Inside The Visible : Ceramic Environments of Analogy and Contiguity.

30092025

Ceramics Now.

Silent Interiors :  Anthropocene Aesthetics : Ceramics and Environmental Engagements.

Humanise : Building Interior Places.

Ceramic Vessels and Voids : Spatial Bodies~Surfaces~Interiorities.

Clay+Ceramic : Lines~Making~Correspondences.

Material absorbed in its own thoughts : Mattering Interiority : Craft Philosophies.

Studio spaces, analogies and contiguities around interiorities of making places.

Ceramic Shelters : Transitional Zones between thinking and Making.

Slab built forms from clay slabs that have previously been drawn into and brush marked with slips. Assemble forms then divided into several spatial interiors. Piercings through the surface set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering my discursive researches and readings into a performative spatial body.

Urbanism : Fossil Futures~Anthropocene.

Urban Gothic : An Excess Of Changefulness.

The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.

Vessels of Retreat/Dark Pots : The Body and its Entanglements with Things/St Ninian's Cave, Scotland.

A craft philosophy centers on the thoughtful creation of objects by hand, emphasizing skill, materials, purpose, and the human connection between the maker and the object. It values the process of making, leading to deeper human intelligence and wellbeing, and sees the craft as a means to cultivate virtue and live a more meaningful, slower life. Key aspects include pragmatism, appreciating imperfections (like wabi-sabi), and recognizing that a single problem solved in craft often leads to new challenges, fostering continuous learning.

Stranger Things : A humble, passive, somewhat absurd object, yet potent, mysterious, sensuous : Hans Coper

Hans Coper, Theory and Object Analysis.

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

MA Interior Design

2014.

Things made of light and dark. Hans Coper : Brian Clarke. Sainsbury Centre, Norwich UK

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

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)

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea l983)

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.

Drawings in the form of tracings were gathered from the flat planes of the display cabinet; these were further superimposed in an attempt to map the surface and forms of the Hans Coper pots and to explore their volumes and interior spaces. These new sight lines subjectively link surface details with profiles into the possibility of new spatial forms. These plans and mappings became the starting point for a series of slab and thrown assemblages. Thrown and slab worked clay forms in T Material, preliminary drawings done in-situ some with annotations. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Rotterdam Exhibition with Lucie Rie. 1967 Hans Coper.

His arrangement was highly original and innovative, he showed his families of vases in groups, emphasising their subtle differences in form and surface treatment. The space between the pieces was just as important as the objects themselves. The architectonic character of Coper’s pots become visible through their dry, stone like skin and the sophisticated way in which Jane Gate photographs the work.

“Potters of reconciliation, they sought a marriage of function and beauty.” Douglas Hill SF author/intro to exhibition.

Craft Study Centre Publication 2014

Object Analysis

Name of object:   Vase, flattened oval form on a cylindrical stem, pinkish cream to grey glaze over                                       manganese on exterior, manganese over interior and recessed foot. It is decorated                                    with incised lines on back and around the stem with concentric rings incised on the                                   foot

Accession number:                P.74.28

Maker:                                   Hans Coper 

Construction techniques:

Materials:                               stoneware

Dimensions:                           22.2 x 18.8 centimetres

Date made:                             1960s      

Provenance:                           Made in Hammersmith, London. UK

Given to Muriel Rose by Hans Coper in 1966

This thistle-shaped vase is constructed from five individually thrown pieces. The joints making up the pot have been selectively accentuated with the residues of the manganese engobe. Incised geometric marks remain from the initial turning process of the component parts, prior to the construction of the pot. (Russell Moreton. 2014)  

Name of object:     Vase, unglazed rim. manganese interior, decorated with vertical scoring on the                                         exterior      

 Accession number:                   P.74.103

Maker:                                       Hans Coper 

Materials:                                  stoneware

Dimensions:                              12.7 centimetres

Date made:                                1950s

Provenance:                               London. UK                                      

Single thrown form with the remains of the sgraffito technique after the ceramic has been heavily abraded after firing. The vertical lines of the sgraffito technique and the form itself are similar to Lucie Rie's flower vases, see Lucie Rie by Tony Berks page 112.

