Cyanotype Drawings : Landscapes/Maps and Performative Drawings

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #2
Collage and drawing with cyanotypes, photographs, negatives and painted surfaces.

Mesh/Material/Light, Cyanotype Process
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide.

The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure in 1842.[1] Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints.[2] It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection.[3] Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.[4]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Cathedral : Place Studies

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft.#5

Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

Visualising Environmental Agency

 

"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Gell 1998)"

"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.

 

Template and Form 2010.The Yard, Winchester.

Omslagsfoto : 

Landscapes from the Metropolis of Death. Otto Dov Kulka.

Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #3

Collage and drawing with cyanotypes, photographs, negatives and painted surfaces.

Blueprint : Kengo Kuma, Sensing Spaces.

Panspermia : Cyanotype Drawing
Drawing on paper,150x240 cms
Full size human form drawn through "performance" on paper with cyanotype and black ink. Astronomical data and traces of seed heads together with reference material/notes (directed panspermia) in pencil.

Anthropomorphic and Botanical Cyanotype Drawing (Detail)
Botanical traces with leper graves


We live our lives sunk in vast forgetting. Milan Kundera, IGNORANCE.

Human mapping of social groups from the occupancy of the Winchester Cathedral "Space for Peace" 2011.
Mono Print : Cyanotype process on paper, 52x42cm.

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

Objects and Traces/Map Reading : Visual Archaeology/Anthropology in Social Space

The map fosters interpretation and exploration

Inseparable Attendant : Place and Process

Assemblage and blueprint : Site drawing/Leper Graves

Drawing figure/ground, documentation of work in progress.

Life "drawing" trace on paper with water and field chalk. Work submitted to Interfaith Group Show at the Link Gallery, Winchester 2010.

"This particular event invokes for me the notion of simple material relations and collaborative gestures that underpin human agency. Art space/practice can promote these working intimations."       Artist's Statement (archive)  07.12.2009.

Anthropological Landscape : Morn Hill, Winchester

Panspermia : Cyanotype Drawing
150x240 cms
Human form drawn on paper with cyanotype and black ink. Astronomical data and traces of seed heads together with reference material/notes (directed panspermia) in pencil.

180621

Spatial Practices/Apparatuses/Events : The Scriptorium : Collage, Architecture and Blueprints.

A HUT WITHIN THE INFLUENCE AND NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE

The tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental condition and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow.

Juhani Pallasmaa. Hapticity and Time.

Notes on Fragile Architecture. 2000

Contemporary artists aim to produce specific relations with the technologies they adopt and adapt;
This schematic offers a partial taxonomy.
Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium : Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art 2006

Immersive
the "cave" paradigm, the virtual helmet, the black-box video, the earphone set

Alienated
taking technology and "making it strange," exaggerating attributes to provoke shock, using technologies to switch senses or induce disorientation

Interrogative
work that repurposes  or remakes devices to enhance their insidious or wondrous properties; available data translated into sensible systems

Residual
work that holds on to an earlier technology, repurposes or even fetishizes an abandoned one

Resistant
work that refuses to use marketed technologies for their stated purpose; work that pushes viewers to reject technologies or subvert them

Adaptive
work that takes up technologies and extends or applies them for creative purposes, producing new subjects for the technologies in question 

Domain-Court-Cell : Research Collages, UCA Interior Design MA

02/10/21



https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24401545681/in/datepost

Acts of Drawing/Derrida : Becomings through immaterial, memory and blindness.

JACQUES DERRIDA THE SCEPTICISM OF DRAWING:

“perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love.

Jacques Derrida in 1993 wrote an extensive text to accompany an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre. This text titled Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins contains within it some particular references to “Pliny’s Origins of Painting." Together with the aid of illustrations of paintings on this theme, he examines and interrogates their philosophical and historical qualities.

Derrida makes particular mention and emphasis of the “state of blindness” in his analysis of the Butades myth. In particular the notion of  “scepticism” which is at the very heart of drawing. This notion of the “difference between believing and seeing”1, and what he remarks as “believing one sees and seeing between” evokes the emergence of a “glimpse” caught in a state in which “doubt ever becomes a system“2. There is a moment of delay between the gaze with its vigilance and attention, and what one reflects upon seeing. These actions will conspire to create the moment of conclusion. So by keeping the thing in sight it is being constantly examined but not reflected on, until the point when the gaze is averted to the drawing .It is a this instant, withdrawn from the sight of the object, that a “blindness” forces the recollection (the moment of conclusion to emerge) to which the drawn mark is visual evidence of that moment Derrida makes the observation that representations substitute memory for perception and that blindness is a constant withdrawal into memory. Derrida is of the view that drawings, paintings are “representations drawn most often from an exemplary narrative." This myth of Butades with its “exemplary narrative” relates directly to the absence or invisibility of (being in) the drawing process whilst in the presence of the object, that the very act of drawing withdrawals and blinds its participant. Butades daughter is “blinded” in the acts of both love and the act of drawing. Through these conditions it can be seen that Butades daughter is blind to the vision of her lover and in drawing around his projection she is forced to recollect and reflect to produce a conclusion of that action by the simple gesture and act of an inscription drawn aided by a flickering silhouette.

