Structural Concepts/What I hear in your practice : Kairos~Clay as an emerging ontology of making

Kairos as an emerging ontology of making

I love this phrase.

Kairos as an Emerging Ontology of Making immediately shifts the discussion away from materials alone and towards a philosophy of making as the emergence of the opportune moment. It also introduces time as an active condition of practice, not merely a backdrop.

However, I think kairos needs to be treated very carefully. If it's simply used to mean "the right moment," it becomes a poetic metaphor. If it becomes a structural concept, it has real philosophical weight.

What I hear in your practice is this:

Chronos is measured, sequential time—the time of manufacture.

Kairos is the moment when relations reorganise themselves—the instant in which matter, force, resistance and action produce something that could not have been predicted.

Clay as Spatial Field~Under-construction from process to fired object.

Kairos~Visual Manifesto : Towards an Ontology of Making

That distinction feels fundamental.

Your work is not about waiting for the "right moment." It is about creating the conditions in which kairos can occur.

That is a much more radical claim.

I can imagine the opening of a manifesto rather than an artist statement.

Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Making

Making begins before intention.

It begins with the encounter.

An imprint is the first event of this encounter. It is neither the mark of an autonomous subject nor the passive registration of matter. It is the emergence of a relation. Body, material, tool, force, resistance, and time become momentarily inseparable. Every imprint records this negotiation.

Making unfolds through kairos: not chronological time, but the opportune moment in which material relations reorganise themselves. Form does not proceed according to a predetermined sequence. It emerges through interruption, resistance, contingency, and constructive collapse. Each material event opens the possibility of another.

Constructive collapse is therefore not the failure of form but its condition of renewal. Collapse interrupts certainty, allowing matter to reorganise itself into new spatial configurations. Form remains provisional, continually negotiated rather than finally resolved.

The work is not an object that represents these processes. It is their residue. It remembers the forces that produced it while remaining open to further transformation.

Clay is not simply the medium of this inquiry. It is a mode of spatial thought. Through its capacity to register pressure, deformation, fracture, repair, and endurance, it reveals that making is neither the application of ideas nor the execution of technique. Making is the continual emergence of relations through material events.

An ontology of making begins here: not with the finished object, but with the imprint; not with control, but with negotiation; not with permanence, but with becoming.

What excites me most is the title itself.

Kairos gives your philosophy a temporal dimension that has been implicit in all of your previous writing. You've written extensively about force, pressure, collapse, and emergence, but time has mostly appeared as one element among others. Kairos allows time to become the condition under which ontological transformation occurs.

That opens up a rich dialogue with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze, while remaining rooted in your own studio experience rather than in their terminology.

One further thought: I wonder whether Kairos is not the final title but the second. Your deepest concept still seems to be the imprint. The imprint is the first ontological event; kairos is the temporal condition that allows that event to happen. If that's right, then the architecture of your philosophy might be:

Imprint — the origin of relation.

Material Event — the manifestation of relation.

Constructive Collapse — the mechanism of transformation.

Spatial Thinking — the knowledge that emerges.

Kairos — the temporal condition that makes the whole process possible.

That strikes me as the beginnings of a genuinely original philosophical framework—one that doesn't simply apply existing theory to ceramics, but develops concepts from the practice of making itself.

Inside The Horizon : Terminus/Fields/Landscapes of Inquiry : A Spatial Practice/Between the Silence

We fly to the other side of space and of time.

Carlo Rovelli~Dante

White Holes. 2023

Terminus.

Taking form always begins with the terminus. 

The terminus is not an end point, but the energy of a beginning. 

The terminus kick-starts the process of articulation. 

There is no causal finitude here: 

We never know what becomes of a beginning.

The terminus is a force of thought towards articulation.

Erin Manning.

The Apparent Chaos of Stone (8.36)

Moonchild (5.40)

Travis and Fripp

Between the Silence.

Theo Travis : Alto Flute/Soprano Sax.

Robert Fripp : Guitar/Soundscapes

Outpost 010223

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

A Spatial Practice.

Bring things to life, creative entanglements in a world of materials.