This single thrown form perhaps best illustrates the creative union of both Coper's and Rie's practices, the form almost a kind of beaker might itself been inspired by the "dark pots” Lucie Rie found whilst visiting Avebury Museum. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Name of object:     Squeezed ovoid-shape vase with flower holder inside, manganese interior

Accession number:                    P.74.30

Maker:                                   Hans Coper

Materials:                              stoneware

Dimensions:                          22 x 22 centimetres

Date made:                            1970s

Provenance:                          London. UK

Wheel thrown forms, comprising of bowl, open cylinder and an interior ring acting as a flower holder. The bowl form has been turned before being jointed with the upper section. The piece was then indented at four points to form an ovoid form. Pronounced incised horizontal marks remain from the joining, which has been further transposed by the action of becoming ovoid. Very subtle and restrained use of the manganese engobe followed by Coper's characteristic post firing technique of abrading the surface of the ceramic. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Hans Coper : Working Notes CSC/10 March 2014.

Notes re/statements

1.   Specific to the form in question.

2.   Context in relation other similar forms.

3.   Key Words: Impregnated, Incised, Eroded, Reduction, Surface, Soil, Abraded Surfaces, Machining, Grinding, Assemblage, Components, Parts, Groups, “Aryballos,Spade, Thistle, Diabolo, Cycladic, Spherical,” Sculptural, Pottery, Architectonic, Space between Forms, Spatial, Sensuality, Form and Fold, Bodily Spaces, Light and Dark, Clay, Water, Fire, Agency, Difference,

Extracts from catalogue “The Essential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014”

“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which 

may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”

“My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration. The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, and provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process.”

Artist Statement, Victoria and Albert Museum/Collingwood, Coper Exhibition 1969. Small Beige Spade 1966.

The body comprises a thrown circular form, from which the bottom has been flattened into an oval and the lower section has been pressed together.

Throwing rings are visible on the inside.

Areas of the white engobe have loosened from the underlying layer during firing and formed blisters.

Cycladic Vase 1973.

Blisters in the slip have been sanded down to reveal a rust coloured underlying layer. Medium Sized Spade 1973.

There is a clear delineation between the light upper section and the rougher and darker lower section.

Small Thistle Shaped Vase 1973.

There is a large incised circle on one side of the disc and a smaller circle on the other. Hans Coper’s characteristic use of light engobe and dark manganese oxide has produced a hazy texture.

Black Aryballos 1966.

This ceramic form has its origins with the Oil Flask used by athletes in Greece and Asia Minor.

Tall elongated diabolo forms.

After being thrown the cup has been formed into an oval and then indented at four points.

Text Fragments. Momentum Wheel.

It is difficult to determine in which order the parts were assembled.

The underlying surface is showing through the grooves that are linking the body and the base.

The manganese engobe is demarcating dark and light zones through an undulating incised line.

“Rings” caused by the placement of a prop in the kiln. Brown-Beige Colorations.

Sensations caught within the form. 

Soil like deposits/remains. 

Reductions of the fired surface. 

Abraded Surfaces

Incised Line. 

Droplet.

Blisters, pricked open and sanded after firing. This process has produced an irregular, patch surface.

Parallel lines have been incised with a pointed object on the exterior of the base. Thistle Shaped Vase 1966.

The dark brown patches (around the jointing of the pot) and flecks appear randomly distributed but have been purposefully placed to accentuate the structure of the vase. This flat vase with the contour of a stylised thistle flower is made up of five individually thrown pieces. The tall cylindrical foot supports a vertical disc, comprising of two individually thrown flat plates. It is as though the disc has sunk approximately ten centimeters into the foot.

Spherical Vase with Tall Broad Oval Neck 1966.

The transition from sphere to neck is accentuated with darker colourations.

Hans Coper

Hans Coper's iconic assembled ceramics frame the later part of the twentieth century with an ambivalence of both alienation and reconciliation. His pots reveal differences that have resisted the homogenizing effects of the culture of the time. They embody and are a physical testament to what the potter himself has reflected on his life, "endure your own destiny"1 2 within the space and time of the human condition.