Derrida uses the example of the painting by J. B. Suvee “Butades or the Origin of Drawing 1791” or as it is referred in English as “The Daughter of Butades Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover ” to illustrate that it was “as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing.” The drawing in effect becomes a “declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other.”3 Derrida comments that the origin of drawing may have become born from the desire to create some sort of surrogate mark which originates “from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.“4 The important observation Derrida continues to make is that the daughter in “following the traits of a shadow or a silhouette” who is in effect drawing on a blindness which will through recollection, initiates a sense with which she is in effect “already loves in nostalgia.”5

Derrida dwells on the very nature of drawing moving away from “the origin of drawing” to “the thought of drawing” he comments that the thought of a drawing has a “certain pensive pose, a memory of the trait that speculates, as in a dream, about its own possibility.”6 It is as if the potency of drawings is a projected development that occurs as Derrida states “on the brink of blindness.” This notion of the “trait” (a feature to a line, stroke, or mark) a visible presence that accompanies the lines odyssey, a sense of presence that can witness something of the invisible in the visible is touched upon. ’’Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible is cited by Derrida as having already made “Indications” in this respect Derrida footnote from The Visible and the Invisible seems to sum up something of the invisibility and presence of the trait acting on a drawing. This extract taken from the “working notes” section of the book it reads” One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a non visibility.”7

Distilled from the salient points of Derrida’s extensive interrogation Memoirs of the Blind seems to acknowledge the fact that “whether Butades daughter follows the tracts of a shadow or a silhouette or even if she draws on the surface of a wall or in a veil.”8 the resultant inscription in any event “inaugurates an act of blindness.” Derrida’s revelation is that “perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love that simultaneously that also contains her anticipation of a loss, and as a result, a nostalgia that is reflected upon before it is actually perceived.

1  . Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993),page 1.

2  .Ibid., page 1.

3  .Ibid., page 49.

4  .Ibid., page 49.

5  .Ibid., page 51.

6  .Ibid., page 3.

7   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),257.

8   Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, page 51.

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

 Outpost 130524

The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Drawing as Gesture.

Coda : Coded Imprints/Mediality

Contemporary drawing tending towards graphism, illegible writing, that can be seen as a regression from image and coded sign to what could be described as states of the 'pre-sign', of moments of inscription and the emergence of the signifier from the gesture or act of making a mark.

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

A fusion between the artist's mind, the artist,s hand and the beholder's gaze.

Even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation.

Avis Newman.

The raw drawn line at its emergence into the world.

Line can no more escape the present tense of its entry into the world than it can escape into oil paints secret hiding places of erasure and concealment. This fundamental condition can bring it therefore much closer to the viewer's own situation than can the image in paint.

The drawn line in real time with its own momentum, its own trajectory.

A walk for a walk's sake, the mobile agent is a point shifting its position-forward.

Paul Klee.

The present of viewing and the present of the drawn line, hook onto each other, mesh together like interlocking temporal gears. They co-inhabit an irreversible permanently open and exposed field of becoming, whose moment of closure will never arrive.

Though it is impossible to reconstruct with any real accuracy the precise sequence whereby drawn lines on paper finally come together as a completed image. The permanent visibility of each unit of production, of each individual line on its own, means that there is no escaping the sense of the line as emerging from an initial state, blank paper to the state we eventually see.

The drawn line in a sense always exists bin the present tense, in the time of its own unfolding. The ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.

The blankness of the paper exerts a pressure that cannot be reduced or done away with, relentless its blankness forces everything into the open into a field of exposure without shields or screens, with no hiding places, a radically open zone that always operates in real time.

If painting presents being.

The drawn line presents becoming.

Line gives you the image, together with the whole history of its becoming-image.

However definitive, perfect, unalterable the drawn line may be, each of its lines, even the last line that was drawn is permanently open, to the present of a time that is always unfolding. Even that final line, the line that closed the image is in itself open to a present that bars the act of closure.

A Walk for a Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Cy Twombly.

Works on Paper. 1979.

Such gestures do not ask to be interpreted.

Making marks that open-up a space where in which the distinction between human and non-human is undecidable. How are we to respond to gestures that do not ask to be interpreted since they are meaningless, or more precisely they are gestures in meaningless.

If drawing is to be taken as just such a gesture, how are we to respond to it?

It it is not directed to meaning or interpretation, what does it demand of us?

