Spatial~Agencements
A Research Ecology of Making.
A practice begins somewhere between things.
A reading encounters an image.
An image recalls a place.
A place produces a movement.
A movement gathers a material.
A material resists the hand.
The resistance changes the making.
Nothing quite remains where it began.
Spatial Agencements describes this movement through a practice that gathers bodies without finally containing them. Clay, ceramic, drawing, architecture, landscape, photography, memory, reading and walking enter into provisional correspondence. Some relations become visible; others remain latent, waiting for another encounter.
The wayfarer gathers.
But gathering is not accumulation. It is a temporary bringing-into-relation.
A fragment may become a drawing.
A drawing may become a spatial proposition.
A spatial proposition may enter clay.
Clay may become ceramic.
The ceramic may enter another room, another atmosphere, another body.
The practice moves through these transformations without requiring them to resolve into a single narrative.
Here, the archive becomes mobile.
Old images, forgotten texts, abandoned propositions and previous material encounters can be returned to and disturbed by the present. What was once documentation can become material again. What appeared peripheral can become central. What seemed finished can reopen.
Archive → anarchive.
The studio consequently becomes less a place where things are produced than a situation in which bodies encounter one another.
Clay is one such body.
It receives, resists, absorbs, fractures, records and transforms. Fire changes the conditions again. What was provisional becomes persistent, but persistence does not mean closure. The ceramic withdraws from the immediacy of making while remaining available to light, atmosphere, architecture, movement and other bodies.
The work becomes a spatial body.
Not because it represents space.
Because it participates in relations that produce space.
Keywords.
spatial agencements, research ecology, wayfaring, gathering, correspondence, spatial bodies, bodying, material reciprocity, speculative learning, situated ecology, making, clay~ceramic, archive~anarchive, walking, landscape, interiority, permeability, threshold, futurity, In~~Touching,
Russell Moreton's current practice operates as a spatial ecology of making in which ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, landscape, interiority, teaching, reading and remembered experience remain in active correspondence.
Rather than developing through a linear progression of ideas, the practice moves through encounters. Materials, images, texts, places, bodies and previous works are gathered, displaced and returned to in altered circumstances. Earlier propositions do not become resolved stages within a history of development; they remain available as active bodies within the present.
The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.
Its spatiality does not reside simply in the production of objects with architectural or sculptural characteristics. Space emerges through the relations that form between bodies: between material and gesture, surface and interior, object and atmosphere, architecture and movement, reading and making.
The studio becomes an expanded environment in which these relations can be tested.
Making is not understood as the execution of a pre-existing idea. It is a mode of inquiry through which thought becomes distributed across material, body and situation. Clay participates in this process through its resistance, plasticity, weight, fragility and capacity for transformation. Pressure becomes trace; cutting becomes aperture; excavation becomes interior; repetition becomes difference. The ceramic body emerges through these material events rather than simply receiving a predetermined form. This emphasis on making as an active mode of knowing is already central to Moreton's recent formulation of the studio as a site of continuous exchange.
Gathering
A recurring figure within the practice is the wayfarer.
The wayfarer gathers.
Readings, images, fragments, materials, spatial memories, drawings, architectural propositions and encounters are collected not as information to be accumulated, but as bodies that might enter into correspondence.
The gathering remains provisional.
Something is carried.
Something is placed beside something else.
A relation appears.
The bodies may then disperse, only to return through another material or situation.
Gather ~ carry ~ encounter ~ release ~ return ~ gather again.
This movement is central to the practice's relationship with the archive.
The archive is not treated as a stable repository of completed knowledge. Through collage, drawing, rereading and making, archival material becomes mobile. The old text encounters the new ceramic; the image encounters another body; a forgotten proposition becomes perceptible through a changed material condition.
The archive begins to become an anarchive.
Not because its contents are discarded, but because they begin to move again.
The archive is not proving the present practice. It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.
This is why the practice can be understood as a research ecology rather than a research method. It does not establish a fixed procedure through which knowledge is extracted. It creates conditions in which different bodies of material can encounter, trouble and transform one another.
