Silent Interiors : Anthropocene Aesthetics : Ceramics and Environmental Engagement.

Ceramics and  Architecture : Making Things, Perception/Thought/Action

Urbanism : Fossil Futures~Anthropocene

Ceramics Following Resonances : Interiors in fired clay.

Ruins · Jozef van Wissem · Zola Jesus

When Shall This Bright Day Begin

℗ 2016 Jozef van Wissem and Zola Jesus

Released on: 2016-02-05

Mixer: Jozef van Wissem

Producer: Jozef van Wissem

Composer: Jozef van Wissem

Music  Publisher: Wissem Music

Lyricist: Zola Jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-Kx7ehxCQ&t=21s

Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.

Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.

Theorial objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.

The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.

Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.

Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.

Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.

Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.

Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity

If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.

Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.

The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.

Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.

Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies

The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.

Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.

Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013

Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.

Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.

Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.

Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.

Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance. Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.

Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation. London.

Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.

The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.

Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

 

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.

Time : Duration and Perception.

Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.

One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.

Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.

Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.

The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..

Steven Holl.

Outpost 100223

Hungate, Norwich. 

Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023

Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.

Clay Making. 

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.

CLAY/WITH FIRE : Thinking Architecture/Exploratory Research/Vocabulary

Spatial Bodies in Architectural and Contemporary Art.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Thinking Poetics : Architecture and Ceramics.

Urns : Immersive Cells of Containment~Dissolution.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry. He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

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

Wrapped Body : Tacit Auguries/Sacred/Secular Spaces

Speculative art objects/intermediaries on the inwardness of things.

Norwich, Sacred Spaces, 
Body Fragments/Tacit Auguries : Care and Constraint 2019
Ceramic/Textile/Wire and Wax on Gesso.

Exploratory Forms. Bandages/Rust : Tacit Collage, Drawing 2019

"All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency."

Jacques Monod,

The Human/Straw Dogs, John Gray.

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

Body/Landscapes : Frank van de Ven. 2007

17 May 2007 Body/Landscape 12-19 July 2007 

Basque Country France Intensive 8-day dance workshop with Frank van de Ven in the South of France. Headquarters will be in the village of Macaye, situated at the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains on the French side of Basque Country. 

A stunning landscape rich with wild life and a strong local tradition. The river Nive/Errobi flows 20 km towards the ocean. 

The workshop is embedded within the annual Itxassou Festival of Music and Art. Body/Landscape: 

The workshop proposes strategies to confront our bodies with the multiplicity, unpredictability, directness and autonomy of the natural environment. The aim is to explore and develop consciousness of the body itself being an ever evolving landscape within a greater surrounding landscape.

http://bodyweatheramsterdam.blogspot.com Body/Landscape Workshop with Frank van de Ven Creative Scotland:

Christopher Wilmarth : Light and Gravity

 Christopher Wilmarth delighted the world with light-filled sculptures of glass and steel that were deeply poetic in their moods and extraordinarily rich in their modernist heritage. But in 1987, at the peak of his career, a long struggle with depression ended tragically for Wilmarth. The internationally acclaimed artist committed suicide at age 44, and his work largely fell from the public view. Now, Wilmarth's legacy is recaptured in this beautifully written, richly illustrated book by art critic, historian, and poet Steven Henry Madoff. The first in-depth look at Wilmarth's extraordinary life as an artist, the book explores both the light and the darkness that underlie his work. Madoff offers a critical overview of the artist's career, examining the sculptor's response not only to historical masters such as Cezanne, Brancusi, Matisse, and Giacometti, but also to the art world of his times--particularly the dominant influence of Minimalism. Using the newly created Wilmarth archive at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Madoff anchors this moving interpretation with the sculptor's own writings unearthed from journals, student notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and letters. Madoff draws as well from interviews, articles, and poems that Wilmarth published in his lifetime, along with the body of criticism covering Wilmarth's development over the years. Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford contributes a poignant memoir of her years of friendship with the artist, and Fogg associate curator Edward Saywell offers a powerful selection of Wilmarth's writings. The sculptor's romantic outlook, his gorgeously light-infused art, and his dramatic decline into work of harrowing darkness are sensitively examined in a book that reintroduces Christopher Wilmarth's sculptures and graphics to the contemporary art audience.

Drawing/Moving Bodies : Spatial Thresholds : In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

Outpost 270224

In the body of knowledge, there is a mind in the flesh quick as lighting.

Artaud/Newman

Drawing ultimately corresponds with/to a mobile field of properties.

The Haptic Engagement.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

In drawing it is this potentiality and instability of the 'framed image/object' that reinforces our uncertainty  of any definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself, but at its suggestion and its very possibility in a formation that has yet to occur. There is the uncertainty (and its anxiety) as to what stage of language it is, in its becoming.

Looking with the eye and touch of an artist, even to a point of scrutiny, while keeping the societal content in which they emerge in mind. What forms the overall connection between the drawings in the exhibition is the value attached to gesture, as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace on the paper. 

Catherine de Zegher, Avis Newman.

Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.

Within the realm of visual representation, drawing is present as an act of tracing absences. 

Opened and closed by the mark, an inscriptive game that is both motional and emotional, that enables an active control/participation over separation anxiety. While at the same time unlocking the way to the child's independence.

The earliest drawings are not guided by visual exploration of space, but by an exploration of movement and spatial concerns.

Bodily responses to drawing acts, of trying to bring about a visible language from visual inscriptions. Gestural traces in drawings evidence a continuous process of situating being/becoming.

Drawn from the body of knowledge into the/onto the surface event of experience. 