Bom in 1920 into a prosperous middle dass background, his childhood years were spent in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany. In 1935 his father Julius, is singled out like many other Jewish businessmen for harassment and ridicule

under National Socialist Party. This would result in the Coper family moving frequently to escape the attention of the Nazis. Tragically in 1936 Julius takes his own life in an attempt to safeguard the future of his family. The remaining family. Erna Coper and her two sons return to Dresden. In 1939 Hans at the age of 18 leaves Germany for England, the following year he is arrested in London and interned as an enemy alien. He spends the next three years first in Canada then returns to England by volunteering to enroll in the Pioneer Corps. In 1946 a meeting with William Ohly who ran an art gallery near to Berkeley Square, brought about an opportunity for a job in a small workshop run by Lucie Rie, a refugee potter from Vienna. Hans Coper now began earnestly through his engagement with ceramics to reveal a continental modernity "whose work seemed uncomfortably abrasive to the traditionalists."*

Hans Coper and Lucie Rie worked together at Albion Mews for 13 years forming a friendship and a working relationship that was mutually reciprocated through practical concerns, innovation and experimentation. There is a creative synergy in place through their mutual sharing of process and experimentation within the practicalities of the studio space. A documented instance of this reciprocal inventiveness is in the appropriation of the technique of "Sgraffito" which Lucie Rie employs after being inspired by some Bronze Age pottery at Avebury Museum bearing incised patterns, which are displayed with some bird bones, which may have been used as tools to incise the pottery. These "dark bowls of Avebury"3  are transposed through the use of manganese engobe and a steel needle into Lucie Rie's ceramics, Hans Coper although not present appropriates the bird bone for the engineered steel of a pointed needle file and uses the action of an abrasive hand tool to remove layers of the manganese engobe. In this way Coper is enacting onto the surfaces of his ceramics, the very agencies that Modernism was acting out in the realms of architectural space and surface treatment of materials. In 1959 a move to Digwell Arts Trust would bring to a close his working relationship with Lucie Rie. Coper now became involved with a number of architecturally based projects through the Digswell Group of architects and building professionals. Coper's engagement with the Digwell Group was not without problems and creative frustrations, but seen in retrospect it became an experimental period where Coper was strengthening his ability to bring his pottery into a spatial communion with the modernist architectural sensibilities of the time. However it was a wartime friend Howard Mason who introduced Coper's work to Basil Spence, from this introduction Hans Coper was commissioned to design the candlesticks for the new modernist cathedral at Coventry. The Six Coventry Candlesticks completed in 1962 explicitly reveal a sensitive and progressive spatial awareness to the architectonics of built spaces. The candlesticks delicately tapered and waisted are made in sections and assembled on site onto rods set into the architectural interior. These assembled thrown and fired towering forms seem to be more about a presence than their actual physicality. They appear to paradoxically transcend the monumentality of their setting through their very immateriality, their slight of form being perfectly balanced to accommodate a single candle and its temporal flame.

As a maker of pots he was in constant touch with his working process, an analogue process, a creative membrane that surrounded the agency of making and thinking. He was able to pursue his vocation "My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration"4 His resultant works reflect what might be termed a "machining in" of a creative durability that is both ancient and modern that contains both tensions and fragility, and that above all seems to exist in a state of timelessness.

His assembled "pots" are constructed from thrown components, "throwing" as o process that he remarks on "I become part of the process. I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now". It is through the wheel, the body and the interplay between clay and air that the inner space that defines the form is created. Adam Gopnik writing about the art of Edmund de Waal describes what I might be termed a spatial sensibility "the pot-ancient as it is. is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out."5 Hans Coper further adds sensuality to this "innerness" when he encloses it in a skin that appears archaic through a deeply physical surface treatment of engobes, incised grooves and scratching of the raw pot; then when finally once fired the dry vitreous surface is further machined and abraded to give a graphite-like sheen.

Hans Coper's pots speak in silence of this interior "architectonic" space that is itself reverberated through an almost archaic modernity. He seems to be able to tune the interior, to load its mass, its void.

