Drawing has the ability to hold complexities separate enough so as to be read, yet drawings also merge into a perceptive unity marked by a sensation or realisation of intuitive nowness authentically caught in the tension of the line.
John Berger’s definition of what a drawing might contain when it is simultaneously viewed as both a now and an elsewhere, marks for me a threshold of encountering space time, we are passing through as we perceive our very consciousness.
I sometimes think of these drawings as sites, containing both physical and playful evidence of explorations. The cyanotype process captures objects and turns them into “inclusions” or vessels that might induce an interesting dialogue, a buried association or simply a stage for thought. I feel the objects recorded are the result of an assemblage of thoughts/interests close at hand driven into the visual through an expediency (working with light and time) and an aesthetic that contains my sense of materiality from which to nurture a creative subjectivity. Strangely it is this aesthetic that just keeps things separate enough but which still makes things actively conspiratorial. It appears to be able to render things in isolation and then bring them together. It is as if the intuition that comes from working and theorising within an art practice is placed into the realm of things, off loaded, detached, and orphaned to make its own way in the world.
Link Gallery.
Forum Notes, 27 March 2010
Site is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.1
Art Practitioner with earlier experience in ceramics and glass, recently completed visual arts course at Winchester, now at Canterbury completing MA course in spatial practices. Working mainly on drawing, photography and architectural interventions/ installations that explore our sense and experience of place.
My work explores a philosophical inquiry into the need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences.
The use of materials from the locality (field chalk) implies a personal geography drawn from the direct relationship to an inherited Earth. There is the suggestion that the absence recorded by the trace is an inclusion, a legacy set into a field of materiality, but it might also suggest a metaphysical field of thought.
This act of drawing becomes its own experimental field of exploration, a sort of “in-between reality’’/Maurice Merleau-Ponty) an enmeshed experience. Thought of and read as a material memory encountering the realm of the insubstantial.
This “undoing of place” might instigate a threshold and a situation/room from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
This work and others like it attempt to articulate an interest in the body as both a physicality ( social, spatial and per formative presence ) and a poetic surface in architectural space.
Influences, Myth of Butades, origin of drawing, Pliny
Interested in the inscription ( a surface inscribed, written or carved as a formal or permanent record ) of a presence, a trace that reveals an origin of feelings/gestures centred around the body.
Inscription brings with it a notion of performativity, that of body and place, and their interaction, situation and experience. This spatial activity renders a sense of a material memory surfaced by place.
Tacita Dean, Drawings are more than just visual therapy, they speak of collective experiences and dilemmas that trouble humanity.
This simple work gathers-up an intimate social inscription on a surface, a playful act to then associate natural material.
Drawing is the primal means of symbolic communication which predates and embraces writing, and as such it functions as a tool of conceptualization parallel with language.
Drawings offer a partial comprehended rumination of the mind, Avis Newman. Drawing, becomes a sort of dwelling amongst an intimate comer of oneself, perhaps even a site for the solitude for the imagination. Gaston Bachelard comments in the Poetics of Space that a corner in a room can become “a symbol of solitude."
Drawing like walking becomes a form of thinking. This thinking is further articulated and accompanied by the intrinsic qualities of substances and liquids that are placed in proximity so as to be encountered.
My use of chalk as a materiality, emblematic of a solidity, a localised material and a metaphor of a inherited and compressed layering of time. The whiteness of this found material draws associations with the surface of the paper, there similarities’ also render there material differences. The inclusion of wax onto the surface was an attempt to seal a sense of a reflective surface, a surface amongst the work that might accommodate the light and nowness of place. Any drawing is a static object, but contains the trace of actions, traces carried out in time. Perhaps this drawing is registering itself into a language of matter.
1 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place, a Philosophical History. (London: University of California Press, 1998) page 186.
ARTISTS CV/STATEMENT re INTERNATIONAL BOSPHORUS ART BIENNALE, ISTANBUL 2011.
RUSSELL MORETON
Visual artist/maker of dwelling spaces.
Spatial Practices MA Canterbury UK.
Visual Fine Art BA hons Winchester UK
Contemporary Crafts Sculpture Waterlooville UK
Ceramics HSND Epsom UK
June 2011 Artist Statement/Outline of Interests.
