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.

Spatial Bodies of Practice~Gathering/Multiplicity/Lightness/Synthesis

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

What begins as lightness becomes density. Images, ruins, fragments, colour, readings and places gather without settling into a single structure. The work moves between material transformation and the impossibility of containing everything that has been encountered. Chora appears as trace, mark, map and body: a spatial condition where things can occupy one another without becoming the same. Read through the current practice, synthesis becomes less a resolution than a gathering of differences. The spatial body begins to form through multiplicity—through what touches, overlaps, withdraws and remains unresolved.

Speculative inquiry 190926

I think this post opens an important question for gathering:

Can gathering remain multiple without becoming synthesis?

This is significant because your current Permeable Chamber is almost the opposite of a synthetic container.

It gathers, but does not resolve.

It holds, but does not contain.

It allows correspondence without requiring agreement.

So perhaps something has shifted:

synthesis → multiplicity → gathering → permeability

The old post is therefore not simply about “synthesis”. It contains a tension that the current practice can activate: the desire to gather without closing the gathered material into a resolved whole.

That is very close to your recent formulation:

The Permeable Chamber is where gathering becomes a troubling reverberation.

Outpost 190822

LIGHTNESS

QUICKNESS

EXACTITUDE

VISIBILITY

MULTIPLICITY

Six Memos for The Next Millennium.

Italo Calvino, 1992.

The difference between the first versions I read and the final ones lies in structure, not content. 

Calvino wanted to call the sixth lecture 'consistency' and he planned to write it in Cambridge. 

I found the others, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.

Esther Calvino.

The Drought.

J.G. Ballard.

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin on the origin of German Tragic Drama.

Photographic ruins an amalgam/agency of what remains.

Brown and Blue.

A Field in England.

Cyanotype material on canvas with iron pigment.

Developing a spatial serenity/synthesis/synergy.

This amalgam of colour with various substances demonstrates the change and transformation of the material world, which can be interpreted as essentially an alchemistic procedure.

The goal of such procedures is ultimately to resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Yves Klein.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Magdalena Broska.

Air and Dreams.

An essay on the imagination of movement.

Gaston Bachelard.

Shotesham, site based inquiry,studio practice.

Spatial registers around the corporeal and the transcendental.

Ruin its relation to time.

Fragment as ruin and on melancholia as an attitude of retrospective contemplation.

Dialectics at a standstill, a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired, allowing allegory to be understood, felt as a contemplative calm, an equilibrium in the becoming and wrapping nowness of the self/situation.

Dialectical thinking involves the clarification of ideas through discussion and contradiction.

What remains after the process of dialectical thinking?

An initial thesis is opposed by an antithesis, then resolved through a synthesis of the two terms, which can in turn become a new thesis.

Objects/inclusions for painting with/layered transitions and movements.

Holga 120WPC, f135.

Ilford Delta 100/8 exposures 92x55mm.

The Gaze of Orpheus.

Maurice Blanchot.

The Essential Solitude

In the solitude of the work, we see a more essential solitude, a self communion.

MULTIPLICITY

The work grew denser and denser from the inside through its own organic vitality.

For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality, while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos.

Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands.

The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits.

The network that links all things is also Proust's theme, but in him this net is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of the dimensions of space and time.

The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility. In this sense a typical experience of knowledge is the jealousy felt by the narrator for Albertine.

It is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy.

But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

Remembrance of Things Past : The Captive.

 

Infra-ordinary.

Species of Spaces

We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.

But where is our life?

Where is our body?

Where is our space?

Georges Perec.

CHORA : trace/mark/map/body

The drama of encountering space.

Recombinant Poetics via Interventions.

Thinking about temporal issues through visual, material and spatial registers.

Concerned with artworks and architectural projects that reconfigure the temporality of sites, repositioning the relationship of the past and the present in a number of different ways.

Allegory, Montage, Dialectical Image.

Between Art and Architecture.

Jane Rendell.

Performativity/Drama of Residency

Transient readings and encounters.

Other Enactments,Dialogues,Relationalities. 

Sites of evidence/knowledge and understanding.

The scheme should incorporate both careful repair of existing fabric and a significant element of new construction in a contemporary design.

SPAB, design competition.

We are not calling for a new disordered architecture to match the disorder of culture; this would only affirm the chaotic. 

Rather, we propose experiments in search of new orders, projections of new relationships.

We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method.

The energy inherent in opening up relationships presents us with a continuity of ordering that compels refection.

Steven Holl. 

Correlational Programming, Parallax.

This one has enormous potential for the current practice.

It gathers Calvino, Benjamin, cyanotype, ruins, Bachelard, Shotesham, material transformation, multiplicity, Proust, Perec, chora, montage, temporality and the refusal to turn the investigation into a fixed system. The particularly important phrase for me is the post's own recognition that “We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method” and its interest in opening relationships.

That is remarkably close to where your current practice has arrived.

The deeper speculative proposition

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

It may be about something more particular:

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

The earlier work repeatedly approaches this through different media:

cyanotype allows material to seep beyond the traced body;

collage and montage allow fragments to occupy a shared field;

diagram allows temporal and spatial relations to remain in movement;

the vessel allows surface and interior to sense one another;

walking allows place and body to continually alter one another.

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

Then firing changes the proposition again.

