Tim Ingold : Textility of Making/Hungate Clay Drawings/Speculative Constructions/Interior Design Theory

The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Clay, is always a working idea, a matter/material process between things, a form of thinking in process.

Clay-Drawings in volumes, void spaces and surfaces.

Presenting a building as a process rather than an object; a process which continues from the initial conception phase throughout its existence via construction and occupation

Tim Ingold.

Textility of Making, 2020.

https://issuu.com/oliwkaka/docs/publ_ver_15_publish_fin

Building Materials/Brick Form/Buttressed/Tower/Scaffolding

Corten Metal Box Constructions.

Components brought into a spatial form/navigation/exploration of built spaces.

Building as drawing, showing changes taken, marked, erasures, superimpositions, indexical and scored surfaces.

Materials marked, moved and redeployed elsewhere.

Poche/Pierced Walls/Architectural Details

Lead tray/Water/Ceramic/Wooden Wedges.

Making Template/Drawing/Pierced Components

Hidden Spaces/Enclosed/Confined Volumes/Voids

Experiential/Spatial Alterations to the drawn plan as the building commences. 

St Peter Hungate

Norwich.

A History of the Church.

Geoffrey Goreham, Rachel M. R. Young.

1965.

This sketch by John Kirkpatrick, who died in 1728, is the earliest extant picture of the church.

John Bonde also left 6d, to the anchorite of St. Peter Hungate. This  was a man vowed to live a religious life in solitude. An anchorite's cell was often built against the church wall with a connecting window, so that he could hear Mass and yet remain secluded.

The pyx and the metal box or chrismatory (mentioned in 1368) which held the consecrated oils were also locked lest the holy wafer and oils should be stolen and used in witchcraft.

Monochrome by James Sillett, 1828.

Space-Enfolding-Breath.

Monica Wyatt.

Towards a New Interior.

An Anthology of Interior Design Theory

Lois Weinthal, 2011.

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

What is a material? : Readings of Movement and Attention : Slow Philosophy/Clay/Ecology of Material Thinking

Land Forms/Architectures from marking movement.

Clay, Greenware. Studio Space.

Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021

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

A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

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

The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve 

Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically 

Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010

Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010

New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay

The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object 

Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad

Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012

From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective

Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies

Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them

Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008

Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers

Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate

Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability

The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution

Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice

Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy

Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline

The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)

The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 

So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002

Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006

The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions

A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  

New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative

Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's

New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006

Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it

The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries

Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection

Expressing itself expressing 

Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions

Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact

The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement

Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 

A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside

The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017

Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice

'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey

Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005

With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 

Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence

Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994

The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler

The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world

Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen

Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.

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

The artwork in the image consists of slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 

His work often explores the intersection of architecture, spatial practices, and ceramics, using clay as a medium to investigate themes of construction, silence, and architectural space.

These specific pieces feature a rugged, structural appearance, incorporating textures and forms that evoke architectural elements.

Moreton's practice is deeply rooted in process-based inquiries, where the material and the act of constructing the sculpture are central to the final expression.

The artist is based in the UK and his sculptural work is frequently described as a meditation on materiality and existence.

Artistic Practice: Moreton is known for his work that explores ceramics through an architectural lens, often creating pieces that evoke the feeling of interior spaces or structures where the "drama of the building has now ceased". 

Style: His work frequently features weathered, structural forms with muted, monochromatic palettes and textured surfaces. 

Focus: His practice often investigates the interconnectedness of materials and the creation of interior, spatial structures. 

This image shows a field containing several poles, which are often used in environmental or ecological studies as Robel poles. These poles are typically used to measure visual obstruction, which helps estimate the density of vegetation or the amount of biomass in a specific area. 

The poles are placed at various locations within the meadow or grassy area to collect observational data.

In studies, these measurements are often combined with other techniques to assess habitat quality or vegetation growth.

Research collage with objects (Shoa) appears to be a mood board or an artist's research wall, heavily focused on the themes of film, memory, and decay. It features references to seminal filmmakers and philosophers who explore how time and history are captured or lost.

Key References in the Image

Andrey Rublev (1966): The central black-and-white photograph is a still from the film Andrei Rublev, directed by the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The text box explicitly identifies "Andrey Rublyov: The painter-monk on his journey." The film follows a 15th-century icon painter through a turbulent period of Russian history.

Bill Morrison: On the far left, a vertical strip of text quotes the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison: "maybe what the ruins of Cinema, patiently and violently are tracing, is disappearing." Morrison is best known for his film Decasia (2002), which uses decaying archival film footage to create a haunting meditation on the fragility of the medium and human memory.