Visual artist working with alternative photographic processes, clay and architectural glass. The current practice continues to explore themes and realities around the contemporary human condition. The exploration of these interests is predominately developed through drawing and traces of actual objects and performative gestures referencing the body as a site amongst the layering of material and data. The use in some works of site specificity and materials drawn from the location are used to further underpin a sense of engagement and dwelling. The resultant drawings with their traces of agency and exactitude, lightness and ambiguous multiplicities seem like a compression of a filmic substrate, a material memory brought to the surface. These personal consolations of working practice are initiating thoughts centred on building architectural spaces, from which to register and response to a sense of serenity and enchantment amongst the scripting of materials in spatial/social dialogues.
Astronomy, Science, Natural History, Architectural Spaces, Stained Glass, Early photographic Processes, Ceramics, Anthropology, Craft Disciplines, Theatre, Film, Arte Povera, Contemporary Art Practice/Research/Philosophy/Exploration.
IMAGE, PANSPERMIA 2010 Added notes.
This work began as a performative drawing between the touch and tact of its maker, marking a personal and intimate involvement with both the corporeality of the female body and a loved one. This fragile union and fecundity is expressed by the photograms of “elderflower seedheads” left as evidence within the territory of the body/vessel. The personal intimate space of these initial acts and gestures are shifted against infinite space of the known universe. The title stems from speculation that life might have been introduced onto a fertile Earth from spores from space. Interestingly having dwelled with these initial thoughts, I feel that perhaps the work augurs an exodus at some point in the future.
Russell Moreton
CHAPEL ARTS, ARTISTS OPEN STUDIO AND TALK
TALKING AROUND A TABLE OF DRAWINGS
THE WORKING SPACE AS INSTALLATION
THE SPATIAL PRACTICE OF RUSSELL MORETON
Objects or vessels that might induce an interesting dialogue a stage for a future event or trajectory. I feel the objects are the result of an assembly of thoughts driven into the visual through an expediency and an aesthetic that just keeps things separate yet somehow they remain actively conspiratorial. It is all about the intuition that comes from working and theorising with and within an art practice.
The intension of the “charting table” (8x4 ply sheet on builders trestles) was to allow the subject of practice together with my activities to become visible, and in so doing create a public sense of speculation around the material on show. The spatial agenda would be addressed, bought into being as it were by the exposure and placement of objects, tables and projections into the main reception area at UCA Canterbury. It is hoped that the curiosity of some will solicit the interest of others and thereby create the unfolding of an event; the projection could be a real time monitor of the charting table. I am beginning to view the show as an exhibition/event around working practices, but unfortunately the sense of site dominates my practices situatedness. Conceived as a contingent/speculative intervention into the normal running of this space as a reception area.
Resident artist will host an “open studio” at Chapel Arts Studios on 2 December. The chapel will be open from 12.30 onwards to view an installation and other material. The “talk around a table of drawings” will commence at around 6.45 pm.
Earlier training in ceramics and stained glass together with extensive experience in the construction industry are now being utilised in my contemporary practice.
My current spatial practice, is centred around a multi disciplinary approach underpinned by “drawing” to critical issues of site. This activity could be understood as an investigative creativity amongst the phenomenological aspects of architectural place and the potentials of producing working spaces/sites for the reflection of others. The working practice currently employs the use of clay, glass and photographic processes. The practice is informed by interests in astronomy, architectural space, theatre and anthropology.
The use of “site” as a working drawing from which to create a temporary intervention into place helps to instigate a threshold, a room or event from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
Anima-Animus : Winchester Cathedral/10 Days in the City
‘When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction’ Jung.
Russell Moreton uses analogue film processes that inquiry into both the surface and the materiality of the photographic image. He was invited by Helena Eflerova and Kye Wilson to document the filming process of Anima-Animus. He uses 35mm and medium format cameras together with a number of pinhole type cameras. In using historical processes like cyanotype and light sensitive silver gelatine, he explores the relationship of the image to its supporting surface. A number of his images are heavily worked in the darkroom to exploit differences between the seduction of the photographic surface and its actual physical presence altered by chemical and physical interventions. His work echoes themes around the body and the architectural spaces of institutions and beliefs.
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