawings, models and photographs to illustrate an architect's work and ideas, Sensing Spaces offers visitors the opportunity to engage with architecture directly and to experience bit through their bodies and senses. Individually and together the exhibition and its works raises intriguing questions about the boundaries between art and architecture, the human qualities of space, and the role buildings play in shaping our lives.


Steven Holl argues for an architecture informed by a phenomenological interrogation in which he sees architecture as a dynamic process where by we constantly reinvent our relationship to the world of the senses, including our sense of time and space.


Architects and artists create in an attempt to make people perceive, to make something visible.


The house as a vessel, as an instrument of experience for time, light and place. As a poetic potential to speak of something other, a language and a relative autonomy that grounds or precedes the architecture.


Building transcends physical and functional requirements by fusing with a place.

The site of a building is more than a mere ingredient in the conception of architecture, it is its physical and metaphysical foundation.

Architecture through building is bound to a situation, a construction that is intertwined with the experience of a place.


House : Black Swan Theory.

Anchoring 

Steven Holl.


Clay/Raw Oxides/Biscuit Fired/Mirror/Water