Drawing Towards an Ecology of Materiality/Embodiment/Emotion/Affect

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Relation-In-The-Making.

Spaces between objects, Giorgio Morandi.

Emergent Evolutions.

These micro-perceptions are perceptions without objects, hallucinatory tendencies in the sense that they express nothing but the emphasis on the quality of becoming. They do not give us a body fully formed or an object-in-place, rather they fold perception into a becoming-body-of-movement, creating the emphasis of quasi formation that is relation-in-the-making.

An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling.

Momentum Wheel : Lucie Rie Installation.

We perceive/perception is the force for the worlds infinite unfolding, with objects catching the edges of their contours, participating in the relation they call forth.

Erin Manning.

The smooth paint of the background turns out to be made of many translucent layers, intended to cover over outlines that Giacometti rejected, always in favour of a smaller and smaller head.

John Berger.

Diffractive Thinking/Reading abstractions in the middle of things and both ways at the same time.

Karen Barad.

MAKING

Anthropology

Archaeology

Art and Architecture.

Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making. For Ingold instead of treating art and architecture as compendia of objects for anthropological or archaeological analysis, he advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.

Hungate Site Visit.

Water/Light/Architecture.

Ceramic Vessels/Lead Tray/Water/Mirror.

Cyanotype Solution, unexposed, unwashed.

White gesso on biscuit ware.

White lead glaze.

Ceramics and Architecture.

Ceramics for a reflective solitude, an architecture of silence.

Figural Jars/Abstracted Human Clay Vessels/Cinerary Pots.

Sainsbury Centre.

Julian Stair.

Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Mezzanine Gallery.

Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Materiality, Embodiment, Nonhumans, Hylomorphism, Things.

One of the peculiarities of material culture studies over recent decades has been its virtual divorce from the traditions of ecological anthropology. This is odd, given that both fields are broadly concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Students of material culture are interested in people's relations with things. Ecological anthropologists study how human beings relate to their biotic and abiotic environments. For the former, persons and things are bound in relational networks; for the latter, human beings and other organisms are bound in webs of life. Yet practitioners of these two fields are speaking past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. 

Tim Ingold.

Archaeology, Volume 41, 2012.

The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect.

Sarah Tarlow.

When David Sylvester asked Giacometti about the thinness of the sculptures he had made without a model, Giacometti said 'they get narrow despite myself'.But then added, 'from life, they do this less'. Models put up a resistance to the thinning gaze, as if they were resisting Giacometti's willingness to let them go.

Drawings That Shrink.

Drawings that are extremely tense, a sign that the object/model is resisting.

Relations on the figure and the rejected lines and their borders on the drawing.

And so Yanaihara tilted and shrank, and sank down towards the bottom of the frame. As he shrank down, he also shrank away, back in space, away in time and perhaps in imagination, away from firm memory and towards insecure recollection. At some point Giacometti abandoned the drawing and began another.

Giacometti was fastidious about the placement of the easel, the canvas, and Yanaihara's chair, and he put little red blocks of clay under the stretcher to keep the canvas at a precise angle. None of that helped him anchor the figure: still it kept shrinking. The principle of its shrinking is clear in the dozen preparatory drawings, because many of the rejected lines remain visible. What mattered was the relation between the head and the borders of the drawing. That's why the drawings have drawn borders with lines scattered like matchsticks inside them.

On Drawing/Seeing to abolish the principle of disappearance, but it never can, and instead it turns appearance and disappearance into a game.

The crucial sadness of drawing  is it is unsurpassably close to the object, but always separated from it. Drawing bends my thoughts towards the nearly indescribable distance between the model and the motions of my hand, or should I say between the movements of my eyes as they pass over the model, and the sweep of my hand as it moves across the paper. Or the feel of the model, as I imagine it, and the texture of the paper as it slides under my hand.

The game of drawing is intricate enough with its slant rhymes between the feel of the model in my mind and the feel of the paper. It is made more difficult because drawn lines have the power to remake my own imagination. Every line I draw reforms the figure on the paper, and at the same time it redraws the image in my mind. And what is more, the drawn line redraws the model, because it changes my capacity to perceive. 

