Working Notes~Sensate Intelligence : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

The Sensate Intelligence in Clay.

Contemporary Ceramics : Practices in Craft and Design.

01-05-2017 Original Blog.

10-08-2026 Some images added.

The ceramic body becomes a threshold between what is held and what passes through. Skin, interior, light and darkness gather around the vessel, making emptiness materially present. The surface is not simply the outside of a form; it is where inside and outside begin to negotiate. Clay becomes atmospheric here, opening towards memory, sensing and the experience of being situated within and around a body.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres.

Ceramic Building Technologies.

Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

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

Surreal Geometries.

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

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics.

Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature.

Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel.

Earthly Inspirations.

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

Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry.

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

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

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

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

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

Around Form and Formlessness.

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

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

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

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

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

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

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

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

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

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

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

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

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel.

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

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

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

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

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

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

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

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

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

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996

LIGHTNESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Form

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

The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities.

The Physical Self.

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

Thinking and Learning through Objects.

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

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

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

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

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the most immediately connected to your present practice.

It already contains an extraordinary amount of the vocabulary we have subsequently been developing: vessel, emptiness, inside/outside, skin, threshold, memory, atmosphere, permeability and spatial occupation. The post explicitly describes the ceramic skin as a negotiation between inside and outside and the vessel as simultaneously occupying and being occupied by space.

And importantly, it records itself as an older body: “01-05-2017 Original Blog”, with images added in 2026.

First constellation — Ceramic Bodies

Making Matter(s)~Truth

Overspilling Forms

The Ceramics Reader / Brickyard Ceramics

Making Iterations / Procedures

Working Notes : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark

Archival / Anarchival: Anarchival

Migration judgement: Extremely strong.

This one could become a significant ancestral body for Permeable Chambers and In~~Touching.

Ceramic Bodies

Making Matter(s)~Truth

→ matter / experience / correspondence

Overspilling Forms

→ transformation / excess / displacement

The Ceramics Reader

→ material history / energy / persistence

Making Iterations

→ repetition / care / becoming

Sensate Intelligence

→ interiority / threshold / atmosphere

And underneath them there is an emerging trajectory:

matter → movement → energy → iteration → interiority

But I don't think that trajectory should be written into the archive as a linear argument.

It is better understood as a field of correspondence.

The constellation makes Ceramic Bodies feel much more convincing as a WordPress category than it did in isolation.

Because “body” is doing several different things across these posts:

• body as material
• body as vessel
• body as architectural form
• body as accumulation
• body as surface
• body as interior
• body as movement
• body as memory
• body as something porous
• body as something becoming

So Ceramic Bodies isn't simply a category for posts about your ceramic work.

It becomes a proposition:

What is a ceramic body capable of carrying?

That question allows all five posts to remain different.

And this is exactly the kind of hospitality we were talking about with the Anglian Potters statement. The category doesn't tell the reader what ceramics is. It opens a space in which ceramics, clay, making, history, architecture, body, atmosphere and thought can meet.

The Great East Window: Brian Clarke | HENI Talks 'Perspectives'

Drawing/Building Scripts : Collage/Photography

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre-spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg 

The Body and Spatial Boundaries~A Spatial Inquiry into Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Outpost 280122

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries.

russellmoreton.com

Tim Ingold.

From science to art and back again: The pendulum of an anthropologist.

https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/2237/2055

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing, entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.

Photography/A Fragmentary Whole : The Temporal Flow of Things

Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."


-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

“Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”

Literary cartography is not a literal form of mapmaking, after all; rather, it involves the ways and means by which a given work of literature functions as a figurative map, serving as an orientating or sense-making form.

Lukács’s Literary Cartography:

Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Path : Circular, Stonehenge

Transparency,time and matter #2

Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011. #4

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".

Blue Spaces : White Absences #2
https://visualartpractices.wordpress.com/

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

London/Millennium Bridge : Architectural Abstracts/Drawing Traces

Shadow Theatre/Sculpting In Time : Visceral Compositions~Gatherings

A Resultant Complication of  Agencement.

Shadow Theatre for a  Performative Interior.

Enfolded Structures : On a sympathy of correspondence.

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.

Photographic Documents : Domain-Court-Cell : Research Collages

Spatialities and Interior Spaces~Apparatuses for Diffractive Thinking.

Science~Inside The Church : Spatial Documentation~Defractive Readings.

VISITORS : Collage/Waverley Project/Exploratory Practice 2015.

Cyanotype Process

Modern/Primitive

Collage/Fragment from Dom Hans van der Laan

Cell/Court/Domain

Visitors

Godfrey Reggio 

Research collage with photographic document, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham.

