New Ceramics/Drawings/Constructions/Apparatuses/Daylight

Ceramic Forms/Inscriptions/Lines of Knowing.

Wayfaring, walking/sensing between things. 

As wayfarers we experience what Robin Jarvis has called a progressional ordering of reality, or the integration of knowledge along a path of travel.

Up. Across and Along, Tim Ingold.

Structural Modalities/Making/Tensions : Spatial Forms to gather/interact with discursive research

Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.

The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.

The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.

Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness)

Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innemess. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.

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

To build, dwell and explore the space of drawing through intuitive and abstract making.

Drawings/Constructions/Apparatuses.

There is no stage at which humankind does not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space.

Lefebrve.

Like drawings, assemblages drawn and made showing the paths taken.

Landing Sites/Holding Places.

Between The Body/Sensing Spaces/Voids.

Perceptions, body, organism, environment,

Mezzanines, lofts, basements, balconies, walkways, scaffolds, access platforms.

Living Architectures/Narratives/Dwelling within the Ruinous. 

Tarkovsky.

Bachelard.

Making Gestures and Connections in Space. 

The Memory of Objects.

The Provocative Combination of Densities.

Inner Architectures/Clay/Sensorial/Conceptual/Places

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 

And round it was, upon a hill. 

It made the slovenly wilderness 

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild. 

The jar was round upon the ground 

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere. 

The jar was gray and bare. 

It did not give of bird or bush, 

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (1919)

Innerness for the potter is always at the heart of the practice, as manifested through the opening up of the thrown vessel.

Inner spaces of defined interiors forming vessels that are intrinsically cyclical through light and dark by way of their surfaces and volumes.

Like the cellar, the pots interior and its containment of light and shadow becomes a dwelling space for a submerged primordial memory. (Bachelard/Trigg)

The clay links the vessel to both locality and our geocentric position.

‘Pleasure is moving from darkness to light and vice-versa.’ 

Grafton Architects. Sensing Spaces: 2014

The pot promotes an architecture of the soul, of an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination.

In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. 

Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.

Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment 

Splitting.

Spatial representations/cuttings into the urban/social fabric of architectural redundancy.

Gordon Matta-Clark.

The co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction, by selective excavation and creative demolition.

Castelvecchio an attitude to history. Carlo Scarpa.

Site is the un-doing of place.

Generative and provisional, site-specific investigations for sensing place.  

Hand Built, Slab Ceramics.

Oxide washes, incised lines and piercings undertaken to the raw clay forms.

Architectural Facades/Camera Obscura. 

Dark Room.

Garry Fabian Miller.

The internal mechanisms with which we see and experience visual and physical phenomena depend on a bottom-up approach. Building up from elements of abstraction, the opposite top-down approach of given figuration stifles necessary imagination.

Curiosity, imagination and enthusiasm all hold a power in the mind to ignite the creative act.

The Lake of The Mind.

Steven Holl.

Stochastic thinking suggests an interconnected ecosystem of architecture together with all of the arts to achieve new levels of correlation.lay

Open Studio/Cyanotypes and Collages : Harleston Revisited/Norfolk and Norwich 2018

Civilizing Rituals
Inside Public Art Museums
Carol Duncan

Julian Stair
Quietus reviewed
Archaeology of an exhibition

Spirituality in Contemporary Art
The Idea of the Numinous
Jungu Yoon

The Aesthetics of Silence
Susan Sontag

A Field Guide To Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit

Essays On The Blurring Of Art And Life
Allan Kaprow

Ways of Curating
Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

On Show : Contemporary ceramics in the Goodison gift in the context of a historic museum collection.

A rare opportunity to hear different perspectives on how the art of display can animate objects and deepen insight into historical collections.

The study day will draw on two current displays exclusive to the Fitzwilliam Museum: the Goodison gift of contemporary ceramics and the exhibition Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery. Speakers include four internationally-acclaimed UK ceramicists whose work features in both displays: Julian Stair, Carol McNicoll, Philip Eglin and Jennifer Lee. The study day concludes with a conversation between Amanda and Sir Nicholas Goodison, followed by the opportunity to share reflections on the subject.

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art and Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward.
Art in mind : How contemporary images shape thought
Ernst van Alphen

Walking and Mapping
Artists as Cartographers
Karen O'Rourke

A Bigger Splash
Painting after Performance
Catherine Wood 

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand/Spatial Representation/Working Drawings,Collages and Cyanotypes.

“In my view, the task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience. Architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.”

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.
Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009

Thinking Things : The Archi-Textual Surface.

 

Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.

Peter Zumthor : different kinds of silence

Aesthetics of Silence : Susan Sontag

Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization, the transcendence, he desires.

Every era has to reinvent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at the resolution of painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.)

 

Krishnamurti claims that we must give up psychological, as distinct from factual, memory. Otherwise, we keep filling up the new with the old, closing off experience by hooking each experience into the last. We must destroy continuity (which is insured by psychological memory), by going to the end of each emotion or thought. And after the end, what supervenes (for a while) is silence.

In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is “art.” The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer et al, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move), have proved to be a peculiarly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions. Of course, the site needs continual refurbishing. Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness. Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outgrown maps of consciousness are redrawn. But what supplies all these crises with their energy — an energy held in common, so to speak — is the very unification of numerous, quite disparate activities into a single genus. At the moment at which “art” comes into being, the modern period of art begins. From then forward, any of the activities therein subsumed becomes a profoundly problematic activity, each of whose procedures and, ultimately, whose very right to exist, can be called into question. Following on the promotion of the arts into “art” comes the leading myth about art, that of the “absoluteness” of the artist’s activity. In its first, more unreflective version, this myth considered art as an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself. (The critical principles generated by this myth were fairly easily arrived at: some expressions were more complete, more ennobling, more informative, richer than others.) The later version of the myth posits a more complex, tragic relation of art to consciousness. Denying that art is mere expression, the newer myth, ours, rather relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement. Art is no longer understood as consciousness expressing and therefore, implicitly, affirming itself. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote — evolved from within consciousness itself. (The critical principles generated by this myth were much harder to get at.) The newer myth, derived from a post-psychological conception of consciousness, installs within the activity of art many of the paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics. As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negative, a theology of God’s absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowingness beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the “subject” (the “object,” the “image”), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence. In the early, linear version of art’s relation to consciousness, a struggle was held to exist between the “spiritual” integrity of the creative impulses and the distracting “materiality” of ordinary life, which throws up so many obstacles in the path of authentic sublimation. But the newer version, in which art is part of a dialectical transaction with consciousness, poses a deeper, more frustrating conflict: The “spirit” seeking embodiment in art clashes with the “material” character of art itself. Art is unmasked as gratuitous, and the very concreteness of the artist’s tools (and, particularly in the case of language, their historicity) appears as a trap. Practiced in a world furnished with second-hand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of words, the activity of the artist is cursed with mediacy. Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization, the transcendence, he desires. Therefore, art comes to be estimated as something to be overthrown. A new element enters the art-work and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition — and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself.

https://www.opasquet.fr/dl/texts/Sontag_Aesthetics_of_Silence_2006.pdf

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/06/the-aesthetic-of-silence-susan-sontag/

Spatial Intelligence