Marc Augé: On the right, there is a quote from the French anthropologist Marc Augé: "Ruins, as a notion and phenomena are slowly disappearing from our cities. Out of a lack of time, we are condemned to preserve the past." Augé is famous for coining the term "non-places" and writing extensively on the relationship between time and space in the modern world.

Themes and Context

The collection of these specific quotes and images suggests a deep interest in "The Ruins of Cinema" and the physical or conceptual disappearance of history.

Tarkovsky is often associated with the concept of "Sculpting in Time," where the filmmaker uses the medium to fix and observe the passage of time itself.

Bill Morrison's work literally shows "ruined" film, where the chemical emulsion is melting or rotting away, yet creating something new and beautiful.

Marc Augé's quote reflects on how modern society lacks the "slow time" required for ruins to form naturally, instead opting for immediate, artificial preservation.

The architectural drawing and the physical cardboard model (possibly a "section" or "maquette") visible on the right suggest this board might belong to a student or professional in architecture or film production design, exploring how physical spaces can embody these abstract concepts of memory and decay.

Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

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

Drawing as Diffractive Research : Mind/Hand/Media/Wayfaring, all in the thick of material existence.

Diffractive Research.

Tim Ingold's concept of "diffractive research" emphasizes a dynamic and iterative approach to inquiry, where researchers move between different lenses and perspectives, exploring the interplay between diverse elements. This method, rather than seeking a definitive conclusion, aims to enrich understanding by embracing the "emergent difference" and "variation in commoning" found within the research object. 

Elaboration:

"Diffractive" as a Metaphor:

Ingold's use of "diffraction" draws an analogy to the physical process of light being bent and spread when it encounters an obstacle. This process reveals the nature of the obstacle and the light itself, highlighting the complexity of their interaction. 

Iterative and Relational:

Diffractive research is not a one-time process but a continuous engagement with the research subject, moving between different perspectives and interpretations. This iterative approach emphasizes the relational nature of knowledge, recognizing that understanding emerges from the interplay between the researcher and the object of study. 

Embracing "Emergent Difference" and "Variation in Commoning":

Instead of seeking to define or reduce difference, diffractive research celebrates the "emergent difference" that arises from the interactions between diverse elements. It also emphasizes "variation in commoning," recognizing that individuals and things can contribute to a shared understanding even when they have nothing in common. 

"Wayfaring" as a Method:

Ingold's concept of "wayfaring" (a way of traversing the world, constantly engaging with its details) is closely linked to diffractive research. Wayfaring involves actively engaging with the world, paying attention to the details and nuances that emerge along the way. 

Examples in Practice:

This approach can be seen in research that explores:

Materiality and Agency: How materials shape human action and how humans, in turn, reshape materials. 

Knowledge and Memory: How knowledge is not simply transmitted but actively generated and shaped through experience and interaction. 

Social and Cultural Practices: How social and cultural practices are constantly being re-interpreted and re-created through interaction. 

Beyond Objectivity:

Diffractive research challenges traditional notions of objectivity by embracing the inherent subjectivity of research. It recognizes that knowledge is always produced within specific contexts and through particular relations. 

In essence, Tim Ingold's concept of diffractive research offers a powerful framework for understanding how knowledge is generated and how we can engage with the world in a more dynamic and nuanced way. 

AI Overview/Google

Outpost 180424

The Body of Drawing/Butades.

Thinking Matter : Cosmologies/Constellations/Assemblages/Apparatuses. 

Matter (as interlacing interplay that is dynamic and mutually defining) has its own nature.

In the thick of material existence.

Merleau-Ponty.

On The Hospitality/Intertwining of Lines

Making/Moving Matter/Theoretical Objects for Spatial Practises.

In and Out of Material/Matter/Matters of Concern/Sculpture

Tony Cragg.

Situated Practices/Architectures of Care/Concern.

Oren Lieberman.

The searching line proposes/launches visual observations/haptic responses, and conversely what is seen determines how the next line is to continue in a perpetual and recursive interaction that unfolds in ongoing time. 

Relationscapes of/with/for Drawing.

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?

Un-Learning Drawing.

The drawn line is raw, on permanent view of its emergence into the world, an open zone that operates in real time. Corrections to the line, challenge perceptions and build intimate relationscapes with the mind, body, media and surface.

'In drawing' we are perceiving the evolving process of thought and perception.

Avis Newman.

Praesentia, being present, a presence that is close at hand to the present moment or time.

The phenomena and its nowness/nearness in the light of day. 

Drawing is driven from the outside.

