Between the Shape of Light and the Shape of Things.

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Japanese Pottery/Raku Bowls.

Drawing, the layers create an aggregate, they are generative rather than descriptive.

Carlo Scarpa.

Between the Shape of Light and the Shape of Things.

I believe that it is art that makes us grasp the reality of the world. It is the effort that human beings have made since the beginning. To make clear for themselves through forms, their own existence.

Carlo Scarpa. 1978

Scarpa finds rhymes/waves, conversations between the structural forms and the shapes of the objects, he designed with transformation and decay in mind. He knew how to wait, how to let ageing and patina complete their work.

The creative consciousness of collapsing time and of death marks all Scarpa's strategies and narratives. At Castelvecchio he leaves great distances between objects allowing them to converse with one another solitarily. His job he believed was not to show himself but to show the works and lend them sight, intensifying their resonance with one another and setting up dialogues between them and the architecture.

Light as a Mutable Presence.

Scarpa needed a light that moves, to give depth to the surface of the casts and to lead them into conversation. I set up my work by pairing like images, to show the different character of pieces as the fall of light changes, not to show light is brought in, but to account for its effects. Each work becomes solitary, tranquil but together they engage in a distant conversation, a little distracted as if in a world of their own. They look at one another from their private pools of illumination.

Guido Guidi.

And what of the present?

The present has no duration, when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustine.

Few architects have dealt with the kind of luminosity, reflection and the sheen of materials as  that which preoccupied Scarpa.

The Chapel of St Ignatius.

Steven Holl.

Architecture holds the power to inspire and transform our day-to-day existence. The everyday act of pressing a door handle and entering into a light washed room can become profound when experienced through sensitized consciousness. For Holl to hear, feel and see these physicalities is to become a subject of the senses.

Goethe, one should not seek  anything behind the phenomena, they are lessons themselves.

The spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola argues for a philosophical interpretation of the senses. This work preceding later writings on phenomenology by 300 years, critically re-orders the hierarchy  of the five senses. Hearing becomes the most refined sense, while sight the traditionally dominant sense comes third after touch.

A Gathering of Different Lights.

Vision.

Realization.

Radiance/Illumination.

The Haptic Realm.

Studies in Light.

Steven Holl in 'Questions of Perception' describes a phenomenology of architecture that argues for a heightened development of spatial and experiential dimensions through individual reflection on the senses and perception. Holl comments on the need to open ourselves to perception, we must transcend the mundane urgency of 'things to do'. We must try to access that inner life that reveals the luminous intensity of the world, only through solitude can we begin to penetrate the secrets around us. An awareness of one's unique existence in space is essential in developing a consciousness of perception.

Hortus Conclusus/A Return to Things : Substances, Materials, Making Drawings, Thinking Assemblages

 

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Hortus Conclusus, a serious place in the midst of mattering local ecologies.

Studio/Garden of forked paths

Substances, Materials, Making Drawings, Thinking Assemblages.

A drawing can be silly or crude, but locked inside it might be a little idea that given enough care and attention can rise above the rest of the orchestra and be heard individually.

Art as a clear and synthetic understanding of structured relationships that reveal innovative space-time through hidden sources of line and light, that suggest what art might become.

Brian Clarke.

Spatial Agent : Camera Tin/Molecular Sieve 115

The theoretical apparatus that practices physical movements and theory.

Grisaille/Procedural/Performative Grounds and Scripts/Double Occupations.

Speculative inquires, creative agencies that move through material thinking.

Diffraction as a tool for analysis that attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge making practices have on the world.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process that uses utilises and explores on going differences between phenomena. Diffractions open up ways for greater sensitivity towards how we are part of the worlds continuous becoming. 

Barad.

Paintings/Discursive Drawings around capacitance, interval,patterning and redundancy.

Diagrams for the imagination

Social noise cancelling artworks/bitumen, felt,foil,ceramic and lead.

Filtered Light/Projections and Transitions

Procedural Architecture/Assemblages and Environments

The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air (1954), Marcel Minnaert.

Minnaert offers a basis for understanding how myriad phenomena are concretely produced in the ordinary world. As opposed to Goethe's subjectively written Theory of Colours (1810), whose conjectures were based on personal examination unhampered by physics, Minnaert blends careful observations of luminous effects with analysis of how those effects are generated by physical modulations of light.

His work not only helps to throw attention onto light's beauty and mystery in the daily environment, but also treats those phenomena as palpable qualities that can be consciously perceived and described, and to some extent causally understood according to how light is modified when interacting with material things. 

The Architecture of Natural Light.

The Re-discovery of Ephemeral Light.

A Return to Things.

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

James Turrell. 

On Phenomenology, a phenomenal way of thinking and seeing.

When one is filled with wonder, a method of examining phenomena through intensified seeing and sensing, as opposed to intellectual abstractions and constructions.

The broad import of phenomenology for architecture, and for understanding the role of light in places we care deeply about, has gained a poetic dimension in the writings of Gaston Bachelard. 

In his still astonishing book, The Poetics of Space (1958), and later in The Flame of a Candle (1961), Bachelard introduces the concept of a primal image, and locates the source of its imaginative power in simple archetypal places, ranging from nests and corners, to cellars and attics, and in metaphysical places such as the lamp that glows in a window, reveries of faint light, and spaces that participate in cosmic events.

The mesmerizing allure of images where light is fighting of darkness, argues Bachelard, originates in primordial memories that are only  accessible through poetic imagination, daydream and reverie, sublimations that lie below rational thought.

The Other Architecture/Constructing Metaphysical Space, Henry Plummer. 2009

 

The arts are the wilderness areas of the imagination surviving.

Claude Levi-Strauss.

The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder.

Cultures of wilderness live by the life and death lessons of subsistence economies.

The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.

Practice, meaning a deliberate sustained and conscious effort to be more finely tuned to ourselves and to the way the actual existing world is. 

A Place in Space, proposes that we must ground ourselves in the dark of our deepest selves, and that a good part of that grounding  takes place in communities, which exist whether we know it or not within the natural nations, shaped by mountain ranges, river courses, flatlands and wetlands.

The place-based stories the people tell, and the naming they've done, is their archaeology, architecture, and title to the land.