Possible Worlds
The Sensual Reciprocity of This Enchanted Isle
Peter Woodcock.
Installation using large paper boats (1.5m long) and mouldmakers plaster for a subterranean space under the cities walls.
Showing posts with label installation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label installation. Show all posts
Friday, 10 April 2026
Sunday, 15 February 2026
Atemwende, a breathturn : Adam Gopnik and Edmund de Waal
Craft and Art : Skill
and Anxiety.
Craft is logic, and art
defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the
artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The
anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she
has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Edmund de Waal is a
maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Atemwende : A
breathturn.
Edmund de Waal.
The Great Glass Case of
Beautiful Things:
About the Art Of Edmund
de Waal
Adam Gopnik. 2013.
‘Actually, I still
make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.
The Sensuality of the
Clay Body.
‘You have to work
quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus
with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the
different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing
with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour
and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny
black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)
The throwing of pots
still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down,
gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if
by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume,
inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the
morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s
nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.
(Gopnik,2014:6)
Ceramics and
Architecture.
Exhibition Spaces of
the Enlightenment
The Porcelain Rooms
The pot, ancient as it
is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from
the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious
and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning
objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our
need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Together these new
porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience
of possessed space.
These collections of
vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of
the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of
an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a
small pot.
‘ The ceramic module
that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional
as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)
‘Even if we insist on
seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates
the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They
gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed
together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines
of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them
brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry
and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by
De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”
1919.
‘The Jar, the
elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air
around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like.
Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)
Gopnik comments that we
can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he
notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to
read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of
space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the
heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware
that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.
De Waal’s work brings
about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict
ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and
the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy
promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with
the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His
control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his
installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors
and negative spaces.
The relations of the
architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in
some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like
the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they
are held hostage by their surroundings.
The empathy we feel for
their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately
forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have
been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they
still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown
clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that
is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What
remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of
spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention
for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their
surroundings.
Does? ‘His art takes
a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory.
Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots.Along
each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Monday, 11 August 2025
Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.
Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.
This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.
Dwelling Apparatuses, Heidegger.
RAVENINGHAM 2025
WORKING NOTES
Developing relations on the specificity of a landscape and the weather.
Construction site, towards an alchemy of thinking and making space and the instants of the wonderous.
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Some ways of thinking.
Processes enabling situations through strange constructions.
Diffractive apparatus of components, materials and filtered light.
Explorative, site specific and performative.
A fictive space articulated through the alchemy of light and water.
Sensing space, seating for a site of speculative inquiry.
Material Matters : Architectural/Perceptual/Sensing Phenomena.
Correspondences, Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.
Reflections/Movements/Environments/Landscapes
Using site as a research instrument, a compounded object of self assembly, and crafted components, materials and substances. A sculptural intervention, event based merging the poetic with the tectonic.
Apparatus/Device/Model.
Sensing composition, situating a site for speculative inquiry.
An exploratory and site specific installation that can open up our interior world to the proximity of both the situation of a natural environment and the experience of a conceptually made object/space that facilitates a sense of wonder, resulting in an alchemy between these two realms of experience.
Art works constantly to brokers these relations within us.
Sunday, 21 July 2024
The Social Life of Making : Thoughts with materials, making good, occupation and maintenance
A Species of Spaces
The Social Turn
Museum Site and Display
Political Philosophy
We have all the choice in the world in terms of products, but very little choice in terms of the kind of economy within which those things are made, accessed and used
Whose Economy Reframing the Debate After Neoliberalism Doreen Massey
Other 'material interventions' and the revaluation of making through strategies of repair and maintenance
Making Ecological Politics
A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us
Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett
Makers work in a world that does not stand still
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Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations
Tim Ingold 2010
Making is central to who we are as individuals, what we make as part of everyday practice forms our identities and place in the world
The mundane experience of making, and thus of labour, is resolutely political, a geographical imperative, and a critical means of operating a meaningful relationship with this material life The Quarry as Sculpture : The Place of Making
D A Paton 2013
The making of a building does not stop when the building work is (temporarily) finished. But only really begins upon occupation, when the work commences of maintaining the buildings integrity against an onslaught of willfully destructive elements, insects, rodents, fungal infestations, corrosion, damp, harsh sun, water, wind
Evocative Thoughts on Building, Alvaro Siza
The social life of making
Making good is about maintaining continuity with the past, in the face of efforts to rupture that continuity.
The need for repair is a remorseless and necessary process that keeps society ticking over.
Posted by Russell Moreton on 29 May 2022
Thursday, 20 July 2023
Mappings and Leylines/Hyde 900/2012 : Spatial Practices,experimental drawing with alternative photography.
Leylines: St Bartholomew’s Church and Hyde Gate/Chamber. Winchester SO23 7DF. www.hyde900.org
“Leylines” has been appropriated and employed as both a practical and as a conceptual strategy to inquiry into places and localities. Site visits and sensitive dialogues with the other artists at a number of locations have further brought materials and processes into the creative realm. The spatial practice of setting-up this work has also produced insightful local knowledge from those dwelling nearby.
Beams and Netting: Negotiations in the chamber.