There is a strong sense of the vessel, the concrete with the emptiness, even an analogy to corporality set in motion by his treatment of the surface and interiors of his pots. The pots themselves belong to ever extended families, to new familiarities created by the subtle interlays between the negative spaces created through the spatial awareness that has been crafted into their very making. The pots through proximity with each other are in a spatial communion, they act to define particular spaces by defining boundaries and creating thresholds between exterior surfaces and space. These pots are themselves are 'encounters' they ask us to be attentive to the responsive sensory inner space set up in residence by the permeable world of the ceramic vessel.

1 Birks. Tony. 1983. Hons Coper. London. William Collins Publishers. p75. 

2 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers p22. 

3 Birks. Tony. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine. Stenlake Publishing ltd: p44.

4 The Essential Potness. Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014. Collingwood and Coper Exhibition 1969. Victoria and Albert Museum.

5 Gopnic.Adam 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things : About the Art of Edmund de Waal. New York; Gagosian Gallery: p6-7

Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity : Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.

Working Collage : Marking the Line/Art, Architecture and Craft Narratives.

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?

— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005

Jana Sterbak

Remote Control 1989

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline

Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines.

 

Ecosophy : Social ecology, mental ecology, environmental ecology.

"Concerning the continuous development of its practice as much as its theoretical scaffolding."

The Three Ecologies, Guattari

Diffused Ecologies : A reflective building is an echo not a statement : SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE

Anarchive Material~Readings

ON MAKING SPATIAL RESEARCH

Sensing Affective Spaces in Art and Architecture.

IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES FOR SENSING IN THE LANDSCAPE.

RAVENINGHAM SCULPTURE TRAILS 2018/2020

The House-sheds : Camping

There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through.

Roger Deakin

WILDWOOD

A Journey Through Trees

Russell Moreton, Speculative Spatial Practices 

A reflective building is an echo not a statement.

Haptic devices/seating/dwelling in the landscapes of the mind. Landscape assemblages and the significance of solitude.

The immensity/intimacy and its immediacy to the imagination. Immensity is within ourselves Bachelard

The site a Raveningham offers the spatial practice of a social event and the opportunity to playfully engage with architectural forms, fine art surfaces and textures.

The sensing space, a sculptural assemblage created at Raveningham is an inquiry into 'making' and 'reflexivity' amongst a social landscape.

SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE 

Creating a new viewer, who has to look in two self contradictory/self annihilating directions at once. Darkest Spaces of Our Times, Therese Oulton, Jacqueline Rose.

CONTEMPORARY ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY : SPATIAL PRACTICE Making Place/Tools, cognitive enactments/materials and performativity/wellbeing Sociological aspects of the Arts

Archaeology, Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Tim Ingold

A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST : Rebecca Solnit 

Experiential anthropology / Walking as 'being/becoming in place' 

Sensate, Sensing Sensuality, Otherness

WHITEBOARD : PAVILIONS/RAVENINGHAM

Art as Contemplative Practice : An Applied Praxis/Inquiry

Expressive Pathways/Building/Making as an extension to the Self/Selves In Response : To Place/Site and “Dwelling/Hut”

Subjective Hypothesis Bricolage/Tectonics

Poetic Abstractions/ Components, Elements

Physical Experience/Experiential Phenomena ( Light/Gravity/Air) Sculptural Assemblage, Building/Making an Exposition of Itself

Smithsons, The Parallel of Life/Art the everyday/quotidian Grounding/Earthing/Dwelling/Home : Reflexivity/Reflection/Reverberations

Knowing Through Making/ Embodying Insights, Tim Ingold

MAKING : Deliberation/Awareness : Constructed Situations/SURFACES and TEXTURES SENSING, Sensorium/Embodied Experience, Sensate, Intra/Intervention

PLACES that transform Chaos into Cosmos, Karsten Harries

PERCEPTUAL psychologist, J.J. Gibson departs from 'the classical approach to depth or space' in favour of an 

 

ECOLOGICAL approach to VISUAL SPACE PERCEPTION, which take SURFACES and TEXTURE as its starting point.