The agent/agency of drawing admits that the process leads, the mind follows.

First the material signifier, marks on paper, then afterwards the signified, the depicted scene and its nominal referent. For Cozens the random application of splashes and patches of ink would at first appear a chaos, yet with a little skill, out of that chaos forms could be encouraged to appear. Blots might become clouds or the silhouette of hills. For Bryson, Cozens 'anti method' clarifies what the official ideology of drawing-as-transparency habitually mystifies. That the relation between subject matter and line is not at all a question of before or after.

Though far from being a work of philosophy Cozen's method/manual anticipates the broad outlines of Merleau-Ponty's description of the intending consciousness as always already in the world, in the thick of material existence.

Drawing the line involves an interlacing of outside and inside, a permanent cross-over between interior (the artist's mind, sensations,sensibilities) and exterior (paper, pigment,stylus).

A Walk For Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Studio Silences of  Space-Time Phenomena/Phenomenology.

Existential becomings in the thick of our material existence.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Primal Scene of Drawing/The Trace of Butades.

Is all about preserving loss/the blankness of paper and a hand that is about to make its first trace on the surface. Drawing enacts the very moments of trepidation when a new image is about to enter the world. 

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency of phenomena unfolding, a fusion between the artist's mind, the artist's hand, and the beholder's gaze.

On Drawing.

The work of observation is necessarily shaped by the line it leaves behind.

The drawn line conditions or models the selections from the field of observation. It launches observation along a particular direction or path.

Sunlight enters into architecture and sensations of bodily presence/perception.

Vessels unfolding through durations of light and dark.

Flesh/Sensation/Paint/Francis Bacon.

An Unconditional Body from Social Objectivity to the Extremes of Subjectivity.

Acts of both presence and transparency.

Mapping Subjectivity/Gathering Matter.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Architectural Body.

Art works and artists, all manifests themselves at the social interaction and reading/rendering of subjectivity.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Acts.

Like the drawings themselves, the exhibitions loyalty is to the immediate experience of the individual image rather than to the totalizing logic of art history complete with its grand narratives of social and cultural change. The exhibition reveals the convergence of real time operations (realities) the artist's visual idea in the time of its coming into the world, and the always ongoing work of viewing.

Pathways of difference, of the brush and pencil as they move through their respective spaces.

For The Brush.

Before it can touch the surface of the canvas, the bush has to orient itself according to the four sides of the frame, and then according to the total sum of the marks that have already appeared on the surface of the picture. It has to hover, to hesitate, to sense as though by dowsing where a channel in space may now open up, a groove in the total surface that the brush may now enter.

For The Pencil.

In drawing the presence of the 'reserve' frees the pencil from this complex calculus of the totality, reducing the scope to an area that can be taken in at once. A local area, that lies where the hand is now in praesentia. For Bryson this introduces the possibility that the drawn line, maybe closer to the immediacy of the artist's thought and perception than the line made on canvas. 

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

MATERIAL MATTERS/Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies : STRANGE TOOLS AND THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

STRANGE TOOLS
ART and HUMAN NATURE
ALVA  NOE

THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

DAVID HARVEY

As David Harvey argues in his seminal Condition of Postmodernity, architecture becomes one of the aestheticised products by which global capitalism and political regimes express themselves. It is with this realisation that we must reverse the equation. Not space and time in architecture, but architecture in space and time, in an  concepts of the former acceptance of Harvey’s conclusion that ‘neither time or space can be assigned objective meanings independent of material processes, and that it is only through investigations of the latter that we can properly ground ourselves’.

ARCHITECTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

Jeremy Till | Collected Writings | Architecture in Space, Time 1996

There is a feeling of intimidation for the architect faced with a broad cultural landscape, and so an understandable reaction is to look for stable elements. In this way architecture, fixed and permanent, shrugs off the ephemeral and the present, and enters into dialogue with the deeper structures which may condition culture. The language of traditional anthropology (mythic, ritual, cosmic, symbolic) is used as a vehicle for architectural exploration, with the intent that architectural will engage with enduring and stable cultural factors. The architect here reverses the role of the anthropologist. Where the latter may investigate and describe social practices through their inscription in space and time, the architect describes temporal spaces in which to set those practices. There is an emphasis on architecture as a setting for ritual and as the embodiment of archetypal human situations, all constituted within cultural tradition. At its worst this approach reeks of conservative nostalgia, at its best it is a project of interpretative re-visioning of an active tradition in which to set human action. It is an architecture that is firmly rooted in space and time, but in very particular interpretations of them. The space is one of concrete representation, informed by the search for authentic meaning. The time is one which combines the cyclic movements of cosmology and nature with a backward-looking naturalisation of history, both characterised by the sense of reinterpreted repetition. The implication is that time and space should stand outside the contingent forces of the present, and that production must resist immanent distractions in an attempt to ground architecture in a more profound cultural horizon. It is this detachment that is both the real strength of this approach but also its weakness, because in looking for the truth it bypasses the real.