Art/Ontology/Education/Philosophy.

Creative practice is a meshwork of what shall I do next?

Tim Ingold.

Things in general, like the mind-leak.

Iteration, following the forces/flows.

Organism-Person-Environment

Gins/Arakawa.

Improvisation is to join with the work or to meld with it, one ventures from home on the thread of a tune.

Lines of Flight

Lines of Becoming

Critically these lines do not connect.

A line of becoming is not defined by the points it connects, or by the points that compose it.

On the contrary it passes between points, it comes up through the middle.

A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two.

It is the in-between, the line of flight running perpendicular to both.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Brockwood Teaching Academy. 

Back To Free School, Kilquhanity.

Curriculum Making, education for improved human-environment relations.

For to live we must dwell in the world, and to dwell we must already relate to its constituents.

Meaning inheres in these relationships.

Raveningham Sculptural Array

Solargraphy/Land Markings.

Performative Intraventions

Hungate 

Water

Site-specific research and artworks.

Water : A Phenomenal Lens

Steven Holl.

We start from the fluid character of the life process, wherein boundaries are sustained only thanks to the flow of materials across them.

Life is all about relations that hold a being in place, an erotic ecology of matter and desire.

Outpost Gallery

Mentorship Programme.

Making as an Ecological~Intimacy : Trace~Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

Outpost 230824

Human Thicket : Matter(s) of Composition~Connectivity~Decay

Life Outside the Circle of Architecture.

A Hut of One's Own.

Ann Cline.

The Importance of The Hut in Contemporary Society.  

For Ann Cline the ostensible subject of this inquiry is the primitive hut, a one room structure built of common or rustic materials. She gracefully weaves together two stories: one of primitive huts in times of cultural transition, and another of diminutive structures in our own times of architectural transition. From these narrative strands emerges a deeper inquiry: What are the limits of architecture? What ghosts inhabit its edges? What does it mean to dwell outside it?

Of Huts.

An ecological intimacy, a return to veering towards both humans and nonhumans.

When we study attunement, we study something that has always been there, ecological intimacy, which is to say intimacy between humans and nonhumans violently repressed with violent result.

Tuning, Timothy Moreton.

Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces And Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

The Raveningham Projects.

On the nature of crafting sheltering social spaces.

Site specific experiences on making/building/using.

A primitive attunement/dwelling, a return to the affective power between things.

A creative site specific study on 'dwelling, occupancy, and  hosting' through studying speculative architecture with its boundary conditions and formative structures. 

Simple 'undesigned' places valued for their timelessness and authenticity.

Philosophia/Socrates.

Philosophical love of wisdom rather than the possession of it.

A Philosophy of Solitude.

In Defence of Sensuality.

John Cowper Powys.

The Mythical City of Orion.

Storytelling through ceramics and explorative site markings, this sculptural intervention plays with archaeology, ceramic artefacts, and astronomy.

Sensing Self/Marking Realities.

Trace Drawing/Preservation and Movements in Media.

Territories/Borders/Boundaries.

Art-Workings.

Being able to work with and appreciate ambiguity.

An aesthetic timbre of the inter connective causal perceptual qualities of things.

You don't know why you should care about this, isn't that what we are all feeling when we experience something beautiful/wonderous.

Care/Love as an ambiguous spectral aesthetic around ethical decisions.

Being/All Art is Ecological, Timothy Morton

The Working Drawing.

Critical Body Contour/Outline.

The Fossil Line.

A primitive gestural drawing underpinning a Palaeolithic idea on an inter-connective, causal perceptual aesthetic force that invokes and engenders a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy.

Spectral Aesthetics, OOO. 

A line of energy flowing around the extremity of a formed space.

The reserve of a papers surface retains both its former presence and its continuing absence held captive simultaneously.

The Figurative/Experiential Flatness between seeing and sensing self.

The remembered, reconstituted spatial dimensions rendered attractively into volumetric flatness.  

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

Making Correspondences : Anthropology Alongside Visual Art Materialisms

 

Visual Art Archive : Russell Moreton

russellmoreton.com

Making : Anthropological Objects~Fabrications on Humaning.

