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

Wayfaring Places : Studio Compositions~Immersive Cells of Inquiry.

Undisciplined small spaces, places of refuge and solitude. A physical space, where an atmosphere quietly echoes spatial metaphors of enclosure, interiority and the sited and situated condition of making.

Studio Environments : Reconstructions and Fictions. Studio spaces for speculative making.

Wayfaring Landscapes~Affective Aesthetics of Difference.

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

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

 

 

A collection of slab-built ceramic sculptures crafted by artist Russell Moreton.

These works are described as exploring themes of "making" and the metaphysical nature of architectural spaces.

The sculptures are intended to evoke the silence and tranquillity found within historical architectural settings.

Moreton's process often involves slab construction techniques and research into specific historical sites to develop these forms.

The research collage depicts a curated collection of materials focused on late 20th-century art and architecture, likely from a research board or publication. Jannis Kounellis: The large black-and-white image features an installation by Jannis Kounellis, a key figure in the Italian Arte Povera movement, known for using raw materials like iron and coal. Carlo Scarpa: A handwritten note identifies another part of the collage as related to Carlo Scarpa, a Venetian architect renowned for his masterful renovation of historic buildings and intricate detailing. Architectural Detail: The top-right image showcases a historic stone structure, typical of the locations Scarpa worked with, showing a sculpture placed inside a renovated architectural space. Art Montage: The overall composition functions as a visual research montage, contrasting structural, industrial forms with historical contexts.

The documentary image and pinhole photograph features text referencing Rodin | Beuys Working Practices and includes a photographic portrait of a man reminiscent of artist Joseph Beuys. The collage incorporates elements that resemble technical drawings or maps of buildings, possibly related to architectural studies or documentation. This style of layering images with text overlays and handwritten annotations is consistent with artistic practices aimed at disrupting conventional viewing, similar to the "dynamic labyrinth" concepts explored in 1960s exhibitions.

Practices on Solitude/The Alchemy of Imagination/The Permanence of Childhood

Outpost 290524

Between The Lines.

Drawing as notation/mapping of an event/time/place recorded.

Sunlight Six Hours on Paper, Harleston 2022.

Sunlight on Wood.

1974. Starts making timed sun drawings in the time scale of one minute or one hour.

As many have for centuries I want to offer back into the world an affirmation of what is wonderful. I work on the surface but am aware that the spirit is often hidden within life a shadow in the darkness.

Roger Ackling

There is an aspect of Roger Ackling's work that might easily be forgotten in its assumed familiarity more usually performed onto something come across and minutely altered in the middle of a journey.

Simon Cutts.

The Work and Teaching of Roger Ackling.

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.

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.

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

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.