Persistent Bodies ~ Correspondence Kept~in~Play

Persistent Bodies ~ Reading, Clay, Ceramic

Confessional : Vessel, Sculpture or Fiction.

A Troubling Interiority. 300926

 

A Propositional Setting for a Spatial Practice.

 

Confessional : Vessel, Sculpture or Fiction?

 

Other Bodies~Other Propositions

 

Gatherings For Speculative Bodies.

Confessional and Conversational Spaces.

Study Spaces~Research Creation : Seating with Cabins.

Confessional Spaces~Spatial-Situationist Apparatuses : A Line of Flight, Vessel, Sculpture or Fiction.

 

Interior Social Places : Perforated Inner Spaces~Intervals~Interiorities

 

 

Pigeon Houses/Dovecotes for Philosophers.

 

What do I know?

Michel de Montaigne.

 

A house for confessing animals.

Michel Foucault.

 

A "line of flight" (ligne de fuite) is a core concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. It represents an act of escape, a sudden rupture, or a creative vector that allows a rigid system to break down and transform into something completely new.

 

 

Clay-Ceramic/Thinking Architectures/Interior Places.

2024. Ceramic. 260mmL x 350mmH x 160mmW.

 

The ceramic is therefore not a conclusion to making but a speculative body within its continuation: a sensate chamber in which material, spatial and philosophical relations can gather, weather and begin again.

 

In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.

 

Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own

 

Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.

 

 

Collages.

Spatial and Reading Apparatuses.

Making Spatial Research Creation.

 

Pink Cosmos~Panopticon : Research Collage~Diffractive Inclusions and Annotations.

 

Body, Personal Relations and Spatial Values. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space~Place~Perspective of Experience.

Reading does not remain outside making. Its soundings pass between bodies of thought, images, materials and places, sometimes surfacing as propositions, sometimes withdrawing into the material conditions of a work.

The reading body moves between these correspondences without requiring them to converge. Ingold, Manning and Barad remain distinct within this gathering, their differences continuing to resonate through the movements of spatial practice. Clay encounters these soundings otherwise. Through making and firing, propositions acquire another condition of existence: a materially persistent body whose interiority remains open to further encounter.

What persists is not an idea preserved intact, but the possibility of its becoming otherwise.

Reading~clay~ceramic: persistent bodies already enduring their weather~~world, carrying relations forward into situations not yet known.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It passes between bodies, withdraws, and remains~in~play.

The Reading Body ~ Correspondence Without Convergence

The reading practice brings Ingold, Manning and Barad into correspondence, not to reconcile their thinking, but to allow their differences to remain active within the work. Each becomes a distinct sounding within a wider field of inquiry, offering ways of attending to movement, material relations, touch and the emergence of bodies. Their thinking is neither applied to the ceramic nor secured within an explanatory framework. It enters the movements of making, where it may be taken up, resisted, altered or carried elsewhere.

The reading body acts as an intercessor within this gathering. It moves between texts, images, materials and architectural situations, allowing propositions to pass between them without determining their final destination. Sometimes a correspondence surfaces explicitly, finding expression in a written proposition or a material decision. At other times, its sounding withdraws, becoming less immediately recognisable while remaining active within the ceramic's spatial and material relations.

Reading, in this sense, becomes a practice of ambiguous inhabitation. The reading body dwells within the relations between ideas and things, neither standing outside them as an observer nor dissolving into their differences. It keeps these relations available~in~play, allowing them to acquire other conditions of existence through making.

The ceramic body becomes one such condition. What has been encountered through reading may persist there, though not necessarily as a recognisable idea or an identifiable influence. It may surface as an aperture, a chamber, a resistance of material, an uncertain interior or a relation between bodies. The correspondence has changed its condition without exhausting its possibilities.

The reading body carries the soundings forward, allowing them to surface, withdraw and enter other bodies. Its work is not to preserve an idea intact, but to sustain the possibility of its further becoming.

The ceramic becomes materially persistent, while the propositions that have passed through its making remain available~~withdrawn for futurity.

The Withdrawn Ceramic Body Persists, But It Does Not Close ~ Research in Futurity

The Withdrawn Ceramic Body ~ Research in Futurity.

Towards an Elaborative Spatial Practice.

For Moreton, the withdrawn ceramic body is not where the research ends. It is where the research acquires another capacity for futurity.

