Speculative Gestures of Agencing Attention : Template and Form/Enchantments and Insights between materials

Making Objects : Of a critical and theoretical nature.

Clay : Atmospheric Interpretations.

Ceramics~Abstract Painting : Re-Consolidations/Abstract Vessels.

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

THE BODY AS A TERRITORY IN RAW CLAY

Developing Formative Histories/Indexical and Involuntary Markings 

Observational essay/account whilst work is resident in the Yard,

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft

Temporality. The state of existing within or having some relationship with time. A clay form with its pre-performative drawing used as a template.

These distinctively different yet closely related works are arranged with the clay piece on its custom made trolley with its calico material that acts as a sheet on which the clay work rests. The drawing is placed behind it fastened to a wall with the drawings bottom edge just making contact with the floor adjacent to the castors that grant the clays supportive trolley mobility. The clay work has a direct relation to this adjacent drawing, the drawing is revealing the traced female that is just discernable on the surface of the clay. On closer inspection of the drawing it is just possible to see a rubbing taken from the periphery of the clay form. Both the paper and the clay seem to be in some reflective mode of mutual intimacy, marks transferred between one another during the manufacture of both are subtly replicated on the form of one and the surface of another. The pierced clay slab (vessel) is the first visible casualty of the entropic process of shrinkage. A significant crack separates the clay vessel into two separate but unique entities that share the same defect as if they were still whole. This division through the continent of the body has been subtly marked by the raised furrow of silica deposited when the clay bodies were in closer proximity. The calico has also rendered a new visual territory around the entire periphery of the form, created by the deposited silica sand and the resultant shrinkage that is taking place. There is the sense of this form moving in two dimensions, creating an extended footprint of previously covered territory whilst continuing to shrink bodily within the details and markings on its surface. This phenomena seems to give the piece a strange complexity of both temporality and a duration on which that temporality is directly charted, the calico is instrumental in registering this perception. The agencies of both the silica sand and the calico sheet between them regulate and guide our understanding of the observation of the clays infinitesimal shrinkage. The compression of the clays structure due to its shrinkage increases its density and visually alters the arrangement of the piercing that are mapped over its surface, the concise circles and holes cut through the clay have now blended into the overall tension imparted by shrinkage, there is a sense that precision of the marks, their machined appearance which contrasted to the locality to the clay around them has been lost, reclaimed by the inner natural torsions taking control of the piece as a whole. The clays surface with its sandy granular deposits whose particle size has become visually larger at the expense of its hosts shrinkage now auger for a territory, a land mass devoid of water, the sense of this territory becoming anhydrous, giving rise to thoughts of thirst and fragility, even the once precise holes give the impression of barren watering places isolated within a landscape in a state of drought. The once visible markings are now obscured by the action of the shrinking territory and its granular coating as it now gains in its ability to obscure features. The traced and drawn female form is still harboured somewhere under this obscuring sand. Yet she now resides as a brittle uncompromising inscription of her former self, the plasticity that once gave her a sensuality into the yielding and pliable surface has succumbed to the unstoppable internal shrinkage of the clay particles starved of moisture. The clay is acknowledging the atmosphere of its given surroundings, our environment.

The Draught, J G Ballard 

The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

The Disposition of the Body, Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract)

The clay suffers, dehydrates as its moisture is absorbed by the surrounding atmosphere, giving up its plasticity and its almost inhuman sensuality and tactility. Presented amongst us, it is rendered into a state of its own homogeneity Conversely the working drawing which has evolved from being a simple template to aid the registration of celestial information within the territory of the body. Has itself become involved in its own creation as an art object. On completing its initial purpose, the task of transferring details onto the surface of the embryonic clay form. It has now become embroiled and entangled as it were with the creative issues of the clay form; “they” have become members of the same intuitions the same creative flux, sisters. The drawn “sister” contains the origin of their shared inscription, the originating female trace. The gesture and act still remains, visible only by physical impression of transference; which is left proud, raised and projecting passed the original flatness of the paper. These material read together render insights into superimposed temporalities shared by the art object, they question and reveal the reverse side of origins, of the work or its working drawing, they all underline the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary art practice.