Socializing a Sculptural Practice, Jack Robins 2015

Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe 2015

Visual Tool, Post Studio, Daniel Buren

INDEXICAL, Traits/Traces and subjective narratives Situational/Relational Aesthetics, Victor Burgin, Nicollas Bourriaud

Handmade, Repetition, Empirical, Experiences.

Metonymy, Cristina Iglesias ( Metonymic Thinking Processes)

Architecturally Speaking, Practices, praxis between art .architecture and the everyday. Visual Perceptions/ The Image

Surreealist Techniques, Collage, Photograms. Decalmania, Frottage. Assemblage, Brutalist/Modemity/Intervention

Minimalist/Drawing/Painting ARCHAEOLOGY : Mark Dion

Agency/Nature/Subject Matter. Collection of Finds, Metaphors/Interpretations for the lived experience. AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF LANDSCAPE :

Taskscapes/Relationscapes

Anarchism, everyday Aesthetics/The aesthetics of everyday LIVING Pragmatist Aesthetics/Interpretation of Concepts

Materiality, material makes more than one language possible, excess of material. LANDSCAPES for an excess of Interpretation/Politics

EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE, through/with the CORPOREAL EXPERIENCE of OTHERS

A STRUCTURE INTERPOSED between the sunlight and the interior space it encloses. Poetic abstractions/Physical experience

Soft/Blurring boundaries between art and the everyday making/becoming REFLEXIVITY / TRANSLUCENCY surfaces into an architectural presence TEXTURES ILIMINALITY on the absence of material

STATIC ENVIRON I ANIMATED THROUGH THE BODY

THE ARCHITECTURAL SKIN / SURFACE. Blurring, revealing, masking, filtering, ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE / WALL / ARCH / PASSAGE /

VISUAL TOOL / POCHOIR, hand coloured through stencils

SCULPTURAL ASSEMBLAGES, towards Speculative Forms/Expression TECTONICS IN MAKING, and the tectonics of immateriality/traces hidden by building.

Concerned with bringing the material from its physical form into the meta-physical world.

PAVILION 

FUSELAGE

THE CAMP/HUT

represents the true reality of things, Deakin.

The building as nothing more than an exposition of itself.

A subjective hypothesis, a drawing developed into an objectivity for experience/leaming.

SITE, the undoing of PLACE

BRICOLAGE / HEURISTIC PRACTICE, Using things at hand, temporal, self constructions, becomings, mind forming explorations.

MOBILITY MOVEMENT

TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTED SPACE

A building component, scaffold, joists and fixings, a surface of absences and the movement of others come together.

MAKING, from form to programme.

WAVENEY VALLEY SCULPTURE TRAIL 2018 RAVENINGHAM

AUDIT OF NOTE FRAGMENTS 27 August 2018

Archive as a generative form/membrane Tarlaton, mesh, paper, liquid light,

Presenting, Creating, Synergies, that further explore site embodiments. The Politics of Things

Diffractive Practices : Agential Cut, Barad, Learning Spaces, 

Brockwood Park School. Reimagining  Education 

In The Cave/Canvas of the Cave

ART. began with the questioning of the involuntary, trace of a human hand, an otherness. 

Moments, Nowness, The Instant, Actuality,

Habitus of Difference

Robert Mangold text on painting/drawing minimalist interrogation into the spaces around perception Minimalist Works / Working Processes represent fields of energy/causality within our experiential perceptions.

Drawing is the experience of seeing made visible/manifest Rhizomic feedback and flow, Deleuze

Research Horizons,

Culture drives growth, wellbeing, social enterprise and community

Lines of intervals, linerality, chains of codes, intersections, utilities, interventions Causality and Chance of ideas, creative acts, art,nature, becoming, the everyday,

Quotidian/Everyday Interests, Complexities of Contemporary Life. Ambients, Phenomenas, Objects, Subjectivities,

Everyday aesthetics, heuristic practice,

Photography, Social pathology of traces layered into ecologies (Anthropological localities of desire)

Photography, The Body, Life, Death, Flemish Painting, Vivitas, Domestic Life, Nature on reclaiming the void left by the death of the mind

Walking creates its own feedback loop, The Journey, The Return,

The specific, Here and Now

Psychogeography, Dossier, Forensic Study, Inquiry.