Moreton’s spatial practice has developed through an extended gathering of bodies: architectural, material, photographic, textual, remembered, imagined and lived. These bodies have emerged through different situations and periods of working, including interiority, landscape, drawing, walking, architectural research, teaching, image-making, reading and the exploratory use of clay. They do not form a linear research history. Rather, they remain as propositions capable of returning, entering new relations and becoming otherwise.

The practice therefore begins not from a singular question requiring resolution, but from a multiplicity of questions that remain active through making. Earlier speculative spatial practices are not treated as completed stages through which the ceramic practice has subsequently progressed. They remain research bodies. Their propositions continue to have a capacity for encounter.

The ceramic bodies have not arrived to resolve these earlier questions. They have arrived as another access point.

This access point is significant because clay introduces a particular material condition through which multiplicity can gather. The recent work with clay allows architectural propositions, spatial memories, images, readings, bodily experiences, surfaces, apertures and material encounters to enter the same field without requiring them to become equivalent. Clay does not reconcile their differences. It provides a hospitable condition in which their differences can remain active.

This hospitality is important to Moreton’s developing spatial practice. It is not hospitality as an invitation into a predetermined interior. It is a more unstable form of hosting in which the host itself is changed by what it receives. Clay receives pressure, touch, resistance, gesture, force, moisture, gravity and time, but it does not simply register these things passively. It transforms them. The material becomes an active correspondent within the making.

The clay body therefore becomes a meeting place for other bodies.

The architectural body can enter it through proportion, enclosure, aperture, threshold and spatial memory. The photographic body can enter through trace, viewpoint, absence and the persistence of an earlier encounter. The textual body can enter through propositions, questions and speculative language. The remembered body can enter without being represented. Landscape can enter through weather, erosion, surface and movement. Other theoretical and artistic bodies can enter as correspondents rather than authorities.

None of these bodies needs to be reduced to the ceramic.

They remain themselves.

This is where Moreton’s spatial practice begins to move towards a practice of correspondence. The ceramic body does not become a container for research. It becomes a material condition through which different research bodies can encounter one another.

Multiplicity becomes correspondence.

The distinction is important. Multiplicity describes the presence of many bodies; correspondence describes what becomes possible between them. The ceramic does not gather in order to produce unity. It gathers in order to produce relation.

This also changes the understanding of the ceramic object. The fired ceramic is materially withdrawn from the provisionality of clay, but this withdrawal should not be understood as closure. Firing changes the condition of the material. What was soft, responsive and unstable becomes persistent. The provisional relations of making become materially carried forward into another state.

Pressure becomes surface.

Resistance becomes form.

Aperture becomes interior.

Gesture becomes trace.

Fire becomes transformation.

Ceramic becomes persistence.

Yet what persists is not simply the object.

Something of the correspondence persists with it.

The withdrawn ceramic body therefore occupies an unusual position within the spatial practice. It is withdrawn from the immediate event of making, but not withdrawn from relation. It carries the consequences of previous encounters into situations that have not yet happened. Its persistence makes another encounter possible.

This is where futurity enters.

Futurity, within Moreton’s practice, is not the prediction of what the ceramic will become. Nor is it an image of an imagined future. It is the capacity of a materially persistent body to enter another relation.

The ceramic waits.

It waits for architecture, for light, for another body, for proximity, for movement, for an altered viewpoint, for memory, for an encounter that cannot yet be known.

The future therefore exists not as a destination but as an interval of possibility.

This understanding also extends Moreton’s distinction between in~place and in~play. A spatial proposition cannot simply be transferred intact from one situation to another. Its physical components may persist, but its spatial proposition emerges through changing relations between architecture, ceramic, bodies, light, proximity, movement and atmosphere. The work remains spatially active when these relations remain capable of being re-entered.

The ceramic body consequently becomes a form of spatial persistence without becoming a fixed spatial meaning.

The same ceramic body can become another spatial body.

The same architectural body can produce another spatial proposition.

The same research body can enter another material condition.

This is why earlier exploratory research can remain relevant without being retrospectively converted into a predetermined origin story. The Waverley project, interiority research, architectural investigations, drawing, photography, landscape, teaching and reading do not need to be explained as steps towards ceramics. They remain active bodies whose propositions can now be furthered through clay.

The ceramic does not rewrite them.

It gives them another access point.

This access point also makes possible a different understanding of the archive. Rather than preserving research as a chronology of completed ideas, Moreton’s archive becomes a field of potential correspondence. Earlier texts, images and projects can encounter later ceramic bodies, while later making can return to earlier propositions without needing to reproduce them.