As I draw, the model becomes defective. The image in my mind is marred by the marks I put on paper. And so because a drawing cannot quite be touched, because it shifts when I try to fix it on paper, because it does not simply transcribe something in the world, because it can never bring back what I once loved – because of all that, drawing is an intense expression of the defect of distance.

John Berger.   

Littoral Zones/Making Processes : Affect, an ecology of experience/Clay Work : Visceral Practices.

 Momentum Wheel : Lucie Rie Installation.

Clay/Ceramics as a concept to a way of thinking.

Speculative Tectonics : A Poetic of Construction.

The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.

Clay Works --- In and Out of material : Clay plays the stone, the stone plays the clay

Tony Cragg

IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL

Demonstration

Tony Cragg : I basically mean the effectiveness of the object, of the material. But because the metaphysical and physical association are already occupied, I'm interested in somehow establishing some relationship with the materials and the things around me without using any preconceived notions of an already occupied language. It is a bit like taking away a Christian name and depersonalising something. What I mean is that it's an attempt on my side to restart the relationship with the material, which I think sculptors have to do anyway.

Jon Wood : Thinking of the increased awareness that this side of your work tries to capture and harness in the viewer, can you say a bit about the kind of sensitivities that you would like to be heightened? What would you see your work as demonstrations of and for? Your sculptures are triggers for what kind of thinking?

Tony Cragg : Well there is an attitude to looking at things and to looking at objects and materials which is based on a meditative tradition of contemplation : the universe in a grain of sand idea, or maybe even religious ideas where you actually get in contact on some level with the material world, on a deeper level than the one you obviously are capable of reaching in an everyday situation, so on an extraordinary level, outside of your own experiences.

I am not saying that that's not interesting or important. But I also think that this leaves the battleground for the everyday life to be governed by non-contemplative thought and non-meditative thought. And this may sound like a mixture of terms, but I think that there is a job to be done even on an everyday, “second for second” level of life—on the experiential level of life. I think there is a job to be done here improving the quality of contemplation about an awareness of the material world—the material world seen as an immediate extension of the communal social effort, the cultural effort that you are part of.

Jon Wood : How does it move from being an individual contemplative experience to being one that has a communal relevance?

Tony Cragg : In the main part it only has communal relevance. All you can do for yourself is formulate your sentences, cook yourself a meal that suits you, get dressed in a fashion that suits you, and everything else you have to put up with as having been made by other people for you. But obviously, even if they didn't ask your permission, there's something consensual about that, isn't there? Even though you don't like it, it doesn't look like you're making an effort to change it. And maybe there's some active thing there. My idea is that even if I don't like it, I wouldn't be able to change a great deal of it, but I could sow the seed for some change in the direction that I would feel would be important. It's a measure of how much responsibility one takes for the change. Looking for more in the visual world around me and looking for more language, in a sense, is one way of heightening sensibilities and expanding a vocabulary and then expanding the responses to a vocabulary is a way of heightening sensibilities. I'm not a politician, but I think we still live in a world that is greatly dominated by mesmerism and mystical models, which are very distracting because they actually stop us from really trying to face reality.

Realist Magic

Objects, Ontology,

Causality

Timothy Morton

Clay Work : Visceral Practices

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

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft.

Longshore drift is a geographical process that consists of the transportation of sediments (clay, silt, sand and shingle) along a coast at an angle to the shoreline, which is dependent on prevailing wind direction, swash and backwash. 

This process occurs in the littoral zone, and in or close to the surf zone.

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 ( 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.

Tectonics in architecture is defined as "the science or art of construction, both in relation to use and artistic design." It refers not just to the "activity of making the materially requisite construction that answers certain needs, but rather to the activity that raises this construction to an art form." It is concerned with the modeling of material to bring the material into presence: from the physical into the meta-physical world.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78804

Situate them in such a way that useful space for life may form itself amidst them.

Kazimar Malevich 1924

Zaha Hadid on Malevich • BBC CH/4

Template and Form 2010.The Yard,Winchester.

Modern information theory claims that both the clay and the mould are engaged with matter and form. The clay is in a metastable state that possesses potential energy, unevenly distributed, but capable of effecting a metamorphosis. This quality of the clay is the source of its form. The mould places a limit on the expanding form of the molecular organisation of the clay as it fills the mould. The mould does not form the clay passively, but communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that alters the clay's molecular organisation.