The Drawing strangely or ironically displays values in a state of stasis, now lost with its sister. The cyanotype “sea” with its fluidity bleeding into the porosity of the news print. The “ streams” of residues washed from other areas are now deposited into the interior space where they have collected finally to evaporate leaving their watery remains. Only the clarity of the “permanent” marker pen remains untouched by any entropic activity. Objectively the drawing materials has slowed down to the point when one might grant it a measure of completeness. Its particular temporalities now exist within the interactions it can manifest from others, other things, other situations that are drawn into its proximity, its particular field of intuitive reverberations, its unique dwelling place.

The clay form seems to have gathered up its history of temporal acts that culminate in its present form. This presented object, with temporalities marked on site has become a vehicle, a vessel for its own entropic voyage, another temporality that itself adds a spatial dimension. This object for me appears to be totally contingent yet relational to aspects of space and time, it exists uniquely “once” in the present, presence it creates with its observer. The result of this contingent object is that “we through it” are constantly travelling away from its point of origin, we as a result feel the passage of the entropic value of time through the human condition. Whereas the drawing does refer to a now and a past, an elsewhere ,it seems locked between these two comprehensions.

The clay form has clearly an entropic element which seems to give rise to phenomenologically driven inquiry which in turn helps to creates our sense of a spatiality. Uniquely formed between observation and our own movement, we are in effect made to sense that the object heralds our own becoming.

Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

Visualising Environmental Agency

"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Art and Agency, Alfred Gell 1998)"

"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.

Drawing intervention and speculative sculptural environment. 

Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School. 

Teacher Education Manual

Insight-Bohm-Krishnamurti. 1979

David Bohm, Are we saying that insight is an energy which illuminates the activity of the brain, and that in this illumination the brain itself begins to act differently?

Krishnamurti, You are quite right. That's all-that is what takes place. That is -this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set.

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

MAKING as a process of translation in the process of spatial iterations : An expanded field of exploratory inquiry.

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities.

Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us.

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

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

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

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 Geographies of Making

ReThinking Materials and Skills for Volatile Futures

The skill to sustain the life of something through repair and reappropriation

Collecting is an example or a pre-emptive activity that people who are skilled with their hands commonly share

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.

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair.

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

Drawing Into The Human Form/The Architectural Body

 Drawing Into The Human Form.

Its conceptual frameworks, aesthetics and contexts.

Inclusions/Enclosures/Involuntary Mappings and Erasures.

Figuring it out, sensuality through making the drawing heard.

Drawing from a blindness, a memory of seeing.

Derrida.

Drawing into the perspectives and  sociological relationships of the Architectural Body, organism/person/environment.

Gins and Arakawa.

Explanations/Gestures of Looking and Mark Making.

Scale/Proximity/Seeing Distance/Situatedness/Environment/Art Work.

Haptic Seeing/moving over the surface of the sociological subject.

Frottage, life drawings with involuntary textures and marks derived from their particular locality and working methods, concrete floors, wooden floorboards, graphite sticks, charcoal, pencil and wax crayons.

The body and its nakedness becomes the instrument of our emotions and our sensuality.

The Psychology of Nakedness.

Naked to Nude, Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.

Dwelling in Brockwood/Kilquhanity : Drawing isn't a matter of tools but perception-a form of engagement.

Outpost 140223

Matters of Concern.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world. 

Creative entanglements in a world of materials.

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

Improvisation is drawing.

Drawing isn't a matter of tools but perception-a form of engagement.

Roni Horn.

Kilquhanity Free School.

Mission statement to enjoy childhood.

Kilquhanity promotes a playful difference amongst the locality.

Back To Freeschool : Drawing Out Of The Archive.

At Freeschool I turned a dwelling place into both a site of introspection and a social construction.

By living together as a social group, learning by the practical 'doing' from which to extract a sense of practical wisdom.

Useful work, promotes a sense of being amongst the social group, of an equality of joined forces for the benefit of Kilquhanity.

Kids encouraged to build camps around the grounds, personal and inter-personal temporary structures that reinforce our sense of 'passing through'.

