Russell Moreton : Research Journal. 2013

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24370355922/

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

THE PRESENCE OF THE BUILT OBJECT IN THE WORLD 

THROUGH THE MANNER IN WHICH IT IS BUILT.

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

At the end of the twentieth century, with late capitalism more widely accepted as the economic model than ever before, the ideology of newness has become transparently associated with the workings of the market. Recent interest in airports, shopping malls and infrastructure emerges from an idea that it is these places where the processes of the contemporary economy are most brutally apparent. For architects to engage in these programmes is for architecture to become a commodified product and to be subject to the tyranny of the new.

Adam Caruso, The Tyranny of the New.

History is the raw material of architecture.

Aldo Rossi

Originality does not consist in making up new words that do not have the fine character of experience, but in using existing words well. They can be sufficient for everything.

Auguste Rodin

A radical formal strategy is one that considers and represents the existing and the known. In this way artistic production can critically engage with an existing situation and contribute to an ongoing and progressive cultural discourse.

Adam Caruso, The Tyranny of the New. Pp70-73

RADICAL FORMAL STRATEGY

THEORY PRAXIS MAKING

DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN:

VENACULAR STRUCTURES and HIGH STATUS ARCHITECTURE

SPATIAL CONTINUITY: MAKING, DWELLING

TRADITION

There is no compelling evidence as to why architecture should reject more than 400 years of working within a liberal arts context, nor is there compelling evidence that architecture is any more marginal than at other times over that period.

Adam Caruso, The Tyranny of the New.

Continuity involves the legacy of existing buildings produced by architects as well as the much larger legacy of existing, vernacular structures. In trying to connect these things, Caruso St John are part of a tradition that includes figures as diverse as Adolf Loos, Auguste Perret, Alison and Peter Smithson, Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Mies van der Rohe, Roger Diener, or Hans Kollhof. These architects have all questioned the abruptness of the radical break inherent in the formation of orthodox modern architecture.

Eric Lapierre, Caruso St John, The phenomenology of construction.

CONSTRUCTION

Adam Caruso on the medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire.

Today the nuances of language that make up these architectures only exist as an intellectual discourse and do not operate at the emotional level that would have engaged the original inhabitants, or audiences of these buildings. And yet we are still emotionally affected by these structures. Denied access to the specific culture of their iconography. We respond, at a more visceral level, to the more general culture of their construction. When this formal language ceases to be novel, a building becomes part of a more normative condition, the condition of not ‘being new’ and its qualities increasingly emerge from the more long-standing and stable world of construction.

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing 2002

By ceasing to be new, a building attains a more ‘normal’ condition, it becomes finally more banal, from a viewpoint that has much in common with Perret’s famous aphorism on ‘a work that would seem to have always existed’.

AFFECT SPACE POLITICS : NIGEL THRIFT

REVERBERATIONS : BACHELARD

RUINS : MARC AUGE

REFRAINS : AFFECT READER

SPACES OF ENCOUNTER : RE-DISCOVERY OF SPACE

CLAY : INNERNESS, CRAFTED FROM THE VALLEY/DWELLING/SITUATION

CONSTRUCTION AS THE APPLICATION OF MATTER

PHENOMENOLOGY vs. CONSTRUCTIONAL truth

THE QUESTION OF RUINS or the differences between the architectural ideologies of Auguste Perret and Caruso St John.

Beautiful architecture makes beautiful ruins, affirms Perret, since in ruins, only the structure remains visible.

When Adam Caruso observes the ruins of Fountains Abbey, he is concerned with physical matter.

The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing 2002

The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.

Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear façade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the façade.

Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.

For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.

Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.

INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES

SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.

QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.

INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY

CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.

The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.

New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John

The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the corners, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight.

The Brick House, London, Caruso St John

ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.

CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES

AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)

The artist, the real architect, has firstly the feeling of the effect that he wants to produce, and then he imagines the spaces that he has to create. The effect that he wants to create on the beholder, will come from the material and its form.

Adolf Loos

It is through the splendour of truth that the building attains beauty. The truth is in everything that has the honour and task to carry or to protect. He who hides a pole makes a mistake. He who makes a false pole makes a crime.

Auguste Perret

The originality of Caruso St John’s work lies the fact that this atmosphere is created by claddings that have a strong architectonic character. As opposed to Loos, they use paint very rarely, and prefer to use construction materials in the traditional sense of the term: brick, concrete and wood. They do so in order to continue to create architecture, not as a spectacle, but by merging two traditions –that of Perret’s structural rationalism and that of Loos’s claddings –to define an architecture that speaks to us of the contemporary world in a truly critical manner.