Clay, Hessian, drawings and transparencies from architectural openings, drawing frame, antique glass, lead and nylon lines.
This intervention into a listed building has become a temporary refuge for a work in progress. The work attempts to show a creative agency as it encounters a host of installed hierarchies and conditions. The architectural motif on the drawings has been derived directly from the open apertures of the chamber, and these drawings also reference the supportive ironwork (Ferramenta) which has been playfully re-registered as a graphic leyline . A drawing frame similar to that used in archaeology for drawing has been adapted to illustrate the relative positions of the leyline as registered by the ordnance survey grid, both terminuses being labelled on the frames periphery.
The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret. The significance of the hut.
“He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar.”
Gaston Bachelard.
via Russell Moreton : Spatial Practices..
Sunday, 12 February 2023
Spatial Agents/Local Materials : Kilquhanity Free School/The Yard and Link Gallery, Winchester.
Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011
Dark Session's : Shadowy speculations in the pottery. Kilquhanity 2011
Silver gelatin prints from a "room obscura" set up at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011 as part of "Back to Free school, Drawing out the Archive."
Site drawing from "a pathway between sunrise and sunset" staged at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011. This research has led to notions of architectural "interventions" and " footprints" through the direct observational mapping of celestial alignments and movements as they pass over the landscape.
Thoughts relating to Spatial Practice as a site of operation in which to locate my practice. Use of spatial correspondences (place, identity gesture and resonances) as a means of mapping the diversity of human presence and passage into architectural space.
Possibilities of using methodologies and aptitudes gained from visual fine art and experience with glass and ceramics as architectural interfaces to instigate situations and promote a sense of an interactive spatiality through the role of the viewer becoming an active interlocutor into the dynamics of the site.
My work utilises simple scientific phenomena and by appropriated registering apparatuses ( chambers to act to become placed in relations to place, this placement is in effect an act of intervention and place becomes site, a proposal is delivered through this action. This proposal is in the form of a relational device/threshold that attempts to fold into the place, a site of creative intervention around a paradoxical inquiry, into objectivity and abstractions, between embodied knowledge’s and findings. These
“working Sites” attempt to engage the interlocutor on their own theoretical and subjective relations and to reveal and form their own singularities from the experience of becoming placed. This immersion into the objective, the philosophical, and the poetic, could be seen as trying to create a “metaphor around dwelling/becoming." A subjectivity enlightened by theorising around issues of the production of space and the notion that time is both a structure and an event. The interlocutor (the
view/relation of others present) becomes brought into “place” becoming as it were a ’’guest” of place through this placing inquiry, place can become ones own familiarity of space.
The Yard Studios, Winchester.
Multi-disciplinary practice, drawing on a long association with Art, Craft and the Building/Construction industry. Working mainly on drawing/mapping with local materials ( Arte Provera), alternative photographic processes and architectural interventions/installations that explore our sense and experience of place. Interested in the intimacy and mobility of “Artists” books and journals as a device to accompany the experience of place. My work commands and demands a need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences, that have themselves been transposed into another physicality. Interested in using drawing and materiality as a site of exchanges, traces formed into inclusions within its own experimental field of experience. The practice is continually informed by contemporary practitioners such as Roni Horn, Melanie Counsell, Christopher Bucklow. My work sets out to contains its own sense of a consolidation of time through ephemeral processes and reflection. The use of elemental mobile photographic devices is being investigated as a means of “registering” durations of human occupation continually superimposed amongst the agencies of “Place” and “Time”. The use of the human body as a trace allows my drawings a direct spatial encounter of absence. This method of working directly with the body is a direct result of earlier sculptural works in concrete and clay.
Artists Information & Material For
Interfaith-Group-Show: STRONG VOICES part of Hyde 900/2010
Co-organised & curated by Stephen Cooper & Arielle Klobusiczky
Russell Moreton
Process & Materiality: mirror arcane symbols ranging from science - humanity spiritual -pagan mythology & Christianity
Symbol & Vision: 3 Layers containing a portable space of vision/ thought
Binding Factor : Layers & Locality (Non places)
Layer I
Lyrical intervention with/&/or of Space particular Non spaces
Tracing activity contain in suspended materiality placed in space
Layer II Consolidation of Time
Capturing notion of time bound process, performance and procedure
Documentation of resulting absence from ephemeral activity
Layer III
Surface & Traces
Sense of Equilibrium between matter and process material & activity paused
Haptic Tactile resonance
Locality
Site Specific
response to space, architecture and surroundings including work
of others issues of frontality versus experiencing 3d work over come by designing samples/glimpses of concepts II!
Material & Process: all include water/moisture/ and light
Blue, Cyanotype ( Blue Print)
Off White, China Clay & /or Chalk
Negative Image, Pin Hole Camera
Orange/Brown, Rust
INTERFAITH GROUP SHOW AT THE LINK GALLERY 2010
Artist Statement
Spatial Practitioner using a multi-disciplinary art practice to explore relations in Architecture, Fine Art and Performance. Interested in the production of spaces that are relational and collaborative to both the practitioner and the visitor/interlocutor. My work utilizes simple indexical strategies to engender interest and perhaps a con spiritual enchantment for the everyday. These resultant correspondences “trace strategies” are open, active and present in-situ; they become “placed geographies around human relations.” Previous workings have used the agencies of natural light in both photographic apparatuses and projection through transparency and clay both as a material from which to retain impressions of mobility through its material memory and its analogy to the “Promethean myth" and its use of clay to fashion mortal man. This particular event invokes for me the notion of a shared humanity, a mutuality that could be understood as reflexive through simple material relations and collaborative gestures. Art space can promote these working intimations that are in the realms of beliefs.