Spatial Abstractions : Reflexivity on Reflection. Embodiment on Experiential Subjectivity LANDSCAPES Constituted by creative practice

Walks as erasures, sedimentation, (Gardiner)

Getting Lost, Walking whilst deep in thought/embodiment in the environment 

Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape

Between PLACE and SITE

Art Poverva, Materiality, Agency, Making, Nesting Building, NASCENT FINDINGS

Encoding DATA, LANGUAGE

Entanglements of Visual Data and Abstract Language CATHEDRALS OF INTELLIGENCE

The Urban Documentary,Text, Sebalt, The River : The Colour of Light

Albers/Colour Perceptions

Vernacular Architectures, Building/Making beyond the design

Footings, Voids, Roof Structures, Cavities, Between Walls, Sensing Spaces in the very making of the building.

The Architectural plan/model and its proposal became the real virtual space for architectural energy and innovation.

TRANSACTIVE MEMORY Texts, Contents, Particulars, Process,

Working through ideas with things/devices/apparatuses Cognitive Landscapes /Relationalities ? Possible Worlds Subsumed by the causality of relationships/culture

Mies van der Rohe 

The Art of Sculpture

Moholy Nagy 

The New Vision Abstract of an Artist

Light brings the moment in time to us

Presence, Praesentia, exactitude of light on place and time LAND, LANDSCAPE, CLAY

Pot, Shard, Remnant, Culture, Jug, Dominion/Grounded Temporal/Spatial Perspectives

Light/Dark Room : Towards a new Interior Experimental Vision : Research Collage

Aesthetics of the Everyday Creative, Human Praxis

Mediating/Architecting the experience of LANDSCAPE

Supportive Material/Texts/Cyanotype Drawings from found objects

SITE / COLLAGE COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax 

 

AFFECT

SENSATION / CAUSALITY LIVING

THINKING LOOKING

DRAWING and THE LAW OF STRATIFICATION, the inevitable results of the working of GRAVITY STRATIFICATION OF RECOLLECTION / MEMORY OF THE WORLD. (A Land, J Hawkes )

FACTORING THE TACTILE CONDITIONS OF THE REAL WORLD into perceptual awareness. 

PERCEPTUAL psychologist, J.J. Gibson departs from 'the classical approach to depth or space' in favour of an ECOLOGICAL approach to VISUAL SPACE PERCEPTION, which take SURFACES and TEXTURE as its starting point.

COLOUR AS CONDUIT I PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA I IMPROVISATION

PIERCED I DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW I SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS I TECTONICS AND TEXTILES INDEXICAL I GESTALT / VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan

ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS I GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS ACTUALITY

IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard. 

Tidbury Ring, field drawings with cyanotype liquid on paper.

A Hut of Ones Own. Heidegger for Architects. 

Immaterial Architectures.

SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE

EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE

Soft/Blurring boundaries between art and the everyday making/becoming REFLEXIVITY / TRANSLUCENCY surfaces into an architectural presence TEXTURES / LIMINALITY on the absence of material.

STATIC ENVIRON / ANIMATED THROUGH THE BODY

THE ARCHITECTURAL SKIN / SURFACE, Blurring, revealing, masking, filtering, ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE / WALL / ARCH / PASSAGE /

VISUAL TOOL 

SCULPTURAL ASSEMBLAGES, towards Speculative Forms/Expression TECTONICS IN MAKING, and the tectonics of immateriality/traces hidden by building. Concerned with bringing the material from its physical form into the meta-physical world.

PAVILION / FUSELAGE

THE CAMP / HUT

represents the true reality of things, Deakin.

The building as nothing more than an exposition of itself.

A subjective hypothesis, a drawing developed into an objectivity for experience/learning. 

SITE, the undoing of PLACE. (Casey)

BRICOLAGE I  HEURISTIC PRACTICE, Using things at hand, temporal, self constructions, becomings, mind forming explorations.

DWELLING / MOBILITY / MOVEMENT IN THOUGHT

TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTED SPACE

TETHERED FOLLY against a fabric of time.