Eric Lapierre, Caruso St John, The phenomenology of construction.

Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity.

Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning. 

PROXIMITY OF SPACE

INTIMACIES IN SOCIAL SPACES

SCRIPTORIUM

THREE STAGE METHODOLOGY (Kikutake) Mitsuo Taketani

KA ‘ESSENCE’

KATA ‘SUBSTANCE’

KATACHI ‘PHENOMENON’

Characteristics of an architect

CHI ‘BLOOD’

TACHI ‘TEMPERAMENT’

KATACHI ‘EMBODIMENT’

STEPHANIE GANACHAUD JOUE L’ANGE DE LA GEOHISTOIRE

STEPHANIE GANACHAUD JOUE L'ANGE DE LA GEOHISTOIRE from Bruno Latour on Vimeo.

Photograms : Without the agency of time and light, there is no record.

Photogram of an allium using the historical process of cyanotype. The stilled nature of the image  is caused through its contact with the paper and the exposing sunlight over time. Photographic processes such as cyanotype yield these sorts of veiled images, manifested from the revelation captured within the photograph itself.

Without the agency of time and light, there is no record.

Visual Substance : Inter-Subjective Encounters

 Outpost 090222

Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture

Organism/Person/Environment

Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.

Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.

The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.

Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.

The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.

Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.

A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.

Between Art and Information.

Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.

The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of  things.

The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.

In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.

Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.

The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.

The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.

Tactile Light.

The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.

For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.

Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.

Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency

Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.

Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.

Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints

Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.

The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.

Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.

Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis,wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.

Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.

Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light

Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.

Some approaches and interpretations of phenomenology in architecture.

 Outpost 020922

Perceptual Experience.

On The Nature of Things.

The notion of specific agential intra-actions in architectural practice.

Thingification, the turning of relations into things,  entities, relata, all infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.

Karen Barad sees reality composed of intra-acting elements which together make up a phenomena.

Making Use of Useful Correlations/Meaningful Information.

The actor of this process is not a subject distinct from phenomenal reality outside it, nor any transcendent point of view, rather it is a portion of that reality itself.

Our discourse on reality is itself part of that reality.

The radical questioning of our mental maps of reality.

Lines of thought that take inspiration from, or rooted in quantum physics.

Karen Barad's utilization of the ideas of Niels Bohr.

Physics seemed to me the place where the weave between the structure of reality and the structure of thought was closest, the place where this intertwinement was subject to the incandescent test of continuous evolution.

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explores being as it resides in the perceptual situatedness of the body-subject into the world.

When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes what we perceive.

Perception is considered as the fundamental act that enables human beings to inhabit space and time.

Reality is not composed of things in themselves or things behind phenomena, 

but things in phenomena. 

For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for materialization of the idea-force.

For Merleau-Ponty idea is the invisible of this world which inhabits this world, sustains it and renders it visible.

Holl is interested in the phenomenal nature of the idea, in his search for connecting the phenomenal properties with conceptual strategy.

According to Bohr, the primary epistemological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena.

Phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components.

Phenomena are produced through agential intra-actions of multiple apparatuses of bodily production.

Things in phenomena/agential intra action

Steven Holl points out a path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. In this architectural journey the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site-force interact with each other. This interaction begins with the formation of an abstract idea, the formation of a concept out of this idea and its transformation into a material, a spatial and formal reality on a physical site.

The Visible and The Invisible.

Phenomenology of Perception.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Posthumanist Performativity.

Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.

Karen Barad.

A Living Room For The City : V&A Dundee.

Kengo Kuma, Maurizio Mucciola.

Parallax

Some approaches and interpretations of phenomenology in architecture.

Steven Holl.

Studio Works

 Outpost 050822

The Thinking Field/Speculative Curriculums.

The Body-In-Action/Making Spaces between Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Anthropology.

Sequences of actions that add up to an observational-heuristic procedure.

Conserved without restoration of lost detail.

The problem of historical materials, which we can never ignore but can't imitate directly either, is an issue that has always concerned me. I am primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Carlo Scarpa, Castelvecchio.

Lime Wash, Field Chalk, China Clay.

Human Figure Drawing.

Waxed Paper, Canvas.

Charcoal, Clay, Liquid Iron Oxide.

 

Essential Work Only.

The SPAB Approach.

The Society's approach very often involves carefully considered inaction.