Instead of considering what its meaning is, we could place the emphasis on the fact that a gesture has been made, the fact that something has been left for us. A mark inscribed on a piece of paper, perhaps by someone. We would thus receive the gestural mark as the trace of the other without any need for that mark to be meaningful. We may well do so without reverting to the 'what' and interpreting the gesture as an expression.

We need to say nothing more than the other has left this mark.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

Michael Newman.

The gesture is communication of a communicability.

Means Without Ends.

Giorgio Agamben. 2000

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. What is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself, but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language. It is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term.

For Michael Newman, the drawn mark could be taken as a 'gag' in precisely the way Agamben outlines. Its relation to language lies not in language as a goal, but precisely in its turning back on itself to expose its mediality, which is the condition of language.

Materiality and Mediality

Materiality and Mediality takes as its focus the reciprocal relationship between the facture of objects and the making of meaning. The questions addressed in this focus build upon ongoing research on textility. Material observations of textiles from Gottfried Semper onward have played a special role in the historiography of our field, and the study of textiles demands both new economic, social, and material approaches to the history of art, from canvas painting to tapestry, while also emphasizing global movements of materials, techniques, and makers.

More broadly, the study of materials encompasses both the complex negotiation of human makers with material resistances, and the way materials change physically and in terms of their reception over time. From the extraction and procurement of raw materials to the sensual qualities of finished products, the study of an object’s materiality brings forth histories of labor, trade, technology, and the environment that have been traditionally considered beyond the remit of art history. Concomitantly, media theory is a useful tool to examine how medium shapes the behavior of works of art, which becomes especially pronounced when new media emerge and spread. Both materiality and mediality impact the aesthetic, social, and ritual understanding of works of art. The study of materials and media invite approaches to the history of art that span geographies and chronologies in new and challenging ways. Materiality and Mediality serves as a broad framework to examine visual culture using sets of methodological tools that can shed new light on canonical works of art while simultaneously integrating overlooked objects into larger art historical narratives.

https://www.biblhertz.it/en/dept-weddigen/materiality-mediality

We are thus left with the question of how the mark received as trace of the other relates to the mark as gesture, even if the trace necessarily withdraws from the mark. How does the mark-as-gesture not reduce the trace to its mediation to expression in a medium and thus reduce the other to being a figment of my world, an actor on the stage that I project. The other is reduced to the same if the medium is conceived as a common substance, a kind of thing that joins two entities, communication as exposure breaks with this ontology.

Plastic Horizons/Strange Attractors/Affective Abstractions

 Outpost 010722

Intermediaries/Exploratory Realities.

Constructs/Apparatuses.

Elastic Horizons/Schisms

Space-Time Manifolds

Heuristic Devices/Poetic Ideas

Strange Attractors/Drawings/Diagrams

Architectures that embody philosophy, through limited concepts that work with the contingent and the uncertain.

Light has a new prolific dimension today as a means of measurement and communication.

Light that is not seen with the eyes can be felt. 

Light's psychological effects can lead to extremes of feeling with direct repercussions.

The revelations of new spaces, like interwoven languages, dissolve and reappear in light. In magnificent spaces, light changes and appears to describe form. 

An eclipse of white clarity suddenly gives way to a pulse with colour; light is contingent, its shadows intermittent.

In the mist of the metropolis at night, space dissolves before our eyes, only to take shape again within seconds. 

The spatial depth of the urban field cannot be objectified precisely. In its pulse the polarised position of our body and its perceptions are upset.

If we explore spatial depth, then we can consider how objects appear correct or inverted. During our thought-experiments regarding space, especially space beyond the earthbound (Event Horizon, black hole) we accept new spatial levels and by the force of our imaginations, alter the known spatial levels of previous human existence.

Horizon with aurora borealis.

A horizon is not only an optical condition but also a spinning moment in space-time.

In this sense, the earth is not the ground. 

As things continue to float, they spin and accelerate creating subtle centrifugal forces.

We are organic beings.

All of our objective relations begin from the inside out.

We  must form an extended comprehension of space and time at the scale of astronomical events while not losing the perspective of the microscopic.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Prototyping For Architects, Mark Burry, Jane Burry.

Why it does not have to be in focus, Jackie Higgins.

Studio Painting/Constituent Parts.

Matter and Affect

Presence and Mutability

Affective Abstractions

Robert Ryman

Shifting perceptions into immersions within a sensate world.

Japanese Minimalism

Exploratory Diagrams

Spatial Forms/Horizons 

Building as a body, a battleground of invisible forces. The spine is the central elevator. 

The structure is a tube of concrete covered with insulation and tarred black wood boards.

Knut Hamsun Museum, Hamaroy, Norway.

Works on Paper and Cloth, visible fixings, securely situated to the wall space.

Architectural Panels/Painting Surfaces.

Soundproofing social noise

The solitary artist literally at the edge of his environment, in a state of profound meditation about our place in the wider cosmos.