Kilquhanity seems to suit the individual with confidence and those with good social skills, Architects, Film Makers, Craftspeople, others have found it difficult to rejoin society.

Brockwood Park School

Our consciousness is not actually yours or mine, it is the consciousness of humanity evolved, grown, accumulated through many, many centuries, when one realises this our responsibility becomes extraordinarily important.

J. Krishnamurti.

Projective Speculations, through questioning and research, asking ourselves, how are our intraventions capable of generating previously non-existent possibilities or ideas?

How can architectural projections become tools for engagement in the actual transformation of the world, and to what extent can they be tools for thinking as well as for the articulation, interrogation, and challenging of discourse.

Intraventions in live situations are the main form of engagement, we take part from the inside, in the construction and articulation of 'sites'. We do this by using expanded conditioned, ecologies, localities and actors within a phenomenon in which we operate 'an architecting' as responsibly as possible.

Oren Lieberman, Alberto Altes.

Raveningham Site Visit/Walking in the Landscape.

Ephemeral-Site-Drawings.

The Choreographic Object in The Lanscape.

Land/Demarcations/Spaces/Occurrences with others

Filtered light pieces/land markers

Field Studies/Gathering/Dwelling/Reading/Light/Time/Media

A Phenomenal Lens.

Water/glass dishes/construction, floating/submerged objects/.Cyanotype Print.

Sculptural Array/Sky Watcher/Imaginative Spaces.

Apparatus for Solargraphy.

Mast/Conductor/Transponder,

Hungate Study Day.

Corporeal Annotations.

Reading/Materials/Substances/Phenomena

Water/Light/Architecture/Vessel/Place/Canvas/Filtered Light/Ceramic/Clay

Undercroft Norwich.

Plaster/Slab Components/Assemblages/Forms

Spatial Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

 Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

"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.

Assemblage (Wilcox)

As opposed to concepts like structure, culture, science, objectivity, production, agency, technology, and nature, the idea of assemblage emphasizes the material-discursive heterogeneity of which the cosmos is constituted. As Deleuze explains:

In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs. The relations between the two are pretty complex. For example, a society is defined not by productive forces and ideology, but by ‘hodgepodges’ and ‘verdicts.’ [i]

Fortun and Bernstein (1998) use the term “realitty” to describe the complex, messy world made up of assemblages and trace the genealogy of the concept throughout the twentieth century’s continental philosophical traditions. Beginning with Frankfurt School critical theorists like Walker Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who coined the term “constellation,” and moving through Foucault and Deleuze, Fortun and Bernstein characterize the concept of the assemblage thus:

In an assemblage, nothing explains it all: not the sciences, not the social sciences, not the human sciences. There isn’t anything that is first or fundamental in an assemblage—nature, language, culture, institutions, whatever—it’s all at once, and we with our questions come after it. Meaning that we are both assembled by it, and in pursuit of it. Even though we’re consigned to come after the assemblage has been assembled, both with and without our intentionality, that doesn’t stop us from going after it, too.[ii]

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+%28Wilcox%29

Assemblage (Weiss)

(Disambiguation: Assemblage (Wilcox))

The assemblage is introduced as a heuristic tool to map out the realitty of an idea: the conceptual connections surrounding and contributing to the formation of a topic, such as Darwin's theory of evolution. The primary source text for this idea is Muddling Through by Fortun and Bernstein.

There are four general characteristics of assemblages:

1) Assemblages are a kind of infrastructure (1, 2) - "a complex, crazily reticulated transportation system" (105) - that, like roadways, facilitate (conceptual) movement in certain directions while constraining movement in other ways.

