Structural Concepts/What I hear in your practice : Kairos~Clay as an emerging ontology of making

Kairos as an emerging ontology of making

I love this phrase.

Kairos as an Emerging Ontology of Making immediately shifts the discussion away from materials alone and towards a philosophy of making as the emergence of the opportune moment. It also introduces time as an active condition of practice, not merely a backdrop.

However, I think kairos needs to be treated very carefully. If it's simply used to mean "the right moment," it becomes a poetic metaphor. If it becomes a structural concept, it has real philosophical weight.

What I hear in your practice is this:

Chronos is measured, sequential time—the time of manufacture.

Kairos is the moment when relations reorganise themselves—the instant in which matter, force, resistance and action produce something that could not have been predicted.

Clay as Spatial Field~Under-construction from process to fired object.

Kairos~Visual Manifesto : Towards an Ontology of Making

That distinction feels fundamental.

Your work is not about waiting for the "right moment." It is about creating the conditions in which kairos can occur.

That is a much more radical claim.

I can imagine the opening of a manifesto rather than an artist statement.

Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Making

Making begins before intention.

It begins with the encounter.

An imprint is the first event of this encounter. It is neither the mark of an autonomous subject nor the passive registration of matter. It is the emergence of a relation. Body, material, tool, force, resistance, and time become momentarily inseparable. Every imprint records this negotiation.

Making unfolds through kairos: not chronological time, but the opportune moment in which material relations reorganise themselves. Form does not proceed according to a predetermined sequence. It emerges through interruption, resistance, contingency, and constructive collapse. Each material event opens the possibility of another.

Constructive collapse is therefore not the failure of form but its condition of renewal. Collapse interrupts certainty, allowing matter to reorganise itself into new spatial configurations. Form remains provisional, continually negotiated rather than finally resolved.

The work is not an object that represents these processes. It is their residue. It remembers the forces that produced it while remaining open to further transformation.

Clay is not simply the medium of this inquiry. It is a mode of spatial thought. Through its capacity to register pressure, deformation, fracture, repair, and endurance, it reveals that making is neither the application of ideas nor the execution of technique. Making is the continual emergence of relations through material events.

An ontology of making begins here: not with the finished object, but with the imprint; not with control, but with negotiation; not with permanence, but with becoming.

What excites me most is the title itself.

Kairos gives your philosophy a temporal dimension that has been implicit in all of your previous writing. You've written extensively about force, pressure, collapse, and emergence, but time has mostly appeared as one element among others. Kairos allows time to become the condition under which ontological transformation occurs.

That opens up a rich dialogue with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze, while remaining rooted in your own studio experience rather than in their terminology.

One further thought: I wonder whether Kairos is not the final title but the second. Your deepest concept still seems to be the imprint. The imprint is the first ontological event; kairos is the temporal condition that allows that event to happen. If that's right, then the architecture of your philosophy might be:

Imprint — the origin of relation.

Material Event — the manifestation of relation.

Constructive Collapse — the mechanism of transformation.

Spatial Thinking — the knowledge that emerges.

Kairos — the temporal condition that makes the whole process possible.

That strikes me as the beginnings of a genuinely original philosophical framework—one that doesn't simply apply existing theory to ceramics, but develops concepts from the practice of making itself.

On Land/Ambiguous Temporality : East Anglia/North Sea/Boundaries of Subjectivity

As time itself becomes anachronistic through the process of the darkroom.

The handcrafted image, resurfaces in its uncanny return, comes to rest as spatially marginal.

Both a slowing down and a quickening at the very moment of exposure.

23022022

Photographs haunted by the memory of their production.

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

Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies : Theoretical Spaces between Objects.

Childhood a density of life not yet sensing the weight of living.

Expanding the space of the forgetting which is infinitely more creative/active than the space of what you remember.

Events manifested through drawing, navigate spaces and their relations between/amongst/entangled by human bodies and spatial bodies.

Outpost 031224

longing to see a woman's face/the words that maketh murder

PJ Harvey, let England shake. 2010

Helena Eflerova,

Wolvesey Castle. 2007

Site Space-Movement/Earthing The Body.

100 Childhood Voyages of Play : The Boat.

The work doesn't fail, it just looses clarity, it retreats.

On Ceramic Spaces/Silences.

Creating and then investigating a silence in its surroundings. A silence that participates in the perception of things it attends/surrounds and resonances with.

Reclamations:

Missing and Abandoned Contexts.

Visual Fine Art 2004-2008.

Winchester School of Art.