We are no longer on the outside as an objective, dispassionate observer, but are now part of the journey and perhaps more subtly part of a ceaseless life-giving cycle.

When we are at the beginning of a journey we, like Odysseus, contemplate a character (or concept) that does not yet exist. Absence and loss precede the appearance of an abstract driving force.

Chaos, confusion, and implosion of information bound up in rules, constraints, and limited means precede every architectural challenge. Once the imagined concept takes hold, its correctness is tested in the way it can work in different modes, from program to light, to space and to material.

The journey from the abstract to the concrete is a metamorphosis from a poetic idea with an exploratory diagram, a coherent purpose to form.

Mattering/Metaphor

Dartmoor/Water

Stream of thought, cascades of neural activity in your mind.

Imprints of the natural environment, explorations of matter and light, self and other.

Works that seem caught between this world and evoking a place that is otherworldly.

She works outdoors using the nocturnal landscape as a darkroom.

On The Presentness Of Photography, Craigie Horsfield.

For Horsfield, by separating the act of taking the image from that of printing it, he believes he draws attention to the 'pastness' of the photograph, which is what the picture depicts, its subject and what he calls the 'presentness' which is how the photograph exists through its surface, its matter, and the physical object.

The instant of the moment is also a past reality.

Slow History/Slow Time on the presentness of things and their complicated relationships to time.

Tactile Light/Casting Images.

Pliny/Butades, tracing an outline of a shadow onto a wall.

Christopher Bucklow has devised a process to depict figures composed of myriad pinhole photographs of the sun. He dispenses with the negative by casting images directly into photograms.

She, is rendered not as a shadow but manifested as a radiant, luminous being. 

They flesh themselves in the astral remnants of dilated starlight.

Skin

Surface

Subjectivity 

The composed image is given an apparent physicality, its surface should be constituted by and of  place and time, it should be vulnerable, porous to impressions like skin.

Physical Forms

Landscape

Free Movement

Cone of Vision/Refraction Diagram

Parallax

Elastic Horizons

Science remains essentially mysterious, yet our daily scientific and phenomenal experiences shape our lives; experience sets a new frame from which we interpret what we perceive.

Studio Assemblages : Spatial Instant/Relationscapes

 Ever instant has a thousand memories : Henri Bergson 

Studio Place : Time and Shadows in the Cyanotype Process

Spatial Mediators and Intercessors : Creating Loops/Rhetorical Silences/Strange Tools

Immaterial Architectures
Painting/Form for Reading Spaces/Intervals
Pattern and Chaos/Liminality/Tectonics
Architectural surface for a Library,  raw materials, light, silence and solitude.

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity
Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme. To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.


White Noise : Nocturnes of Silence

Behind Appearance
A Study of the relations between painting and the natural sciences in this century
C. H. Waddington

Adam Fuss
Home and the World

Strange Loops
Art, Science and Consciousness
An Exploration of Mind, Matter and Form through the Work of Susan Derges
Stephen Gaughan

The Music of Waves
The Poetry of Particles
Thoughts on Implicate Order for Susan Derges
Martin Kemp

Adam Fuss
Eugenia Perry

Aesthetic Allure
Rhetorical Silences/Strange Tools

the sensual energy of the dimension in which causality/aesthetics happens

Graham Harman, Timothy Morton

Paintings/Research/Archive/Art Practice
Cyanotype material,objects on canvas.
Russell Moreton 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/40286364403/in/dateposted-public/

Spaces/Aesthetics : 'Spatiality' between Objects, Concepts and Beings

In his discussion of mediators, Gilles Deleuze (1995,121) describes being taken up in the motion of a big wave. He notes that instead of looking for 'points of origin' attention should be directed to mediators that enable a 'putting-into-orbit' that facilitate the movement of concepts, sensations and matter without recourse to origins or destinations.

Katve-Kaisa Kontturi uses the term 'intercessor' instead of  'mediator' as it aligns better with Deleuze's argument, where importance is placed not on mediating between already formulated shapes or beings, but on opening beings up to movement through a third actant.
For Deleuze (1995,125), Intercessors are about entering into or creating a series.

Gilles Deleuze. 1995, Negotioations, 1972-1990.
Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press.

Notes, Introduction
Ways of Following
Art, Materiality, Collaboration
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi

Open Humanities Press
London 2018



Immaterial Architectures : Raveningham Pavilion #1
DSC_3283 Raku Beakers : Lead Glaze/Yellow Ochre
DSC_4049 Field Aesthetic : Causality/Layered Drawings
DSC_3776 Sacred/Secular : Vessels on Painting
DSC_4097 Field Aesthetic : Causality/Layered Drawings
DSC_8923 Artists Studio : Collage/Photography/Painting

Outpost Studies
Norwich
UK