Where no problems exist, or where a problem has no major effect on use or conservation, an old building is best left alone and simply enjoyed.

Problems need to be tackled, but the society encourages work which is no more, but no less, than is essential.

 

Restricting work to these things helps ensure the maximum survival of historic fabric.

Site Sequencing/The Infra-Thin/The Viewing Chamber.

Tactically posed surrounds that contrast/entangle one segment of world with another.

Mapping Photons/Subjectivity.

Architectural Body/Collaged Users

Procedural Movements of Conservation/Care and Repair. 

Extracting that which has become interred.

Observing quotidian detail within the ruins of a  fabric of building.

Domestic and intimate details that create poetic themes that are universal and transcendent.

Wanting to see what things look like photographed/interrogations.

Pushing the photographic image to the point of failure, using the fading twilight to create new abstractions of light and movement.

The intermediate space of the negative.

A gap created between the mechanical attentive and unassumptive nature/vision of the camera and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye. 

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty struggled with the development of a theory of vision that would take account our embodied relationship to it, describing the 'chiastic' relationship between the viewer and the world, an intertwining through which the world was bought into a kind of visibility.

What needed to be put into question and seen as problematic was how the viewer came to be seen as separate from the world, how the visual ever became positioned as something other, something differentiated and separate from the spectator.

The force of presence/presentness.

Stillness and Time, 2006.

Still Video Portraits and the Account of The Soul.

Joanna Lowry.

The Visual, is predicated upon the construction of a distance between the spectator and the world, a distance maintained through the work of culture and the work of technology.

Photographic technologies have provided one key cultural mechanism for defining the place of the visual and positioning it in relationship to us.

In representing the subject they also define the site of the subjects's visibility, the place at which he or she can be seen.

They cut through the world, interrupt it, producing difference and distance and projecting it onto the surface of the paper or the screen.

They produce a differentiated space of the visible within which the subject and the spectator are made aware of their otherness and their distance from from each other.

 

Photographic Drawings/Haiku.

Luminous/Insubstantial Spectral Abstractions. 

Focus and detail  would drag it back to our world. 

Vision is the place where are continuity with the world conceals itself, the place where we mistake our contact for distance, imagining that seeing is a substitute for, rather than a mode of, touching, and it is this anaesthesia, this senselessness, at the heart of transparency that demands our acknowledgement and pushes our dealings with the visual beyond recognition.

Stephen Melville. 

Recombinant Poetics

Pinhole Photography/Qualitative Visual/Haptic Soundings.

St Martins, Shotesham. SPAB

Camera Room/Still Life

Paintings from the overlaying intervals of materials and processes of construction.

The Essential Solitude

Maurice Blanchot

Self Communion.

The person who is writing the work is thrust to one side, the person who has written the work is dismissed. What is more, the person who is dismissed does not know it.

This ignorance saves him, diverts him and allows him to go on.

The writer never knows if the work is done.

What he has finished in one book, he begins again or destroys in another.

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM : Kairos~an attention to the moment in which something becomes possible.

Time here is not a line along which the work travels. It becomes a material of movement: the not yet meeting what has already gone, traces returning through new situations, images reversing, spaces carrying different temporalities at once. The diagram does not simply describe this movement; it participates in it. Kairos opens another sense of spatial practice—an attention to the moment in which something becomes possible. The current ceramic body enters this temporal field differently. Clay gathers duration through making; fire interrupts it; ceramic carries it forward. The body becomes a proposition waiting for another time, another atmosphere, another encounter.

Speculative inquiry 190926

The important movement here could be:

Can the ceramic body become a form of Kairos?

Not an object that represents time, but a body in which different temporalities become available to encounter.

That gives you a very strong correspondence with:

archive → trace → clay → firing → ceramic → futurity

The fired ceramic has a peculiar temporal condition. It contains a history of actions that cannot be repeated in quite the same way, while simultaneously becoming available to encounters that have not happened yet.

The trace looks backwards.

The proposition leans forwards.

The ceramic occupies the interval between them.

Outpost 290722

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM.

Maya Deren's 1948 film, Meditation on Violence.

Two parabolic arcs describe three types of Chinese boxing in a single continuous movement. 

The last portion of the film is printed in reverse motion.