Wayfaring
Wayfaring provides a corresponding spatial logic.
The practice moves through environments rather than simply representing them. Walking, looking, gathering and making become ways of attending to the relations already present within a place.
The wayfarer does not simply move across a landscape.
The landscape participates in the movement.
This extends into the studio. Materials, tools, surfaces, texts and images become part of a field through which the practice navigates. The resulting work is less a destination than a temporary constellation: a gathering of forces that remains open to further movement.
The spatial body is therefore not a body that contains movement.
It is a body that becomes through movement.
Correspondent bodies
Theoretical and artistic references enter this ecology not simply as sources of authority but as correspondent bodies.
Tim Ingold's thinking around correspondence and wayfaring, Karen Barad's account of intra-action and diffraction, Erin Manning's attention to movement and the anarchive, Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of interiority, and the architectural propositions of Arakawa and Gins and Zuzana Kovar all become possible bodies with which the practice can think.
They are not applied to the work as explanatory frameworks.
They enter the work.
They alter its vocabulary.
The material encounters them in turn.
A reading can become pressure.
A theoretical proposition can become an aperture.
An architectural question can become a chamber.
A spatial memory can become surface.
The relation is reciprocal.
The ceramic body
Within this ecology, clay has become an increasingly significant participant.
The clay body gathers what has passed through the practice, but it does not simply contain it. It troubles what has been gathered through its own material resistance.
This is where the practice moves towards the idea of the Permeable Chamber.
The ceramic body is neither simply vessel nor sculpture, container nor architectural fragment. Its apertures, surfaces, cavities and thresholds produce relations between interior and exterior, enclosure and permeability, withdrawal and correspondence.
The body becomes through what passes through it.
Fire changes this proposition again.
What was provisional in clay becomes materially persistent in ceramic. The fired body withdraws from the immediate responsiveness of making, but the relations of making continue through its surfaces, apertures, weight, atmosphere and spatial presence.
The ceramic is withdrawn from making, but not withdrawn from correspondence.
It enters another temporality.
Light touches it.
Air passes around it.
Shadow inhabits it.
Architecture situates it.
Another body encounters it.
The ceramic becomes a spatial body not because spatial characteristics have been added to it, but because it continues to participate in spatial relations.
Interiority as movement
Interiority consequently becomes less a place than a movement between bodies.
It may occur within a cavity, across a surface, between an aperture and light, within the atmospheric field of an installation, or within the encounter between a viewer and a withdrawn ceramic body.
The interior is not necessarily what is contained.
It can be what emerges between.
This allows Moreton's earlier concerns with architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching and spatial research to remain active within the present practice without being reduced to historical influences. The current ceramic work becomes another site through which those concerns can be materially re-entered.
The practice is therefore less concerned with defining what a ceramic object is than with asking what relations a ceramic body can make possible.
In~~Touching
This movement brings the practice towards In~~Touching.
Touch is understood here not simply as physical contact but as a distributed condition of correspondence. Bodies can touch across distance, through light, atmosphere, memory, surface, material resistance and spatial relation.
To touch is to be altered.
To become in touch is to become responsive to what another body is doing.
The practice consequently attends to the world's patternings and murmurings: forces, traces, residues, atmospheres and movements that pass between bodies without necessarily becoming fully visible.
The ceramic body carries these murmurings forward.
But they are never its possession.
They continue elsewhere.
A spatial ecology of making
Moreton's present spatial practice can therefore be understood as a research ecology of making: a field in which gathering, wayfaring, correspondence, material encounter and transformation remain continually entangled.
Its movement might be traced as:
gathering → wayfaring → correspondence → troubling → making → firing → withdrawal → reverberation → gathering again
This is not a method.
It is a condition of practice.
The work remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research does not seek a final position but creates temporary conditions in which different bodies can encounter one another and become otherwise.
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The spatial emerges through this movement.
The ceramic body becomes spatial through correspondence.
The archive becomes anarchive through movement.
Making becomes a way of learning.
And the practice continues to wayfare.
What is gathered is never simply contained.
It reverberates.
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