Working Notes for Proposal
Notion of a shared hospitality/threshold that excepts diversities through a simple gesture. Explorative/relational surface or device to register and contextualize spatial relations produced by the participation of this event and its reception.
Artist Statement, re proposal for “Strong Voices”.
It is my intension to utilise the ambiguous and strangely intimate nature of a continuous line around a human being to act as a site for the viewer to inhabit an engagement with the work. I am interested in utilizing the “open space” the territory within the traced outline as a sort of vessel for the temporary thoughts and reflections of others. This space hopes to set up a condition, a place that allows a dispassionate observer or thinker time to find and form their own thoughts. The use of material residues left from enactments seems to concur a metaphysical presence to that of the inner trace. The use of simple materiality (clay, chalk, rust) invokes a notion of a shared simple relation, to the human form; these sensibilities are reflected in artists like Giuseppe Penone and other Arte Povera artists. The use of light sensitive materials, liquid light and cyanotype brings the representation of worlds into proximity of a human absence. Photographic processes also bring with them a surface of compressed and superimposed time, an event through which time has left behind, like the trace we are left thinking and reflecting a loss that creates equilibrium in the present. To add a presence of temporality and nowness, water vapour has been sprayed onto the chalk creating moisture a breath around absences.
The Link Gallery , Winchester. Strong Voices, part of Hyde 900
Untitled 2010
Wax, field chalk and pencil on paper 230x150 cm
This work utilises the ambiguous and strangely intimate nature of a continuous line performed around a human being to act as a site for the viewer to inhabit an engagement within the work. I am interested in the performativity of this “open space” the territory within the staged trace, creates an outline as a sort of absent vessel for the temporary thoughts and reflections of others. This space hopes to set up a residency, a place that allows a dispassionate observer or thinker time to find and form their own thoughts.
Wax, Field Chalk and Pencil on Paper, focuses our attention on the vulnerability and finitude of the human condition through a representation of its absence given only in the traces of past gestures. Inviting meditation, the simplicity of the materials and their use, directly evokes an emotional register and aesthetic sensibility tied to the human form. In the open space performed by a continuous line, the work seeks to offer us a temporary haven for reflection, a quiet space of respite, shielded from the incessant press of events.
What is the aspect of Faith/Belief in this work?
Personal Statement.
The work allows for me a space for reflection, however awkward its present location engenders. This drawing its manufacture and its materiality for me speak of the intimate space of a domicile, a domesticity and a sense of a proximity to material and geographical relations. For me there exists within its presence a space to ponder issues, some relevant to ones own intimate beliefs and observations. The poetics engendered by the materiality seek a sense of encounter harboured by territory of a human gesture. This encountered materiality is explicitly subtle, yet it is for me raw, open, unclothed and perpetually awkward. For me the confrontation of this awkwardness reveals the trace as being both vital and mortal. It is into this state of the vital and mortal I can begin to harbour my sensitivities and those of others.
Sunday, 6 February 2022
Saturnian Form/Dwelling Place : Lead and Library Dates
Armature : Memory/Personal Biographies
The Everyday complexity of things.
Saturday, 6 January 2018
Site Specificity : Camouflage
Site is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.
Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place
Introduction : On Installation and Site Specificity
Erica Suderburg
The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct as possible.
Allan Kaprow, 'The Event'
Box For Standing, 1961
Robert Morris
Body and Building
Essays On The Changing Relation Of Body And Architecture
Dodds, Tavernor
Observatory, 1971
Robert Morris
Rethinking Architecture
Neil Leach
There is at the core of contemporary existence a transcendental homelessness which Kracauer evokes so lucidly in his description of the hotel lobby, the quintessential space of modernity.
Camouflage
Neil Leach
Thursday, 16 March 2017
Sunday, 3 February 2013
Drawing on the snow, a field in Bramdean 05.12.2010.
Enchantments between materials, snow and paper.
Wednesday, 30 January 2013
Sunday, 27 January 2013
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Sunday, 20 January 2013
Friday, 9 November 2012
Monday, 5 November 2012
Reverberations of place : Accord 1.
Leylines :
Visual art installation in the chamber, Hyde Abbey Gatehouse, Winchester UK.
Friday, 2 November 2012
Walking in the Chapel, 5 October 2010.
" Site as the very undoing of Place "
Nowness
Stillness
Solitude
Awkwardness
Relationships
Materials
Learning
Site based inquiry through drawing, performance and installation.
Chapel Arts Studios 2010
Monday, 29 October 2012
Monday, 11 June 2012
Collage, stamps and non-spaces
Collage based around the architectural and the temporal, of non spaces within architecture and the library stamp.
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