Reading Interiority : Drying Rooms~Spaces and Intervals in Clay

Interiority / Atmosphere

This foregrounds the drying room as a spatial and atmospheric condition, rather than treating the post primarily as a theoretical text.

The drying room becomes a spatial condition of reading: clay is still changing, neither fully provisional nor materially settled. The reading body encounters this condition through touch, while Barad's writing opens that touch towards responsibility, otherness and a futurity that cannot yet be fully inhabited.

Clay as a troubling interiority of reading and as an material interval that becomes available for a developing spatial inquiry.

Clay allows us to reach out, as it touches us, touchings~bodies reaching out into the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never touch. Their touching is to respond~In~correspondence.

For Karen Barad.

Living compassionately requires recognizing and facing (touch~ing) our responsibility to the infinite of the other (that we are) welcoming the stranger whose very existence is the possibility of touching and being touched.

The stranger who gifts us with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come (a futurity perhaps of the withdrawn ceramic that was touching compassionately the bodies of stranger~in~clay.

 

Reading Interiority ~ Drying Rooms, Spaces and Intervals in Clay

A drying room is neither simply an interior nor a space of waiting. Clay occupies a changing condition, gathering the traces of its making while moving towards another material state. Its persistence is not yet secured; its possibilities have not disappeared.

Reading enters this interval as another form of touching. Words, materials and bodies encounter one another without becoming the same. Through Barad, touching becomes a question of correspondence and responsibility: how bodies reach towards an otherness they cannot fully know, and how this encounter changes what it means to respond.

The clay body is already situated within a weather~~world, exposed to forces through which its condition continues to alter. Reading does not stand apart from these movements. It becomes another body within them, carrying soundings that may surface through making or withdraw into the material relations of the ceramic.

Perhaps the drying room is a space of such ambiguous inhabitation: where the provisional persists, where the withdrawn remains available, and where the stranger is not simply encountered but helps to make another encounter possible.

Reading~clay~ceramic. Touching~being touched. Persistent bodies, still~in~~play.

What might pass between bodies without becoming their possession?

interiority,

spatial practice,

reading body,

clay~ceramic,

correspondence,

touch,

material thinking,

Karen Barad,

threshold,

speculative learning,

What else can thinking do?

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning. 

The spatial body has moved closer to touching. Earlier encounters with architecture, drawing, apparatus and site opened spaces through bodies, movement, ritual and repetition. Working with clay~ceramic, these spatial questions become more intimate and material. The vessel, surface, aperture and interior are not simply forms or descriptors, but places where bodies meet and relations pass through. Clay becomes an atmospheric body—receiving, resisting, registering and shedding traces of encounter. In and out of material, inside and outside, touch and space continually fold into one another. Making becomes a reciprocal attentiveness: a becoming~in~touch with other bodies, their patternings, forces and murmurings.

Yes. I think this is another very coherent spatial correspondence~cluster, and it is slightly different from the previous four. The previous cluster traced the development of scaffolding, situation and spatial bodies; this one brings vessel, drawing, ritual, repetition, apparatus, memory and the human body into much closer proximity.

There is a particularly interesting movement across these four:

apparatus → body → vessel → overlapping space → repetition → interiority

And Inside This Clay Jug becomes a crucial hinge because the clay body is already explicitly described through its sensuality, interiority and architectural capacity. The post asks us to think about the vessel not simply as an object but as a way of investigating our experience of interior and exterior space.

Molecular Sieve / Performative Apparatuses

A spatial apparatus becomes a body in motion. Carried through the temporal conditions of a site, the Molecular Sieve gathers light, movement, memory and encounter through its small aperture. The chamber of the camera becomes a place of attention: something between inside and outside, between looking and being situated. Photography here is less an image-making procedure than a way of becoming~in~touch with a place, allowing time and material presence to register through the body of an apparatus.

Inside This Clay Jug

The vessel opens a question of interiority. Clay becomes more than a surface enclosing an empty space; it becomes a body through which interior and exterior can be sensed together. Touch, volume, air, light and memory gather within the vessel, making space something experienced rather than simply described. The clay body carries traces of its making while opening onto other bodies and spaces. Here, ceramics begins to become a way of thinking through the intimate correspondence between material, body and the spaces we inhabit.

Drawing Into the Human Form / The Architectural Body

Drawing becomes a way of moving between bodies. The human body and the architectural body are not fixed forms but spaces of relation, scale, movement and inhabitation. Through drawing, gesture and trace, one body begins to enter another. The image becomes less a representation of space than an encounter with it—a way of sensing what happens between body, surface, interior and surrounding space. Drawing opens a spatial vocabulary that is tactile as much as visual.

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces

Spaces are never encountered only once. Through presentation, ritual, repetition and movement, each encounter leaves another registration, another layer of memory and material presence. Space becomes something continually made and remade through bodies and their actions. Repetition does not reproduce the same situation; it alters it. The trace becomes a form of remembering, while the surface becomes a place where encounters accumulate. These overlapping registrations begin to suggest space as something lived, touched and continually becoming.

Russell Moreton : Collage Works "Interiors and Interiority"

Richard Sennett, "Interiors and Interiority" Published on 26 Apr 2016 4/22/16 Richard Sennett's talk will trace how intimate physical spaces emerged, historically; he will explore the relationship between the concepts "inside" and "subjective" and whether interior spaces and interiority are disappearing today, under the influence of social media.
https://youtu.be/hVPjQhfJfKo


Public Intimacy Architecture and the Visual Arts Giuliana Bruno.


Domain/Court/Cell Architectonic Space: Fifteen Lessons on the Disposition of the Human Habitat By Hans van der Laan,

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/27657797991/in/photostream/

Spectral Confluences : Architecture and Fashion. #2

Spectral Confluences : Architecture and Fashion. #2, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.