Drawing for me always seems to manifest the endless repetition of remaking, and as such as a sensation  it constitutes the space of anxiety, a childhood anxiety.

Moving Bodies

Spatial Thresholds

In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

St Jerome in his study.1474-75.

Messina examines 'earthly limits', St Jerome is sitting in a small study that seems to have been dissected to reveal its interior. The place, environment for his writing and any other material needed to cultivate his mind. As if to say that space can be crossed with a mind capable of entering  and crossing limits. This is the greatness of the mind, and also in architecture, that it is capable of crossing/entering spaces beyond there physical limits. In transcending physical limits Scarpa is setting up a spatial poetics of liminal spaces, is perhaps the main theme of his work at Brion Cemetery, alongside of the real physical and actual architectural figures of solid material. Thus for Scarpa, every time a threshold is crossed the limits between life, humanity and nature in the landscape are traversed as well.

Brion Cemetary by Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione. 2017. 

Enric Mestre.

Architectures For Silence And Meditation.

Building models, blueprints for larger constructions.

Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed and the enclosed.

The work of Enric Mestre is much indebted to the principles of ancient classical form as to the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He is an artist who has a particularly sensitive feeling for massing, for the planar and spatial relationships of contemporary building, and how to size this down into pieces which possess their own particular intimacy. 

His works are  enhanced by the nuanced and controlled colouration of their clay fabric. Mestre produces patinas of great subtlety and variation that relate more to the fabric of a building than to traditional sculpture. Gritty open textures and smooth surfaces both soften and temper the austerity of his forms, in which he also uses sober tones and colourations to distinguish different sections, surfaces and planes.  

Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist building, it has the same starkness, the same asceticism that shares a strong sense of memorial and of elegy. They are deeply contemplative objects, that go beyond exercises in harmony, chromatics, proportion and formalism. 

They present a quietude that contains a profound sense of memento mori. For Whiting there is a sepulchre like quality about such of Mestre's work, for repositories of memory perhaps, sentinels of some unspecified commemoration. Sculptures where one's own imagination is allowed to roam in a disquieting world of urban areas and industrial like structures. 

Their cenotaph like solemnity creates a sense of isolation and loneliness, and we are left to make our own narratives, our own stories.

David Whiting.

Invisible Cities.

Italo Calvino.

With cities, it is as with dreams; everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires or fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful and everything conceals something else.

What is more mysterious than clarity?

What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over the hours and over men?

Eupalinos of the Architect.

Paul Valery.

Christopher Wilmarth

Drawing Into Sculpture.

Christopher Wilmarth (1943?1987), an American artist best known for his expressive sculptures constructed from plate glass and steel, was also an innovative draftsman. This compelling book?the first to focus on Wilmarth's use of drawing throughout his career?offers fascinating insights into his artistic practice and poetic personal vision. Edward Saywell considers three aspects of Wilmarth's drawings: his student and early works; the remarkable crossover that he made between two- and three-dimensional works in a series of drawings constructed from etched glass and steel cables done in the early 1970s; and the independent drawings he made directly after or during the construction of his sculptures as a means to think through completed work and to look forward to new creative ideas. Saywell also draws on previously unstudied materials, such as sketchbooks, preparatory maquettes, and letters selected from the Christopher Wilmarth Archive recently presented to the Fogg Art Museum by Susan Wilmarth-Rabineau, in order to shed new light on Wilmarth's working process.

Curatorial Architectures/Assemblages : Transactive through interventions/a sensorium for display.

Matter/Making in Space : Passages in Sculpture

Working Notes 2018/19

Curatorial Architectures/Assemblages

Speculative Spatial/Curatorial Practices incorporating Fine Art and Architecture.

The Studio is no longer a retreat but it now integrates.

It is all exterior.

Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Constructing active research material that becomes transactive through interventions and installations of display.

Blurring art and the everyday rituals of creative enterprise and survival.

Seeking to create innovative and immersive exhibition formats/situations that seek to engage a discursive and informed audience.

Building Relationscapes

Movement, Art, Philosophy 

Sensorium

Embodied Experience

Technologies and Contemporary Art 

Erin Manning

Caroline A, Jones

Playing with INTERTEXTUALITY

Setting the Stage MAKE SPACE

Immersive

Alienated

Interrogative

Residue

Resistant

Adaptive

Interactive Workshop

Exhibition

Presentation

Open Texts

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

ARCHITECTURE, ART and Design Interiors

URBAN FALLOW (10 Days in the Laundry)

OPERATIVE DESIGN

CONDITIONAL DESIGN

ON MAKING SPACE

THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS

BODY, EMOTION and the Making of Consciousness

Art Practices : the chaos of subjectivity and the organisation of  a creative environment.

Drawing Into The Human Form/The Architectural Body

 Drawing Into The Human Form.

Its conceptual frameworks, aesthetics and contexts.

Inclusions/Enclosures/Involuntary Mappings and Erasures.

Figuring it out, sensuality through making the drawing heard.

Drawing from a blindness, a memory of seeing.

Derrida.

Drawing into the perspectives and  sociological relationships of the Architectural Body, organism/person/environment.

Gins and Arakawa.

Explanations/Gestures of Looking and Mark Making.

Scale/Proximity/Seeing Distance/Situatedness/Environment/Art Work.

Haptic Seeing/moving over the surface of the sociological subject.

Frottage, life drawings with involuntary textures and marks derived from their particular locality and working methods, concrete floors, wooden floorboards, graphite sticks, charcoal, pencil and wax crayons.

The body and its nakedness becomes the instrument of our emotions and our sensuality.

The Psychology of Nakedness.

Naked to Nude, Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.