DURATION

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid, flowing time is interwined with an experience of being where past, present and future merge. If one extreme of time is the experiential time of individual being, the other extreme is the abstract, anonymous, measured time of science.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

The Great Hall of Ascension can receive 10,000 people; its floor and ceiling are made of glass. It is intersected by the glass cages of nine elevators, each rising to its respective destination, traversing the other interiors with a discreet hiss. On the elevator shafts, electronic billboards announce different libraries. With fragments of texts, titles, names, songs descending in a continuous movement, the entire building seems supported by signs in a perpetual countdown to takeoff.

Rem Koolhaas.

Into The Frame Enters

The foreignness of the intimate or the violence and charity of perception.

R. Bruce Elder.

Kairos

The Movement and its Moment

Being Alive

Tim Ingold

Jannis Kounellis

At Castelvecchio, Sparpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition.

An Attitude to History, Carlo Scarpa.

It cannot be, it has gone!

They believe that we can do the same sort of work in the same spirit as our forefathers whereas for good or evil we are completely changed and we cannot do the work they did.

William Morris.

There is no stage at which human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre.

Autopoises and Cognition

The Realization of the Living

Humberto R. Maturana

Francisco J. Varela

We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.

We become self-conscious through self-observation, by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process. 

For colour and against line and drawing.

Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator's construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on film-making, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

The concept of pure colour in a monochrome.

I seek to put the spectator in front of the fact that the colour is an individual, a character, a personality. I solicit a receptivity from the observer placed before my works.

This permits him to consider everything that effectively surrounds the monochrome painting.

Thus he can impregnate himself with colour and colour impregnates itself in him.

Thus, perhaps, he can enter into the world of colour.

Yves Klein.

Colourspace that is not visible but within which one is impregnated.

Parallax and the free movement of the landscape through physical forms.

To resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Presenting Pure Pigment.

I did not like colours ground with oil. They seemed to be dead. 

What pleased me above all was pure pigments in powder like the ones I often saw at the wholesale colour dealers.

They had a burst of natural and extraordinarily autonomous life.

Living and tangible colour material.  

Magdalena Broska

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Fire Pictures

Rain Sculptures

Air Architecture

Cosmogonies

Although it was a room painted totally in white, the artist spoke of an extraordinarily intense experience of blue: it was a true blue, the blue of the blue depths of space.

The demonstration of nothingness, the void of a white space.

Klein wanted to demonstrate the idea of a development from blue, a visible, tangible colour, via white to immaterialised blue.

There is an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, one without a within, in which Bachelard's beautiful sentence resides: First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then a blue depth.

Blue blood of sensibility

Bachelard/Shelley.

A wide variety of different expressions for the process of progressive dematerialisation.

The release of colour from the binding agent.

Work with dematerialised materials such as the elements fire, water, air and dust.

The term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema's historical and cultural architectures of reception into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined.

Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema, seeks to explore the various histories of expanded cinema and their impact on the question of narrative, space and time in experimental film and art practices.

Film/Expanded Cinema. 

Temporal Spaces/Surfaces.

Transparency/Translucency, littoral and Phenomenal.

Mark Burry and Jane Burry

Prototyping for Architects.

Steven Holl 

Parallax.

Designing buildings as serial prototypes.

Spatial Clocks/Theoretical Objects/Entanglements.

Materials imbue the wind-permeable wall with rich textile qualities.

The whole house acted as a prototype, not only showcasing the latest developments in green technology but also exploring at full scale, the performance of the house and the way in which people interacted with it.

The artists wanted to make the same gesture that many cultures make when marking the land through which they have passed, the placing  of one stone on top of another to signal a route back.

The deeper speculative proposition

What I think is emerging from these four posts is that the current spatial practice may not simply be about making ceramic bodies spatial.

It may be about something more particular:

Spatiality is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

The earlier work repeatedly approaches this through different media:

cyanotype allows material to seep beyond the traced body;

collage and montage allow fragments to occupy a shared field;

diagram allows temporal and spatial relations to remain in movement;

the vessel allows surface and interior to sense one another;

walking allows place and body to continually alter one another.

Clay now becomes a particularly intense site for all of these propositions because it can receive, resist, absorb, register, perforate, enclose, open and transform.

Then firing changes the proposition again.

The archive gathers the activities through which spatiality was already becoming perceptible: trace, movement, multiplicity, innerness, atmosphere and encounter. Clay does not resolve these bodies into form. It troubles them into correspondence.

The spatial practice was already there, dispersed across bodies. Clay became the place where they could touch.

That last sentence feels particularly close to what you are now calling In~~Touching.

Immaterial Architectures : Raveningham Pavilion and The Architecture of Natural Light

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.