2) Despite the constraining nature of assemblages, they still allow for some elements of power and agency to be exercised. If you have the ability, granted by some modes of thinking, to go "off-road" or to start a new chain of self-organizing "roadwork", then you are able to recoup more agency in choosing which direction to think in. (105)

3) An assemblage is always in some type of restricted motion as various nodes are afforded slight shifting within the constraints of their linkages. "The lobster form is not entirely whimsical, but a deliberate reminder that the sciences are in motion and, indeed, composed of linked motions." (106) Stabilization is possible in small regions of an assemblage through stronger interconnections made between nodes of institutions, concepts, and activities, such as those found in the sciences. It is important to recognize that this stabilization effect comes not from reality, but from realitty, the social elements that contribute to a sense of fact or truth. This movement also emphasizes that visual representations are "diagrams of contingency" - the elements are all interdependent upon connections to other elements and that shifts in force or direction will transfer across the diagram, sometimes in indirect ways. (107)

4) The representation of an assemblage is itself a kludged tool to aid our understanding of and inquiry into scientific activities. Rather than providing answers or hard-and-fast explanations, assemblages are meant to provoke questions and to open up possibilities in thinking about events and topics in new ways.

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+(Weiss)

Agential Realism

A theory coined by Karen Barad, agential realism reconceptualizes the process by which objects are examined and knowledge created in scientific activities. Barad emphasizes that agential realism is not just an epistemological theory, but an ontological one, as it describes how reality is actually shaped. 

" [Agential realism] is an epistemological and ontological framework that extends Bohr's insights and takes as its central concerns the nature of materiality, the relationship between the material and the discursive, the nature of "nature" and of "culture" and the relationship between them, the nature of agency, and the effects of boundary, including the nature of exclusions that accompany boundary projects.

Agential realism entails a reformulation of both of its terms - "agency" and "realism" - and provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman factors in the production of knowledge, thereby moving considerations of epistemic practices beyond the traditional realism versus social constructivism debates." (89)

Agency, according to Barad, “is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.” (112) 

Niels Bohr's Quantum Physics

“Bohr’s epistemology calls into question several foundationalist assumptions that Western epistemology generally takes as essential to its project; among these are an inherent subject/object distinction and the representational status of language.” (89) 

Influential in the development of agential realism was Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist who asserted that observing apparatuses are not merely passive instruments, but things that participate in the formulation of scientific observation. He also resolved the "wave-particle" duality paradox (97) by positing that the paradox existed because the methods used by scientists to measure light as a wave versus as a particle were mutually exclusive.

By granting apparatuses a more active role in the production of knowledge, Bohr challenged the separateness of observer and object by referring to “objects of observation” and “agencies of observation”.

“[T]his interaction between object and apparatus thus forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon.” (95)

Apparatus

“[A]pparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming." 

“...apparatuses are not mere instruments or devices that can be deployed as neutral probes of the natural world, or determining structures of a social nature, but neither are they merely laboratory instruments or social forces that function in a performative mode." 

Barad uses the example of the transducer in a sonogram machine that is used to "view" a fetus: 

"the transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather, it helps produce and is "part of" the body it images.” (101)

A transducer in a sonogram is not merely a passive instrument; it actively participates in the production of an image of a fetus, both in how it transforms auditory input (sound waves) into visual outputs on a screen, but also in how it makes the fetus seem to be more real and existent than it would have been without. 

Diffraction

Another key idea behind agential realism is Barad's emphasis on a transformative and transgressive diffraction, not just reproducing reflection:

"In this regard, it is important not to confuse the fact that I am drawing on an optical phenomenon for my inspiration in developing certain aspects of my methodological approach ... with the nature of the method itself. In particular, calling a method 'diffractive' in analogy with the physical phenomenon of diffraction does not imply that the method itself is analogical. On the contrary, my aim is to disrupt the widespread reliance on an existing optical metaphor - namely, reflection - that is set up to look for homologies and analogies between separate entities. By contrast, diffraction, as I argue, does not concern homologies but attends to specific material entanglements." (87)

Again, Barad's posthumanist expansion of performativity to include nonhumans comes into play:

"I propose a posthumanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism. The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices, doings, and actions." (135) 

Barad clarifies that her posthumanism is not celebrating "after humans", but more challenging the prima facie segregation and privileging of humans over and from other beings:

"Posthumanism, as I intend it here, is not calibrated to the human; on the contrary, it is about taking issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both living and nonliving)" (136) 

Hearkening back to her physics roots, Barad compares the conceptual diffraction to optical diffraction versus reflection, explaining that diffraction allows for more insight because it transforms (conceptual) images:

"Such an approach also brings to the forefront important questions of ontology, materiality, and agency, which social constructivist and traditional realist approaches get caught up in the geometrical optics of reflection where, much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors, the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen.