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

Christopher Wilmarth : Light and Gravity

 Christopher Wilmarth delighted the world with light-filled sculptures of glass and steel that were deeply poetic in their moods and extraordinarily rich in their modernist heritage. But in 1987, at the peak of his career, a long struggle with depression ended tragically for Wilmarth. The internationally acclaimed artist committed suicide at age 44, and his work largely fell from the public view. Now, Wilmarth's legacy is recaptured in this beautifully written, richly illustrated book by art critic, historian, and poet Steven Henry Madoff. The first in-depth look at Wilmarth's extraordinary life as an artist, the book explores both the light and the darkness that underlie his work. Madoff offers a critical overview of the artist's career, examining the sculptor's response not only to historical masters such as Cezanne, Brancusi, Matisse, and Giacometti, but also to the art world of his times--particularly the dominant influence of Minimalism. Using the newly created Wilmarth archive at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Madoff anchors this moving interpretation with the sculptor's own writings unearthed from journals, student notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and letters. Madoff draws as well from interviews, articles, and poems that Wilmarth published in his lifetime, along with the body of criticism covering Wilmarth's development over the years. Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford contributes a poignant memoir of her years of friendship with the artist, and Fogg associate curator Edward Saywell offers a powerful selection of Wilmarth's writings. The sculptor's romantic outlook, his gorgeously light-infused art, and his dramatic decline into work of harrowing darkness are sensitively examined in a book that reintroduces Christopher Wilmarth's sculptures and graphics to the contemporary art audience.

Lightness/Thresholds of loss and of inside spaces constituted by darkness.

Outpost 050224

Walking with Carlo Scarpa, Brion Cemetary.

Trust in the material and its 'spiritual incitement' that comes from the world.

The spatial dimension of this small building is a metaphor for the mental workings of meditation. The Pavilion is the place where we can enter the minds' empty space/stillness, where we can get away from all our passing concerns.

Thresholds, Carlo Scarpa/Ina Macaione.

Life Affirming Sentiments.

Light-Shade

Bitter-Sweet

Vital Nourishment.

Departing from Happiness.

Feeding the Body.

Feeding the Soul.

Francois Jullien

The Flame of a Candle.

Gaston Bachelard.

On the Loss of (Dark) Inside Space.

Constanze Kreiser.

Is inside space on the verge of disappearing? 

Is it being hindered by constantly improved light technology which is causing one of its fundamental qualities – darkness – to dissipate?

And for what reason?

Is it for the benefit or more outside space?

Or for the benefit of a new spatial quality?

Questioning the way increased use of artificial lighting affects interiors, architectural designer and installation artist Constanze Kreiser opens a philosophical examination of the mediating effect of light. She observes how an enclosure is gradually made lighter in the sense of weight and mass through the addition of openings that emit or filter light. Her polemic on lightness and darkness raises questions of how light measures time, space and inhabitation and the temporal rhythms of everyday existence. 

Light constitutes space in that it creates bright and dim zones, enabling the physical perception of a space.

Space does not originate with the construction of a building, but exists in the act of marking a small unit from an infinite quantity. It is exactly this process which is achieved by sunlight: that which it illuminates is outside, shadowed surfaces forming inside.

Depending on whether lightness or darkness dominates, inside space is a dark space by day and a light space at night. Thus inside space is dependent on light, it is in constant contrast to the prevailing light conditions. Inside space at night has, however, existed only as of the invention of artificial means of lighting – from pine-torches to light bulbs. By day, inside space floats like a dark island in a sea of light.

Bodies and Mirrors.

Ann C. Colley discusses the correlation between physical bodies and their surrounding, particularly  the space of nostalgia and recollection in Victorian literature. Working from the role memory plays in recalling our relationship to known environments. Her text through selected autobiographical accounts discusses the spaces of childhood through the invisible, aesthetic and ubiquitous body, and the proposal that the interior is not simply defined by objects within it, but by our movement and inhabitation around and among them.

Three distinct models of how the consciousness of one's physical being illuminates the interiors of home. John Ruskin text speaks of the invisible body, Walter Horatio Pater of the aesthetic body and Robert Louis Stevenson of the ubiquitous body.

They, Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson considered how their physical being had related to the walls and windows of childhood. Conscious of how this relation defines the sense of one's surroundings, they let their memories resuscitate the dialogue their bodies had once had with these interiors. They understood that it is the child's being that shapes and illuminates the interiors of home. Articles do not define interiors; bodies that move and feel their way among these objects do.

Intimus, Interior Design Theory Reader.

Their orientation anticipates those like Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Primacy of Perception who argues that it is not through thought, absented from the body, that one knows one's surroundings, but through one's 'bodily situation' – that one is conscious through the body's position in space. This is taken further by twentieth- century architectural theorists such as Kent Bloomer, Charles Moore and Robert Yudell, who insist that one measures and orders the world from one's own body, and that the body is in 'constant dialogue' with the buildings surrounding it.