ART AS INDETERMINATE, able to arrest perceptions into different states (becomings) Stone Worlds

Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology Architecture and Ritual, how buildings shape society. Bought to Light

Photography and The Invisible 1840-1900 CURATORIAL / DEVICE / BENCH / INTERLOCATOR

Jannis Kounellis, Theatre, stage crew shifting actors during a performance. Interconnected, between contexts, opening places between the social fabric.

Making spaces, expanding vision to create spaces 'between' in which to write ourselves. 

CONTEXT AND CONSIDERATIONS : MAKING, EXHIBIT, VIEW

ART MUSEUM CULTURE

THE CONTEXT FOR CONTEMPORARY ART IS THAT WE MAKE, EXHIBIT AND VIEW

MUSEUM DIRECTOR, CURATOR, COLLECTOR, ARTIST

None of that means anything anymore. Artists are now more DIVIDUALISTIC. They discover themselves not by securing a role within the historic narrative of a chosen medium. But by INTERGRATING into a more DIFFUSE ECOLOGY that involves not only making art, but also putting on shows, publishing, organizing events, teaching, networking.

THE STUDIO is no longer a retreat, but it now INTEGRATES, IT IS ALL EXTERIOR. THE NETWORK places the artist as a ’like' ITEM within an INTEGRATIVE

INVENTORY or DATABASE.

Makings~Silent transformations~translations from the continuous weather-world.

Translations~Places of Inquiry.

russellmoreton.com

Interactions and correspondences wayfaring through the weather-world of clay and texts.

Continuous Readings~Translations : Weathering and the Passage of Air.

14 Weather-world.

'Can man live elsewhere than in air?' asked the philosopher Luce Irigaray.

The Life of Lines

The Life Of Lines.

Tim Ingold.

Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is interested in developing collaborative and speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.

A site-based practice that further develops into speculative learning, creative propositions for knowledge production through Spatial Practices.

Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material further develops his inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased.

His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.

Assemble forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.

For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His finished fired constructions could become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s).

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham. Spatial Practices MA, Canterbury School of Architecture. Visual Art BA Hons, Winchester School of Art. Ceramics HSND, Epsom School of Art and Design.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton

The Inner Room~Clay/Jug and the Primacy of Being : The Potter and The Philosopher, Coper/Heidegger.

15 March 2015

UCA Farnham.

Working Notes. Visuals and Text

Extracts from Waverley Project/Research Folder, MA Interior Design.

Clay and the Primacy of Being

The Potter and The Philosopher

Innerness and Defined Space

Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.

Ceramic Assemblage : White Spaces/The Patina of Objects.

The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),

Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

Brian Clarke, Stained Glass, Sainsbury Centre.

The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.

The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.

Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951

Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”¹

Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.

Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.

This almost vocational unfinished architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”²

Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.

Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”³

As recorded in his most architectural writings.

The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971

Being and Time 1927/1962

Art and Space 1971/1973

“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”⁴

Building locates human existence,

Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”⁵

This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.

Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”⁶

Heidegger on Thinking,

The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.

Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.⁷

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.

Influences on the “fourfold”

Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.

Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.

Friedrich Holderlin/poet.

George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.

Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.

Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?

Waverley Project 2014.

Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.

In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki

Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.

Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the

effect of light, or through attention to details.⁸

Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.

“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)⁹

This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.

Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.

On building a house. Ingold.

“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”¹⁰

Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)

Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”¹¹

It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”

For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.¹²

Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.

The pot like the building participates in daily life.

This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.

In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.

Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.

“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”¹³

Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)¹⁴

Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.

Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.

Clay and the Primacy of Being.

Studio Spaces.

The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.

For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.¹⁵

Notes:

1 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects.

2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7

5 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 9

6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10

7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30

8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65

9 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1⁰ Tim Ingold. Making. 59

1¹ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1² Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35

1³ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 43

1⁴ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 45

1⁵ Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 71


Wallace Stevens :  Anecdote of the Jar/Vessel takes dominion/Edmund de Waal

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Jackie Leven ; Clay Jug (The Mystery of Love is greater than The Mystery of Death)

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