Moving away from the representationalist trap of geometrical optics, I shift the focus to physical optics, to questions of diffraction rather than reflection. Diffractively reading the insights of poststructuralist theory, science studies, and physics through one another entails thinking the cultural and the natural together in illuminating ways." (135) 

This diffraction challenges the singularity and solidity of boundaries, making what was sharply delineated a zone of fuzzy regions that have questionable divisions held in place by iterative performativity:

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Agential+Realism+%28Weiss%29

Spatial Abstractions : Photogram/Collage/Drawing/Mapping

Hidden Curriculum/Assemblages : Synergies of creative practice

“When building and art are jointly focused in joint search not of an image, but of a mood, they cannot fail to produce integrity, even if they don't produce great art."

Brian Clarke, Glass In The Environment Conference, held at the RCA, London 1986.

UCA Canterbury :  Postgraduate School 2010

My current spatial practice is centred around a multi disciplinary approach through "drawing" to critical issues of site. This activity could be understood as an investigative creativity amongst the phenomenological aspects of architectural place and the potentials of producing working spaces/sites for the reflection of others. The practice informs specific sensibilities and my intuitions through concise and simple trace strategies; promoting a sense of material memory and knowledge which becomes enmeshed with the human condition. These resultant trace strategies, drawings are open, active and present in-situ where they become vessels for placed geographies, maps around human relations.

The use of site as a working drawing from which to create a temporary intervention into place helps to instigate a threshold, a room or event from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

Previous working sites have used the agencies of natural light, water and clay in long durational works realised by installation, performative drawing and elemental photographic apparatuses and processes (pinhole cameras/cyanotypes).My practice continues to employ simple indexical strategies to promote the possibility of a spatial "open text" from which to render transparency and superimpose a charismatic sense of nowness with an awareness of a duration of place.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Land Drawing : Layered Canvas, Gesso, Yellow Ochre on Paper.

Hidden Curriculum, teaching intervention in the library of Brockwood Park School.

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand in the chapel of rest, Andover.

Fossil Worlds, human outline with cyanotype, field chalk and Jurassic earth materials.

My practice is an inquiry into the realms of both architecture (built and social) and fine art based methodologies of making/thinking and presentation. Although my working methods and processes are informed by a number of theoretical and philosophical sources and interests, it is however the simple wonder of things and phenomena that can be brought into new forms of expression that I find wonderous and challenging.

 A Philosophy of Solitude

John Cowper Powys

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

ASSEMBLAGE:

An assemblage is any number of "things" or pieces of "things" gathered into a single context. An assemblage can bring about any number of "effects"—aesthetic, machinic, productive, destructive, consumptive, informatic, etc. Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the book provides a number of insights into this loosely defined term:

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of the substantive. On side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects what it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity... Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. (3-4)

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

Maternal Body : Clay Impression and Fragmented Form installed at Chapel Arts, Andover

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand in the chapel of rest.

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. 

A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.

Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency 2009

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.

My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions. 

Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.

Anselm Kiefer | "Die Ungeborenen" | Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac | Paris Pant...

Russell Moreton : Collage Works "Interiors and Interiority"

Richard Sennett, "Interiors and Interiority" Published on 26 Apr 2016 4/22/16 Richard Sennett's talk will trace how intimate physical spaces emerged, historically; he will explore the relationship between the concepts "inside" and "subjective" and whether interior spaces and interiority are disappearing today, under the influence of social media.
https://youtu.be/hVPjQhfJfKo


Public Intimacy Architecture and the Visual Arts Giuliana Bruno.


Domain/Court/Cell Architectonic Space: Fifteen Lessons on the Disposition of the Human Habitat By Hans van der Laan,

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/27657797991/in/photostream/

Russell Moreton : Photograph (661) Artist's Book.

http://www.ipernity.com/home/russellmoreton