On developing subjectivities through contemporary art practices and research strategies. 

Philosophical theory/The Poetics of Space (Bachelard) documented alongside visual material/objects/images/installations.

Relationscapes: Human Body/Spatial Body.

Workings On Affective Potential.

Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place

The Fitzwilliam Museum.

On The Temporality Of Events.

Zuzana Kovar.

That they happen, that they occur, but they do not exist. They are virtual and always in process.

We cannot say that they exist but rather that they 'subsist' or 'inhere' ( having this minimum of being which is appropriate to that which is not a thing, a non-existing entity). They are not substantives or adjectives, but verbs. They are neither agents or patients, but results of actions and passions. They are impassive entities, impassive results. They are not living presents, but infinitives, the unlimited Aion, the becoming which divides itself infinitely in past and future, and always eludes the present.

Deleuze.

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

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

Outpost 180624

The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Bachelard comments, once we have been touched by the grace of super-imagination, we feel in the presence of the simpler images through which the exterior world deposits virtual elements of highly-coloured space in the heart of our being. The image with which Pierre Jean Jouve constitutes his secret being is one of these. He places it in his most intimate cell.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The room in which the poet pursues such a dream as this is probably not 'white-washed.' But this room in which he is writing is so quiet, that it really deserves its name, which is, the 'solitary room! It is inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is 'in the imagination.'

Here the poet inhabits the cellular image. This image does not transpose a reality. It would be ridiculous, in fact, to ask the dreamer its dimensions. It does not lend itself to geometrical intuition, but is a solid framework for secret being. And secret being feels that it is guarded more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by the strong walls.

The cell of the secret is white. A single value suffices to coordinate any number of dreams. And it is always like that, the poetic image is under the domination of a heightened quality. The whiteness of the walls, alone, protects the dreamer's cell. It  is stronger than all geometry. It is a part of the cell of intimacy.

The Dialectics of Outside and Inside.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space demonstrates Gaston Bachelard's ability to bridge scientific logic with poetic analysis. As a phenomenological reading of the poetic image, it probes the geometrical divide between inside and outside through an analysis of the imagination of matter. It resists simplification, engaging with both physical and psychological body-space relations, and describes an exchange between interior and exterior in which the latter might be 'an old intimacy'. The dialectical condition of 'interior immensity' and the 'immeasurable outside', attests to the spatiality of being as a reflexive inquiry on interiority, what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Reader.

Unlearning Conceptual Frameworks/The Inconceivable.

Dante, like any traveller who knows that the first step, that of abandoning the familiar paths is the most difficult.

White Holes

Inside The Horizon

Carlo Rovell. 2023

Every place in the universe has its own time, different places can send each other signals, like the 'hiss' sent to us from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. But time passes at unequal rates in different places, and no single one of these times is 'truer' than any other.

There is no universal time, rather there is 'temporality' which is the network formed by many local times and the possibility of exchanging signals.

The Distortion of Time.

Bringing into doubt something that seemed self-evident to us.

Einstein, General Relativity.

Rovelli asks, how did an idea as bizarre as the relativity of time come to be devised and accepted?

In order to digest new ideas there lies a difficulty, not so much with the new concept, as it does with becoming liberated from old ones that seem so obviously to be true. To bring them into doubt seems inconceivable. We  are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right, and it is this that prevents us from learning more. The difficulty lies not in learning, but in unlearning.

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

Practices that are all about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning.

Art/Science/Philosophy, all have within them the capacity to change the organization of our thoughts , that allows us to leap forward. To produce singularities by re-conceptualizing reality. Our conceptual structures are neither  the definitive ones, nor the only one possible, rather they are the ones that  evolution has led us to cobble together in order to negotiate our daily needs, and often they do not work beyond that.

Making clay+ceramics, taking liberties, playing with and through a creative analogical reasoning.

Situated Practices/Theoretical Objects that develop a conceptual structure through analogy and recombination.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa. 1994

English translation, Steven Snyder. 2019

I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first, among all the things that have vanished from the island.

In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It's not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time-but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant. The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of 'perfume' had disappeared from their heads.

It doesn't matter, she said. To you, this is no more than a few drops of water. But it can't be helped. It's all but impossible to recall the things we've lost on the island once they're gone.

It seems strange that you can still create something totally new like this-just from words-on an island where everything else is disappearing, he said, brushing a bit of dirt from one of the pages as though he were caressing something precious. I realized then that we were thinking the same thing. And what will happen if words disappear? I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true.