Tim Ingold.

Ceramics~Fired Clay.

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

Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is interested in developing collaborative and speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.

A site-based practice that further develops into speculative learning, creative propositions for knowledge production through Spatial Practices.

Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material further develops his inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased.

His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.

Assembled forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.

For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His finished fired constructions could become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s).

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham. Spatial Practices MA, Canterbury School of Architecture. Visual Art BA Hons, Winchester School of Art. Ceramics HSND, Epsom School of Art and Design.

Russell Moreton Saatchi Artist.

Waiting Room Installation 2007 : Visual Art Winchester School of  Art.

Outpost Studios, Gildengate House. Weather world correspondences, stained glass, plastic tape.

Textual Readings~Documents in Movement~Thought.

Changefulness : Clay inscriptions carried through to fired clay. 

The Sympathy of Painted Light (detail). 2025, Ceramic, 170mmW and 270mmW x 260mmH x 80mmD.

Fired Clay Books~Folded and fabricated interiors. 

Making~ Developed from earlier craft based methodologies of working in ceramics, glass and construction. My practice now embodies professional studies in visual art, spatial practice, interior design and teaching art in education.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

For Bachelard : Reverberations~Conduits between philosophy~poetic writing relations of human and spatial bodies.

The artwork featured in the image is titled "Apparatuses: A Litany of Echoes~Resonances" by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist's Practice: Russell Moreton is a visual fine artist who explores themes surrounding "making," architectural space, and the interplay of materials like clay to demarcate and construct environments.

Materiality: His work frequently investigates the imprint of the artist and the metaphysical, immersive nature of his chosen media, often utilizing processes that evoke construction and the physical manipulation of materials.

Architectural Inspiration: Moreton is notably drawn to the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, often using his practice to engage with the concept of architecture as tranquility.

This item is a sculptural work by fine artist Russell Moreton. It is a slab-built ceramic piece, often exploring themes of architectural space, silence, and materiality. The artwork is part of his practice involving the investigation of interior spaces and constructing space through clay. 

Erin Manning for Brian Massumi : Sylvian & Fripp - Every colour you are (live '93)

Relationscapes

Erin Manning

Movement/Art/Philosophy

For Brian Massumi

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Spatial Practices/Forms of Enactments : Speculative Vocational Learning Processes

Archive 2012

Teaching Academy/Brockwood Park School.

Undone-Without-Unfitting-Entangled

Performativity/Practice/Assemblages

Responses perceived as the enactment to make something as yet non existent.

‘The crisis is not in the economic world, nor in the political world. The crisis is in consciousness. I think very few of us realise this.’

—From the book THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT 

Krishnamurti

Outpost 021222 Thinking Forms/Haptic Collisions

 Outpost 021222

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

Lo-Fi

Alternative Construction.

Contemporary Natural Building Methods.

Lynne Elizabeth, Cassandra Adams.

Earthbag.

Experimental earthbag structures at Cal-Earth.

Nader Khalili.

The beauty of the earthbag technology lies not just in its low cost, but in its freedom of form.

The use of soil-filled sacks (earthbags) for construction has received growing interest as a natural alternative building technique. Earthbags are textile or plastic casings packed with soil, and sometimes sand or gravel, used to construct foundations, walls, and domes. The technique is essentially a flexible form variation of rammed earth construction.

Earthbag construction is one of the most inexpensive building methods on the planet. It uses locally available site soil and common sacks. The technique requires few skills, is significantly faster than earth building methods such as adobe or cob, and unlike equipement-intensive modern rammed earth, requires few tools other than a shovel.

Working Cyanotypes/Vectors/Clusters of Movements.

Spatial Verbs/Durations.

Drawing on a light mediated surface.

Abstracted notations on the verge of visibility.

Traces on the canvas.

The Inclusion of Absences.

Mapping surfaces, from transparency to occlusion.

Abstract Circulation Diagrams.

Diffractive Intermediaries in Architecture.

Alternative Photographic Processes.