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

Studio : Making movements in thinking ( the way is made in the walking of it )

 Outpost Studio 24/10/2021 

Outpost Studio 221021

Material in space, working with spatial agency/thinking movements

The use of any material that helps any figure/organism exist in any given framework/environment.

Working Things/Coalitions of Material, Meaning and Form

Heuristic Discontinuities and  Materialism

Studio images, black windows, arch model,

Kounellis/Oren Lieberman

Architectural Proposal/Spatial Agencies

Marking/Demarcations/Corporeality

Drawing as an impromptu heuristic tool.

Gordon Baldwin, charcoal drawing for a vessel in a landscape. 

Drawing Materials, Blue lever arch

Exploded contents into critical/subjective analysis/displayed as assemblage around the environs of the studio

Content/First Readings/Shifting/Splitting discontinuities between organism, person, environment.

Richard Serra

Drawings Work Comes Out Of Work : Eckhard Schneider

There is no way to make a drawing - there is only drawing

Richard Serra, 1977

A sculpture grammar, based on formal reductionism, an active site-specific reference, and the central theme of gravity and balance. This results in sculptures that let the viewer experience the critical balance of different forces and whose large-scale dimensions impart a strong physical and emotional experience.

Large scale drawings and monoprints

Paintstick on paper and cloth.

Pressure is exerted on the back of the paper with a hard marking tool.

The paper treated as an active substance rather than a passive ground.

Liquid material under pressure shoots out and produces the explosive markings at the edges.

I don't see the drawing I am making until the paper is pulled off the floor and turned over or the screen is lifted.

Precisely because every illusory strategy is avoided, the forms are at the same time able to imply weight, mass, and volume.

Warming or melting the material for his drawings, he applies it either directly onto the paper with large sweeps of his arm, or he uses a window-screen as an intermediary surface through which he presses the colour.

The material and the entire work process serve to build the drawing step by step. It is an elementary process, which, carried out with intense energy, is the result of direct action. By splitting and discontinuing the flow, Richard Serra avoids the gestural and allows a dense superficial construction. Serra avoids gestural features in order to sharpen the awareness of the viewer and draw attention to one's own corporeality. He is not concerned with subjective gestures or narrative references; at the core of his drawings is the principle of marking, of the anonymous characteristic style in which the drawing seems to find its form through the density of the material and the compact work process.  

Unlike the site-specific Wall Drawings, which, rendered directly onto cloth, operate with the proportions and scales of the existing architecture, Serra's drawings on paper are not bound by content. The frame serves, instead, to separate the paper drawing from the wall.

Serra is fully aware that the weight of a drawing does not just depend on the layers of paintstick applied, but above all on its form.

I like to draw. It is an activity I rely on, a dependency of sorts. Drawing gives me an immediate return for my effort and the result is commensurate with my involvement. It is an activity that requires solitude, it is the most concentrated space in which I work.

The colour he uses is black, a dense layer of paintstick absorbs and dissipates light; what emerges is the mass, density, and volume of the drawing.

For Serra, black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a large volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging. To use black is the clearest way of marking against a white field. He finds it also the clearest way of indicating something without triggering associations because black is interpreted as a material substance rather than a colour.

Convertible Facts : James Lawrence

Drawing is transformative.

Drawing is a primal, fundamental concept, an activity intimately connected with the raw terms of life as it is lived. Artists prize drawing not only for its inherent qualities, but also for its virtues as an  impromptu, heuristic tool. Rapid and agile, drawing is easy to adjust, erase, supplant, emulate, and if necessary, discard. It is a fluid means of anticipation, often prior to translation into more celebrated form.

Tony Cragg

In And Out Of Material

Interested in the coalitions of material and meaning and in the content of form.

MATERIAL IN SPACE

Working Things, Reflections on Tony Cragg's Sculptures : Robert Kudielka

Materialist

Materialism means the sculptor's experience that only through the effort of working things is thinking also able to move and change. The material assumes a new form, and the sculptor discovers new contents and meanings.

197

For Cragg, the German language in particular provides a unique possibility of distinguishing clearly 

between the thingness, objectness and objectivity. Kant.