The archive becomes anarchive.

What was once speculative can become material.

What was once architectural can become corporeal.

What was once an image can become a spatial interval.

What was once a question can become an aperture.

What was once unfinished can remain unfinished, but acquire another body through which to continue.

This is not a movement from immaterial thought towards material resolution. It is a continuing movement between bodies.

Here, making becomes a form of spatial thinking. Clay does not illustrate an idea already formed elsewhere. The material encounter produces further thought. Resistance changes the proposition. The hand changes the surface. The surface changes the perception of the body. The body changes the spatial proposition. Fire changes the material condition. The fired body then enters another spatial situation.

The process is therefore recursive rather than sequential:

gathering ~ making ~ correspondence ~ withdrawal ~ encounter ~ futurity ~ gathering again

Within this movement, the ceramic body becomes neither object nor conclusion. It becomes a withdrawn spatial~practising body: materially persistent, relationally open and capable of carrying multiple research bodies into future encounters.

The body withdraws.

The correspondence continues.

The research remains~in~play.

And perhaps this is the deeper proposition of Moreton’s spatial practice: that making does not necessarily produce knowledge by resolving what is unknown. It can produce the conditions through which the unknown remains capable of becoming something else.

The withdrawn ceramic body is therefore not where the research ends.

It is where the research acquires another capacity for futurity.

The ceramic persists, but it does not close.

The earlier bodies remain different.

The spatial propositions remain open.

And what has been gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates. 

Lived Experience~A Situated Ecology

Lived Experience

A Situated Ecology.

Tentative and Open Spatial Bodies, Ceramics. 2026

Correspondences of Bodies — the gathering

Wayfaring — the movement

Archive → Anarchive — the transformation~

This practice has not developed through a linear progression of ideas, but through a shifting ecology of encounters.

Ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching, spatial research and collaborative making have remained in correspondence across different periods of the work. Some propositions have receded; others have returned years later in altered material conditions. Earlier works continue to participate in the present, not as resolved historical stages but as active traces within an ongoing search.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its formation has taken place through materials, places, bodies, architectures, organisms, images, texts, tools and other people. Each enters differently, producing correspondences that can alter the direction of the work. Knowledge is not simply gathered and applied, but emerges through these encounters.

The studio becomes a site of this activity: a place where research can remain provisional, where material processes can think alongside theoretical propositions, and where visual and spatial material can hold different ontological positions without requiring them to settle into a single explanation.

Clay has become an increasingly important participant in this ecology. Through making, the material receives traces of pressure, resistance, repetition, weathering, drilling and repair. Surfaces become histories of encounters; cavities become interiors produced by action; minor gestures accumulate into larger spatial conditions.

What appears in the present is therefore never entirely new.

It is a surfacing.

Earlier concerns with the body, absence and trace correspond with current questions of perforation, ecological agency and material interiority. Architectural research returns through the vessel and the cavity. Interiority becomes porous. Repetition becomes difference. A minor gesture can move an entire ecology.

I understand this as a spatial practice of learning to make.

The practice remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research is a gathering of correspondences rather than a search for a final position: a situated ecology in which materials, histories, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures can continue to enter, disturb and transform one another.

The work does not simply record where the practice has been.

It creates conditions for where it might go next.

Correspondences of Bodies

Wayfaring from Archive to Anarchive.

The archive is not proving the present practice.

It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

Readings, images, drawings, places, architectures, materials and remembered encounters gather as bodies of inquiry. They do not form a history so much as a spatial field—bodies becoming perceptible through their proximity to one another.

Clay enters this gathering differently.

It touches what has been read, remembered and imagined, becoming another body through which these propositions can move. Hand, matter, force, resistance, surface, interior, aperture and atmosphere begin to gather. Fire changes their proposition again, carrying them into ceramic bodies that persist, withdraw and encounter other bodies.

The archive begins to loosen.

Old propositions find new surfaces.

Images find other interiors.

Readings enter matter.

Matter returns the reading differently.

Archive~clay~body~fire~ceramic~space~atmosphere~wayfaring~correspondence.

What emerges is not a method or a sequence, but a spatial body of inquiry: a wayfaring among bodies already in movement.

The anarchive is this movement.

A gathering that does not contain, but opens.

A correspondence that does not conclude, but continues.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It reverberates.