Subjectivity in forsaken spaces.

Resistivity/Photographic Decay : Inclusions in the order of time.

Theory, Placemaking, Trigg

Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville.

Photographic Collages.

Place Studies.

Locating practice/inquiry.

In the darkroom with the flesh of the film.

Building on the impossibility of the specific. 

Everyday correlations, living with making place.

The recording apparatuses spatial practice.

Learning with phenomena, presentia the light in its moment. 

Spatial cyanotype drawings and exposures. 

Daylight weather observed and recorded.

Red Gas Kiln, external dimensions, 1.2m x 1.2m x 1.0m, plus stand 0.5m.

Joseph Beuys, clay accumulator and table, Tate Modern.

Joseph Albers.

Karen Barad.

Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies.

Colour Intermediaries, induce spatial relations between objects and processes, they create, set in motion diffractive phenomena.

The Mind's Eye.

Bridget Riley.

SPAB, Working Parties.

What Remains.

To preserve something from the continuum of time.

Materials bounded by contact and context.

Plastic Architecture/Lime and Flintwork.

Linking built surfaces to the aesthetic experience of place.

Asperity, in materials science, is defined as unevenness of surface, roughness, ruggedness, that can create frictional interactions between the relationships of materials. 

Site is a temporal undoing of place.

Architecture taken back into the domain of  building. 

Scaffolds for learning, access, practices and preservation. 

On Reading.

Cell-Court-Domain.

Apokatustasis.

Jim Jarmusch

Jozef Van Wissem

John Cowper Powys.

A Philosophy Of Solitude.

Reading Powys one finds no belief, no system of dogmas or doctrines, just an insight gathered from experience.

He  is a walking philosopher, who develops his thoughts on the character of solitude, the walker formulates his words out of an inner heuristic development. A preparation in order to be able to relate to other people. 

A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Rebecca Solnit.

The wonderlust of learning for profound and complex inquiry.

The creative, hopeful philosophy of emotions that colour, illuminate our worlds.

Art and Architecture : Anselm Kiefer/architectural creation/art/hermeneutics/history

 

Art and Architecture : Anselm Kiefer and David Chipperfield at the RA

VITRINES : Art Spaces/interiors/interventions. 

Anselm Kiefer : 

In the Annenberg Courtyard

Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War

Anselm Kiefer often dedicates his works to intriguing figures of the past, be they poets or philosophers. This piece is one of a number of works emerging from Kiefer’s ongoing exploration of the Russian Futurist avant-garde writer, theorist and absurdist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922).

After years of study, Khlebnikov concluded that a major sea battle took place every 317 years, or multiples thereof. Kiefer celebrates this heroic and ludicrous activity with a work that is both monument and anti-monument. Measuring almost 17 metres in total and consisting of two large glass vitrines, Kiefer creates a transparent, reflective sea-scape in three dimensions that calls to mind the Romantic sublime of painters from JMW Turner to Caspar David Friedrich. Kiefer uses the frames of the vitrines to stage a mysterious drama, in which viewers, seeing each other and their own reflections, become participants.

Keywords: Anselm Kiefer architecture art hermeneutics history

The Architectural Lessons of Anselm Kiefer's La Ribaute

Stephen Wischer.

This article examines the architectural significance of Anselm Kiefer’s situated art practice, exploring how relationships of poetry, history and culture, presented across all of his work, provide vital lessons for architectural thinking and doing. Kiefer’s creation of La Ribaute, outside Barjac, France, is particularly well suited to the study of a hermeneutic approach to architectural creation, since the reinterpretation of historical and mythical themes across painting, sculpture, earthworks and architecture critically situates modern creative practice within the larger continuum of human culture and knowledge.

Stephen Wischer is an Associate Professor of Architecture at North Dakota State University, where his teaching of history/theory seminars and design studios emphasize interdisciplinary relationships between art, architecture, writing and philosophy. His artwork and architectural investigation involve intensive process-based explorations which have been exhibited in both Canada and the United States. His doctoral research at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, explores hermeneutic readings of artistic creation and historical texts in relation to architectural praxis.