The Rebirth of Sculpture from the Spirit of Matter : Christoph Brockhaus

Art Povera

The relationship between people and their environments and the things, materials and images in this environment, the relations among things,materials and images.

Collecting and Ordering Found Objects, Things, Materials, Images.

Formal Thinking With Matter

THINKING IS FORM

The Drawings of Joseph Beuys : Temkin, Rose

Northern accretion of detail from many sources, he explored several directions and mediums at the same time. 92 

RODIN BEUYS

Rodin's lines don't just represent carnality, they are themselves carnal, invasive, sexy. 

The Drawing Book : Tania Kovats

Drawing and Random Interference/Quantum Chance

ECSTASIS/MATTERING

QUANTUM CHANCE : Janna Levin

DRAWINGS : Antony Gormley

BODY, 2009-2011

A state of becoming, a dispersion of being part of space and time.

WRITING ON DRAWING : Essays on Drawing Practice and Research. Steve Garner.

The Erotics of Drawing : Jonathan Cooper

 

 

Materials at the Hungate Norwich/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Outpost 050823

Dwelling/Reading with Intensity.

Hungate Medieval Art.

11 Princes Street.

Norwich.

NUA Degree Show, Interior Design/Architecture. 2023.

Boardman House.

Redwell Street.

Norwich.

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

Dwelling with Intensity.

In our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology  of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. There is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. The experience of home, like that of a large cradle, is essentially an experience of intimate warmth. Our houses, and their homecomings from snow-covered landscapes turn the pleasure of the skin into a singular sensation.

Gaston Bachelard.

Architecture in the flesh of the lived world not as a construction of an idealised vision.

An Architecture of Visual Images.

The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past 30 years, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated.

Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.

The current deluge of images has consequences on the architecture of our time, producing a retinal art for the eye. Instead of being a situational bodily encounter, architecture has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. 

As buildings lose their plasticity, and their connection with language and wisdom of the body, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision. With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body, and particularly for the hand, architectural structures have become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction.

The contemporary city is the city of the eye, one of distance and exteriority.

The haptic city is the city of interiority and nearness.

The Significance of the Shadow.

In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.

Take the use of enormous plate windows, they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.

Luis Barragan.

An architecture that addresses our sense of movement and touch.

Acoustic Intimacy.

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. The wide, open spaces of contemporary streets do not return sound, and in the interiors of today's buildings echoes are absorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shopping malls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acoustic volume of space. 

Sight is the sense of the solitary observer, whereas hearing creates a sense of connection and solidarity. Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of its streets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials.

On Skin-Architecture-Corpus-Corporeality-Matter-Sensuality

Architecture and its materials of patina and petrified silences.

The hollow smells of abandoned houses stimulated by the emptiness observed by the eye.

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a dramatic description of images of past life in an already demolished house, conveyed by traces imprinted on the wall of its neighbouring house. The retinal images of contemporary architecture certainly appear sterile and lifeless when compared with the emotional and associative power of the poet's olfactory imagery.

Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter-space-light. 

The most persistent memory of any space is often its smell.

Every dwelling has its individual smell of home and every city has its spectrum of tastes and odours.

The experience of home is essentially one of intimate warmth.

The Visible and the Invisible.

The Intertwining – The Chiasm.

The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand.

Spaces of Intimate Warmth.

The fireplace and its immaterial alcove, sensed by the skin, a warm cave carved into the room itself that is an intimate and personal space of warmth. Antonio Gaudi, Casa Batilo, Barcelona, 1904.

The bath with its heightened experiences of intimacy, home and protection are sensations of the naked skin. Pierre Bonnard, The Nude in the Bath, 1937.

The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition, through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us, the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome  and hospitality.

My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself.

Merleau-Ponty's sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the flesh of the world. Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them. Merleau-Ponty saw an osmotic relation between the self and the world - they interpenetrate and mutually define each other – and he emphasised the simultaneity and interaction of the senses. My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens; I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of a thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juhani Pallasmaa.

Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Here in the phenomenal realm we can no longer say that one is more real than the other. Consequently, this 'mark X' no longer rises out of ground as before, but remains an integral part of, and interacts with, its circumstances. To quote Merleau-Ponty on this point, 'Our visual field is not neatly cut out of our objective world, and is not a fragment with sharp edges like a landscape framed by a window. We see as far as our hold on things extends. Far beyond the zone of clear vision and even behind us.'

The Condition of Postmodernity

The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed (David Harvey uses the notion of 'time-space compression), and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions – a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

Silence-Time-Solitude.

A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude.

Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. Buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time. They enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life.

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.

Power Of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Anne Dufourmantelle.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa.