STUDIO PRACTICE, THEORY AND ANALYSIS.
MA SCHOOL OF CRAFTS AND DESIGN.
Working Notes : Brockwood Granary 2014
Theory and Analysis Documents, UCA Farnham
Working Contexts/Title : Spatial/Making analogies/relationscapes
“Innerness” in Ceramics/Architecture and Philosophy/Painting
BUILDing something “existentially unknowable” but with a critical context.
The CONTENTS of the INTERIOR, defining encounters between objects, feelings and taxonomies, bibliographic research material and explorations.
Making Things, to locate subjectivities and ground relations around the fluid and the relational.
Interfaces around the nature of place, its document and its textual narrative creating spatial subjectivities, tools as ways of thinking.
An Assemblage as INTERIOR, contingent to its situation of partial un-builtness.
Space as both text and its scaffold.
Interior as an “Open Text” the spatial development of research from various approaches.
Hans Coper, essay re “Object Analysis” for CSC Exhibition has opened up a number of new avenues of research.
Jean Vacher acknowledges Hans Coper’s links with Modernism and that his pots possess an “innerness” that might be profoundly biographical in nature stemming from “the profound displacements that occurred to him and his family as a result of the upheavals in Europe.” (Personal e-mail correspondence CSC 28March 2014)
“The Pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”
Adam Gopnik 2014
“A predynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand : made thousands of years ago it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somewhat absurd object, yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self-expression, but seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy.”
Hans Coper, 1969
“Innerness” from Atemwende by Edmund de Waal, text by Adam Gopnik.
The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all things: volume, inner space, an interior, the space carved out of air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco.1
The Potters wheel, one of the most ancient forms of technology, pastoral and low-tech. The notion of making and its practice of craft could be seen in Heideggian terms as a sort of dwelling, a thinking through materials as a building adapting to the process and situation of the practitioner.
Heidegger on Architecture, through Building Dwelling Thinking.
His definition of the state of nearness that is carried in an object “nearness is at work in bringing near” and that in so doing it is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things. (Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects)
“Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy: one is near to what one finds immediate,”
Is this trait reflected in the throwing of a pot and the urgency of the wet clay?
The agency of throwing and its attentiveness between mind, body and material.
“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.” ( Hans Coper on Throwing)
“A naked confrontation with a single material which would show one’s every mistake and mark.” (Tony Birks comments on Hans Coper’s relationship with clay)
“You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.” ( Edmund de Waal)
The Porcelain Room:
Pots and room together to create an experience of possessed space. (Edmund de Waal)
Use of the Jug as both a hypothetical (cognitive, thinking through things) and actual vessel to carry connotations of meeting and assembly through its void.2
This interior space/void/Ma is echoed in architecture as referenced by Kengo Kuma, Sensing Spaces RA 2014.3
“The jar takes dominion over the unmade world.”
Wallace Stevens
1 Adam Gopnik. About the art of Edmund de Waal. 6
2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects 32
3 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces RA. 65
Working Notes: 10 April 2014.
Crit UCA Farnham MA Interiors
Interior “encloses space” Design “useful”. Damien Blower
“Forms” “ a labyrinth” as a being evocative of a formal design language.
4 Dimensions plus 2. The sensorial/spatial and social body in the interior environment.
The Project/Structuring with descriptors and contexts.
1 Context to the building, an interior that relates through a culture, history, or a society.
2 Brief, what does it need to do to function as an interior and to meet other criteria intrinsic to the user/programme/function relationships on site.
3 Experiential, what is the experience of this interior space, what phenomenological effects drive the design process.
The Ruined Abbey :Re-Building Walls : Re-instating or Re-Imagining Hierarchies.
What’s going on in here, and why?
Making and Marking the Building:
Footings over the ruins: Wall/Trench/Event (Ritual)
Access,
Containment,
Privilege,
Inner Spaces,
Between Walls,
Voids,
Membrane,
Openings,
Adaptations,
Plastic “Building” Stone/Mortar/Bargate Stone/Terracotta.
Figure/Ground,
Positive/Negative Spatial Masses,
Movement/Duration of Participation,
The Spirit of The Place,
Detailed site analysis/audit of assets in both qualitative/quantitative terms.
Use methodologies and narratives together with materials to create a new spatial interior of “authenticity” a design that can function as an experiential charged interior experience.
Interior designers are not architects; they specialize in the design/programme and function of interior spaces created through architectural practices.
Working Notes.
Theory and Analysis Unit.
Working Title :
Innerness and Defined Space/Air
The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),
Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking,
The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.
The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.
Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951
Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”1
Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.
Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.
This almost vocational unfinished “architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”2
Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.
Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”3
As recorded in his most architectural writings.
The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971
Being and Time 1927/1962
Art and Space 1971/1973
“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”4
Building locates human existence,
Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”5
This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.
Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”6
Heidegger on Thinking,
The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.
Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.7
Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).
Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.
Influences on the “fourfold”
Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.
Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.
Friedrich Holderlin/poet.
George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.
Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.
Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?
Waverley Project 2014.
Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.
In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki
Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.
Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the effect of light, or through attention to details.8
Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.
“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)9
This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.
Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.
On building a house. Ingold.
“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”10
Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)
Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”11
It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”
For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.12
Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.
The pot like the building participates in daily life.
This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.
In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.
Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.
“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”13
Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)14
Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.
Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.
Clay and the Primacy of Being.
Studio Spaces.
The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.
For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.15
Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.
1 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects.
2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3
3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3
4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7
5 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 9
6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10
7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30
8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65
9 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35
10 Tim Ingold. Making. 59
11 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35
12 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 35
13 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 43
14 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 45
15 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 71
Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramic Galleries 2009.
During his career Edmund de Waal has moved from that of being a domestic potter to that of an installation artist.
Rather than the object stranded on the plinth attempting to flag you down, if you place it elsewhere there is a feeling of possibility and latent discovery, similar to the feeling that you get if you are lucky enough to see the stores of the museum. (De Waal,2009:30)
In between spaces/stores and other latent spaces, re Mike Nelson, photographic darkroom between rooms. London 2007.
Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)
Heidegger, The Jug, “gathering vessel”
“What is de Waal charting in these looping circles within circles?”
De Waal acknowledges the influence of Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Glenn Adamson remarks how the special qualities of the round perhaps thrown pot is itself both an object, brought into the being by the world and encircled by it. (Adamson,2009:34)
In so “being” the vessel brings its own order, a subjectivity that acts and takes dominion everywhere. This communion (spatial relation) between the vessel and its environment is further echoed in the lines of the poem “the wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild”(Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)
Signs and Wonders is about seeing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it/we gather our surroundings. This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.
‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated sherd, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44)
Temporal Zones/Re-Imagined Social Landscapes:
Archaeology/Making : Pot Shard/Pottery.
See Tim Ingold the four A’s, Anthropology/Archaeology/Art and Architecture.
Memory, Material and the Patina of Human Dwelling.
Silence and Sensory Spaces into Experiential Places.
Zumthor: Inner spaces within his architecture, what is he attempting to explore?
How are these practically constructed with the materials and the locality of the site’s environment?
Does Zumthor attempt to build interiors experiences (sensing spaces of both memory/reverie and immediacy) around Heidegger’s notion of nearness?
Practices and Practicalities.
Environment,
Architectural Project,
Building Material,
Vernacular Processes,
Sensitivities to Site,
Architecture as Walled Installations?
Design as “Place Studies”.
Architectural interiors as interventions within the Waverley Site.
Rooms in the Pastoral Landscape.(Heidegger for Architects, Sharr)
Phenomenological and Experiential Soundings.(Parallax, Steven Holl) (The Fate of Place, Casey)(The Poetics of Space, Bachelard)
Narratives through the unique “Spatiality” of this place.(Spatiality, Tally)
Spatial Intelligence. Embodied Wisdom in Architecture.
Theory and Analysis, 2014
A vessel defines emptiness as presence.
Innerness and Defined Space/Air
The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger)
Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking,
This essay is an attempt to get to understand my interests centred around the interior spaces of things. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel. It is this vessel with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely. This interior sensing space with its particular characteristics is an extension of our own existential space, it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our postmodern lives. Do these vessels re-enact the particulars of traditions, of other maybe unknown makers; are they in fact expressions on the basic needs of civilisation whether they be pots or architecture. There is the notion that in some way we reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness.
In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry(Daintry2007:9) cites The Tao Te Cing “We turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends” It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to become permeable because it embodies ‘something and nothing and is an effortless three dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.’ (Daintry2007:8) It is interesting to note that the potter hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik2014:6)
This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work “On the Nature of Things” records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world’.(Daintry2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal2004:34)
A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-sheped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.
Does Hans Coper’s text reflect on an archaic pre Christian paganism? Does the human sense of innerness that this vessel dwells with been and was created from remain present? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness but into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement. There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity.
‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson,2009:36)
Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’. He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather the duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions , ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blur and in some way inverts the experience of in or out? He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size’.In this way he explains further ‘Being does not see itself. It does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard1994)
Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino1996) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry2007:12)
The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?
Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.
I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry2007:13)
Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Postmodern.
‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.
Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, “throwing” as a process that he remarks on as saying “I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now”.(Birks1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill. Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice of a craft. His unique ways of working in clay are conceptualised by the very practice and history of ceramics. These composite forms of his own invention underpin his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics form a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations that became permanent and that could endure the world without him.
Hans Coper’s pots are objects that spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel. The almost mechanical surface treatment of the pots surface caused by abrading the glazed layer seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.
Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral mark epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity through their darkened and defined interior geometries that surface into the environment. These forms appear caught or carefully placed between a modernist need for atonement of the recent past and the deeper sensibilities found in the archaic traces of lost civilisations.
His pottery making epitomises his perception of the world around him. His pottery takes up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.
Hans Coper’s pots were an ethical avant-garde produced through the very backbone of his practice. He produced artefacts that sat on his studio shelves, artefacts that did not actually require need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are archaic and were crafted by things close to hand. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Postmodern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized.
Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik,1991:2)
Do Coper’s pots now find themselves navigating in a fetishized monopoly of Post Modernism; can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’(Kuspit,1994:5)
In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves,2008:8)
His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. This site specific installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.
Signs and Wonders is about seeing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it/we gather our surroundings.
‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson,2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves,2009:8)
This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.
Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)
His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way endemic of his and our postmodern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing has itself become just a function, an endless repetition. Grapham Gussin that this can take you nowhere Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, akind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)
Although the body has been existential through the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work it still none the less appears was if it were now atrophied through his preoccupation with presentation and academic preservation.
Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit 2002)
Will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?
In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.
Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).
The light of reflection and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light; from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.
The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.
The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.
In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference.
Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.
Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment.
Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.
Defined Interiors : By material, agency and social and private architectures.
Interiors of Pots : Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude.
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