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM : Kairos~an attention to the moment in which something becomes possible.

Time here is not a line along which the work travels. It becomes a material of movement: the not yet meeting what has already gone, traces returning through new situations, images reversing, spaces carrying different temporalities at once. The diagram does not simply describe this movement; it participates in it. Kairos opens another sense of spatial practice—an attention to the moment in which something becomes possible. The current ceramic body enters this temporal field differently. Clay gathers duration through making; fire interrupts it; ceramic carries it forward. The body becomes a proposition waiting for another time, another atmosphere, another encounter.

Speculative inquiry 190926

The important movement here could be:

Can the ceramic body become a form of Kairos?

Not an object that represents time, but a body in which different temporalities become available to encounter.

That gives you a very strong correspondence with:

archive → trace → clay → firing → ceramic → futurity

The fired ceramic has a peculiar temporal condition. It contains a history of actions that cannot be repeated in quite the same way, while simultaneously becoming available to encounters that have not happened yet.

The trace looks backwards.

The proposition leans forwards.

The ceramic occupies the interval between them.

Outpost 290722

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM.

Maya Deren's 1948 film, Meditation on Violence.

Two parabolic arcs describe three types of Chinese boxing in a single continuous movement. 

The last portion of the film is printed in reverse motion.

DURATION

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid, flowing time is interwined with an experience of being where past, present and future merge. If one extreme of time is the experiential time of individual being, the other extreme is the abstract, anonymous, measured time of science.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

The Great Hall of Ascension can receive 10,000 people; its floor and ceiling are made of glass. It is intersected by the glass cages of nine elevators, each rising to its respective destination, traversing the other interiors with a discreet hiss. On the elevator shafts, electronic billboards announce different libraries. With fragments of texts, titles, names, songs descending in a continuous movement, the entire building seems supported by signs in a perpetual countdown to takeoff.

Rem Koolhaas.

Into The Frame Enters

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

R. Bruce Elder.

Kairos

The Movement and its Moment

Being Alive

Tim Ingold

Jannis Kounellis

At Castelvecchio, Sparpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition.

An Attitude to History, Carlo Scarpa.

It cannot be, it has gone!

They believe that we can do the same sort of work in the same spirit as our forefathers whereas for good or evil we are completely changed and we cannot do the work they did.

William Morris.

There is no stage at which human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre.

Autopoises and Cognition

The Realization of the Living

Humberto R. Maturana

Francisco J. Varela

We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.

We become self-conscious through self-observation, by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process. 

For colour and against line and drawing.

Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator's construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on film-making, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

The concept of pure colour in a monochrome.

I seek to put the spectator in front of the fact that the colour is an individual, a character, a personality. I solicit a receptivity from the observer placed before my works.

This permits him to consider everything that effectively surrounds the monochrome painting.

Thus he can impregnate himself with colour and colour impregnates itself in him.

Thus, perhaps, he can enter into the world of colour.

Yves Klein.

Colourspace that is not visible but within which one is impregnated.

Parallax and the free movement of the landscape through physical forms.

To resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Presenting Pure Pigment.

I did not like colours ground with oil. They seemed to be dead. 

What pleased me above all was pure pigments in powder like the ones I often saw at the wholesale colour dealers.

They had a burst of natural and extraordinarily autonomous life.

Living and tangible colour material.  

Magdalena Broska

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Fire Pictures

Rain Sculptures

Air Architecture

Cosmogonies

Although it was a room painted totally in white, the artist spoke of an extraordinarily intense experience of blue: it was a true blue, the blue of the blue depths of space.

The demonstration of nothingness, the void of a white space.

Klein wanted to demonstrate the idea of a development from blue, a visible, tangible colour, via white to immaterialised blue.

There is an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, one without a within, in which Bachelard's beautiful sentence resides: First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then a blue depth.

Blue blood of sensibility

Bachelard/Shelley.

A wide variety of different expressions for the process of progressive dematerialisation.

The release of colour from the binding agent.

Work with dematerialised materials such as the elements fire, water, air and dust.

The term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema's historical and cultural architectures of reception into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined.

Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema, seeks to explore the various histories of expanded cinema and their impact on the question of narrative, space and time in experimental film and art practices.

Film/Expanded Cinema. 

Temporal Spaces/Surfaces.

Transparency/Translucency, littoral and Phenomenal.

Mark Burry and Jane Burry

Prototyping for Architects.

Steven Holl 

Parallax.

Designing buildings as serial prototypes.

Spatial Clocks/Theoretical Objects/Entanglements.

Materials imbue the wind-permeable wall with rich textile qualities.

The whole house acted as a prototype, not only showcasing the latest developments in green technology but also exploring at full scale, the performance of the house and the way in which people interacted with it.

The artists wanted to make the same gesture that many cultures make when marking the land through which they have passed, the placing  of one stone on top of another to signal a route back.

The deeper speculative proposition

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

It may be about something more particular:

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

The earlier work repeatedly approaches this through different media:

cyanotype allows material to seep beyond the traced body;

collage and montage allow fragments to occupy a shared field;

diagram allows temporal and spatial relations to remain in movement;

the vessel allows surface and interior to sense one another;

walking allows place and body to continually alter one another.

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

Then firing changes the proposition again.

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

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

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