Body, Memory and Architecture. 

Drawing Inscriptions/Spaces/Breaths.

Remaining in the simplicity of our origins.

A Breathturn.

A flow of energy that wends its way ceaselessly through the world, animating it as it goes. 

Simple pots of simple thinkings/orderings and findings/feelings attained through the privilege/practice of the beginner's mind.

Sadhana, bearing the difficulties of existence.

Working Interiors for the making of the imagination.

Marking of a small subjective space from a infinite quality.

Ceramic Volumes/Vessels and Surfaces/Openings of Light and Dark.

On Drawing/Conversation.

Twombly/Artaud.

Corporeal Acts.

Documents and Sensation.

Images 'exist' in a domain of emotional and physical extremes.

.In drawing, acts of reading and perceiving are concurrent as a simultaneity of mental factors.

I am interested in the way the inter-connectedness between inscription and representation is 'grounded' in the primitive body. I an not speaking of the language of depiction and representation, but of what constitutes the mental energy of engagement, that is so evident in drawing. How the markers of an action translate the murmurings of the mind. For both drawer and viewer the mark and its imaginary space are encountered as a fact of existence as such it is the evidence of beingness, concerning those primitive, dark, and distant moments, etched in our psychic history that exist within the framework of the image that is now being invested in the work.

Avis Newman.

The Doctrine of Introversion.

The artist struggling to conform to the patterns of everyday existence. 

I can't respond to the society I live in.

David Sylvian.

Placidity.

Condemned to the eternal silence of processes.

Zhuangzi.

INTIMUS.

Mark Taylor, Julieanna Preston.

Matrix Key/Components, clockwise.

Practical Issues

The Field of Possibilities.

The Organizing Matrix.

Date of Publication.

Time Period Discussed.

Disciplinary Orientation.

 

Art as Experience : Interactions of Color, Josef Albers.

GLASS-COLOUR-LIGHT-INTERIOR-LANDSCAPE

ART AS EXPERIENCE

WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF THE MATERIAL

Josef Albers

Life is change-day and night, cold and warm, sun and rain. It is more in-between the facts than the facts themselves.

I believe it is now time to make a change of method in our art teaching, that we now move from looking at art as a part of historical science to an understanding of art as part of life.

In art we can still experience revelation and wonder.

On Glass Pictures

Opaque Glass/Sandblasting

Colour Intensity

The flatness of the design elements offer an unusual and particular material and form effect.

Colour Intersection/Instant and a Spatial Flow

Colour Interaction

Square-on-square studies, of closely observed colour events staged within a controlled setting.

Oral History

Interview with Josef Albers, 1968 June 22-July 5

The role of art in society to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality

Working in Collage and Stained Glass under Itten

Collage to Montage

His belief that he teaches a philosophy (of how to see) not technique.  

Guggenheim Museum. 1994

Catalogue

32. Skyscaper 11
1929
Sandblasted flashed glass 36.2 x 36.2cm.

30. Skyscraper 1
1927/1929
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass 34.9 x 34.9cm.

28. City
1928
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass with black paint, 33 x 55.3cm.
Badley damaged with sections of glass missing.
Alber's numerical notations in white chalk or pencil are visible on the surface.

21. Frontal
1927
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass with black paint, 34.8 x 47.9cm.

https://ia800808.us.archive.org/9/items/glascoli00albe/glascoli00albe.pdf

A Spiritual Documentation of Life

Marco Pierini

Art is something that cannot be taught, what can be taught is craft

His program focused mainly on the study, analysis, manipulation, assembly and transformation of matter.

Albers structured his teaching method as a natural, consistent consequence of his unusual training.

He brought to life works of art that are never merely the result of a thorough process or of the correct application of norms and rules. Rather, they are works of art that discover their own rules in the very process of their making.

Art is not an object but experience

The Artist as Alchemist

Nicholas Fox Weber

He (Albers) saw his art as representing an ideal for the integration of the individual in society both in its tone and in the simultaneous independence and interdependence of its forms and colours. 

TEACHING FORM THROUGH PRACTICE 1928

Learning is better than teaching because it is more intensive : the more we teach/examine, the less the students can learn.

Learning and practicing techniques develops insight and dexterity, but not creative energies. Inventive construction and an attentiveness that leads to discoveries are developed, at least initially through experimentation that is undisturbed, independent, and thus without preconceptions. This experimentation is initially a playful tinkering with the material for its own sake. 

That is to say, through experimentation that is amateurish (ie not burdened by training).   

The Three Ecologies Institute

An Open Laboratory for Thinking in the Making

THOUGHT IN THE ACT

Passages in the ecology of experience

Erin Manning

Brian Massumi