Tensions and Correlations : Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies

Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies

Tension is what happens between bodies.

Correlation is what allows those tensions to become relations.

Ecology of Asperities : Notes on a Particular Spatial Practice

Matter(s) of Space~Surfacing

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

The surface is where the body records its relations.

Scoring → tension becomes visible.

Wrapping → relation becomes operative.

Bandaging → vulnerability becomes perceptible.

Refractory layering → endurance becomes possible.

Together they produce the body.

The ceramic body is also encountered through acts of wrapping, tensioning and bandaging. White brushed refractory materials form protective layers across the surface, recalling earlier propositions around the bandaged body: a body marked by vulnerability, repair, protection and the forces acting upon it.

The refractory layer introduces a particular material correspondence. It protects the ceramic body from the extreme conditions of firing while simultaneously preparing it to undergo transformation. Protection therefore does not remove the body from force; it enables its passage through force.

The surface becomes a place where these forces are gathered.

Scored lines crossing the white areas establish temporary demarcations across the body. They can be understood less as drawn images than as traces of tension: lines through which pressure, resistance, division and movement become perceptible. The scoring interrupts the apparent stability of the coated surface, making visible something of the forces passing across and through the body.

Wrapping extends this condition. Wire, cloth and layered materials bind separate ceramic elements while also producing tension between them. The body is held together, but not resolved. Its parts remain perceptibly separate, caught within a temporary arrangement of pressure, restraint and correspondence.

Wrapped~Tensioned and Bandaged Bodies therefore describes a ceramic condition in which protection and exposure, binding and permeability, vulnerability and endurance remain active together.

The bandage does not simply repair the body.

It records that the body has been subject to force.

The wrapping does not simply hold the body together.

It makes tension perceptible.

The refractory layer does not prevent transformation.

It allows the body to enter the fire.

refractory layer ~ protective skin ~ bandage ~ accumulated surface ~ preparation for fire

force → relation → body

Tensions and Correlations is the conceptual proposition. Wrapped~Tensioned describes the material operation, and Bandaged Bodies brings the work back into corporeal and affective territory.

Making Intensified Surfaces~Spatial Propositions

Making Intensified Surfaces : A Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

My practice begins somewhere between the hand and the structure.

Clay is not simply a material to be formed. It is a body in negotiation: resistant, absorbent, unstable, enduring. Through making, I enter into a process of continual adjustment in which the work is never entirely known in advance. Form emerges through a reciprocal encounter between intention, matter, gesture, tool, surface, gravity, failure, and time.

https://independent.academia.edu/RussellMoreton

I am interested in ceramic bodies that begin to exceed their own material designation. Slab-built, perforated, scored, drilled, painted, weathered, and reconfigured, they occupy an unstable interval between vessel, sculpture, architectural fragment, diagram, ruin, and spatial apparatus. Their surfaces become intensified fields of activity. The hole is an aperture; the grid is a structure; the line is a proposition; the surface is a record of becoming.

Making is therefore not the execution of an idea but a mode of inquiry.

I understand the studio as an expanded environment: no longer a retreat from the world, but a site of continuous exchange. Ideas enter through materials, bodies, texts, places, conversations, architectures, and acts of attention. The work develops through an iterative process of monitoring, correction, combination, and transformation.

My site-based practice extends this inquiry into environments and situations. I construct provisional spatial compositions in which craft, architecture, theory, drawing, sociality, and embodied experience become entangled. These works are not fixed objects but relational propositions: spaces for inhabiting, encountering, sensing, imagining, and thinking.

I am interested in what happens when the distinction between object and environment begins to collapse.

A ceramic body becomes a spatial body.

A surface becomes a threshold.

A structure becomes an event.

Making becomes a way of producing knowledge through the material, the embodied, and the situated.

The work emerges through an excess of form: something always remains unfinished, unresolved, overspilling the structural integrity of the object. This excess is not a failure of construction but its generative condition.

I work within this instability.

Between craft and architecture.

Between matter and thought.

Between the body that makes and the space that is made.

Between the object and the world it begins to produce.

Permeable Chambers~Interiority understood through the surfacing of research, matter(s) between clay~ceramic~and beyond

"It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived"

The Sighted Watchmaker : Making, Tim Ingold .2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Chambers for Surfaced Readings, Russell Moreton, Ceramics. 2025

Clay is always a depth for correspondences, simultaneously surfacing as a landing site~becoming.