A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Outpost 310323

A Sensation of Looking/Manifesting Seeing

Matters of Concern/Fact.

Drawing/Contingency/Sensing/Seeing

Drawing away from descriptive depictions that illustrate preconceptions/aesthetics.

Julian Stair.

Quietus. 2012.

The Vessel.

Death and The Human Body.

There is an alchemy to making ceramics. We take an inert material, fashion it, dry it and expose it to heat and flame. The practice of cremation, of exposing the body to fire, going through an alchemical change, echoes and parallels the process of firing.

Julian Stair.

The materials he works, lead and clay are dense, both physically and emotionally. But Stair's use of these materials is not representational. These objects do not depict or illustrate, instead they enact and embody.

Stair's achievement in this cyclical exhibition is to have expressed both the universality and the specificity of death, each as an aspect of the other.

The great hand-thrown jars that stand at the heart of the exhibition exemplify this doubleness. Though completely abstract, they exist at the scale of the body. They invite a tactile response, visitors might stroke the ridges circumscribing the jars or tap them, or even give them a gentle hug.

Glenn Adamson.

Life drawing on the psychology of  nakedness and the human body in contemporary art.

Life-Class/Anatomy/Pathology.

The practical and theoretical problems of the confrontation with the human form.

Georg Eisler.

Herbert Boeckl.

His nudes speak a physical language, interpreting life and death in terms of human bodies, of functioning muscle and bone and the tactile aspects of flesh, and the knowledge of what lies beneath/behind it. 

Alfred Hrdlicka. 

A Group. 1973.

Proximity does not read as intimacy, the entangled naked bodies convey a sense of insecurity.

The Posed/Nakedness/Social Scrutiny.

The Life-Class.

Isabel Bradshaw/Michael Grimshaw

Drawings/Sculpted lines that bring sensations onto the surface of the paper.

Lines of Movement/Vectors

Lines of Static Forms/Boundaries

Mark-making, rendering the spatialities of the human form.

Form-Movement

Mass-Volume

Skin-Surface

Line is only the visual interpretation of an extremity of a volume. Mark-making on a drawing becomes a conduit for a sensation of seeing others.

The concept of anthropomorphism is central to the identity of pottery. We use bodily terms such as a neck, shoulder, hip and foot to describe the constituent parts of a pot. And the very nature of the vessel as a container, a holder of things, is analogous to the idea of the body as physical container for the soul or spirit.

Julian Stair.

Ceramic Practice/Perception/Mind and Medium/The Jug/Things and Abstracts.

Ceramic Practice and Perception

Mind and Medium

Heuristic Material : Collage 

1. encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method.

2. serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.

abstracts : The Ruins of Cinema/Waverley Abbey Construction.

Flux/Fusion with nothingness and absorption 

Symbiotic relationship, feeding life, breath, energy, immanence

The visceral dark pots, meditations on existential feelings, volumes for thoughts, voids for imagination and fear, ecologies for living. 

The “New Ceramic Presence” a metamorphosis of meanings rather than in the eternity of symbols.

As always, the artist is led, not by patron, not by populace, certainly not by the critic, artist is led by artist. The artist is his/her own culture.

Rose Slivka. The New Ceramic Presence. 1961

The Garden Of Forking Paths

Chieko Mori, Spiral Wave

James Blackshaw, The Broken Hourglass

Helena Espuall, Home of Shadows and Whirlwinds

Jozef Van Wissem, The Mirror of Eternal Light

Chieko Mori, Tokyo Light

The very materiality forces its very form.

Pots invite us to consider the world that is gathered around them and through them. 

Loss of Relativity and the Forgetting of Air

Ceramics of immediacy/sensate in its own implicit space

And into the Fire

Post Studio Ceramics in Britain

Glenn Anderson. 2010

The politics of place rather than the nature of objects.

Clare Twomey most defines the post studio moment in British Ceramics.

Potters are making pots to be 'expressively photographed'.

Paintings have lost their 'relativity' becoming images rather can things. 

Rawson's ideal pot would die quietly in a glossy photograph, but comes to life in the hands.

Clay and mind works with the tactility formed and found from the voids of inside/outside divisions.

For Heidegger, the potter's medium is not clay, but space itself.

The thing of his essay is not a particular jug, but the essence of one.

The thrown walls of a jug may address that space. But the content or purpose of the object remains the voids within it and around it, which it brings into a sort of communion with one another.

Raku as an ideology

A philosophy must be arrived at through a direct involvement with the materials and the process.

Clay,The Body, Breath.

Ceramics, Fire,Energy.

The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds it

The potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not strictly speaking make the jug, he only shapes the clay, no, he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form. From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as a container in the shape of a containing vessel.

Heidegger. Poetry Language Thought 1971. The Thing 1950.

Pots always inhabit espace-milieu for the pots own space is continuous with the space around it, into which it extends and which makes it perceptable.

Anecdote of The Jar.

Wallace Stevens. 1919.

The pot/jar/jug does very little to dictate what happens around it. But it nonetheless conditions that reality, takes dominion.

The Vessel

Death and The Human Body

Each object has palpable weight, stands its ground, each has a definite thickness. A thick wall that reciprocally shields the darkness within, from the light without.

Glenn Adamson. Matters of Fact.

The containment of the body in death.

Existential

Clay Jug as an emblematic object full of billions of stars

Jackie Leven

There is something about clay that is elemental, prebiotic. Many creation myths refer to the forming of man from clay, its the stuff of the world we live in, its what we walk on. Taking that material which symbolises our origins and then making vessels to house the body, creates a wonderful kind of circularity.

Julian Stair. Quietus 2012.

Paul Soldner on Raku as a state of mind, a way of thinking, a way to continue to create with the pot after firing. Raku for me creates a way of living, not a technique but an attitude for life. 

The intrinsic nature of the intimate contact with the pot continues to stimulate the potters response, the pot in its becoming is both a beginning and an end.

A distinguished Japanese potter, Mr Kawai of Kyoto, when asked how people are to recognize good work, answered simply, “with their bodies”. 

Bernard Leach

A Potter's Book

Symbiotic Relationships

Atmospheres and Surrounding Objects

Peter Zumthor 

Unknown Craftsman

Soetsu Yanagi

Put aside the desire to judge immediately, acquire the habit of just looking.

Do not treat the object as an object for the intellect.

Just be ready to receive passively without interposing yourself.

Oculus/Vessel : A Living Circle/Stilled Space/Mined

Thirty spokes unite at the wheel's hub
It is the centre hole that makes it useful

Shape clay into a vessel
It is space within that makes it useful

Cut out the doors and windows for a room
It is the holes which make it useful

Therefore profit comes from what is there
Usefulness from what is not there

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching XI

The Way Of Raku
Pottery and Writings
Christa-Maria Herrmann

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

Process,inquiry and form in the studio #5

Process,inquiry and form in the studio #5, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.