Excavated Landscapes : Morn Hill #2

Excavated Landscapes : Morn Hill #2, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

21/10/2013

Digital Still : Alternative Processes, Tate Modern.

http://russellmoreton.tumblr.com/
Digital Still : Alternative Processes, Tate Modern., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Photography and Architectural Space.

01/07/2013

Photograph (702) Tidbury Ring

Photograph (702) Tidbury Ring, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

25/10/2012

Concrete Surfaces/Photography : Anatomy #2

Concrete Surfaces : Anatomy #2, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

31/05/20013

10 Days in the City : Social Spatialisation #2

Social Spatialisation #2, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

18/04/2013 08:45

Meeting Place

Site based drawings and inquiries.

Consciousness

Body

Space

Material

Creative Vocational Research

Psychogeography : Narratives across a site plan (Waverley Abbey)

In The Process of Translation

https://uk.pinterest.com/russellmoreton/art-and-process/

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/moreton0888/in-the-process-of-translation/

Waverley : Psychogeography

 

Waverley Abbey was the first Cistercian abbey in England, founded in 1128 by William Giffard, Bishop of Winchester. It is situated about one mile south of Farnham, Surrey, in a bend of the River Wey.

 

History

During the first century of its existence, it founded six monasteries, and despite the members thus sent away, it had 70 monks and 120 lay brothers in 1187. It kept about thirty ploughs. The site was subject to regular flooding, however, and in 1203 the foundations for a new church and monastery were laid on higher ground. The new church was dedicated in 1231. King John visited Waverley in 1209, and Henry III in 1225. The abbey also produced the famous annals of Waverley, an important source for the period. By the end of the thirteenth century the abbey was becoming less important. By the time it was suppressed by Henry VIII in 1536 as part of the dissolution of the monasteries there were only thirteen monks in the community and the abbey had an annual net income of £174. Stones from the abbey when it lay in ruins were taken to build nearby houses, including the house at Loseley Park. The ruins of Waverley Abbey are managed today by English Heritage. The sign at the entrance to the ruins states that it was the inspiration for Sir Walter Scott's novel Waverley . However, this is probably not the case. Sir Walter Scott chose to adopt the name for his fictional hero Edward Waverley, the heir to an estate in southern England who travels north and becomes embroiled in the Jacobite uprising of 1745. Waverley Abbey was however featured in Arthur Conan Doyle's classical romance, Sir Nigel. It was the scene of his winning of his war horse, Pommers, and his youthful embarrassment of the avaricious abbey authorities.

Posted by Russell Moreton at Thursday, February 11, 2016 

Drawing Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

 

Outpost 230124

Architectural Body.

Thresholds.

Drawing.

Confronting Bodies.

Drawing : The Indexical/To Work Inside Feeling.

Inscripting Self : The Daughter of Butades.

Kairos : The movement and its moment.

Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.

There is no stage at which humankind does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving tracers that are both symbolic and practical.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Drawing on the Movements of Desire and Attention.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, Bachelard.

The drawing itself is desperate to keep hold of an absence, it all began with a silhouette of a shadow on the wall. In the myth of Butades, the drawing is not generated by 'loss' itself but the her anticipation of loss captured in the moment of turning away, and act that unites blindness to memory.

Derrida.

Drawing is a gaze turned inward into the task at hand, it draws on the inevitable, displacement and absence of the 'thing' and its relation, its otherness.

The 'mark' and its imaginary space are encountered as a fact of existence. In drawing it is this evidence of beingness that is invested in the work, 'drawing itself' becomes a coming-into-being into the presentness of language of the image.

The image corresponds to its own unfolding pulsion, to an obsession, to a desire to expand its own flux beyond the assigned body. Material keeps desire on the inclined plane of appearances surrounding it with its gravity, the drawing materializes a surface in which desire condenses itself and infiltrates inside the oppressive operative grids/apparatuses of language.

Drawing on the holding apart instances, moments and intervals between consciousness and self consciousness. The early formative drawings of children are not guided by a visual exploration of space, but by the hand as an exploration of movement, it is only later that drawing is guided by the eye. In children graphic expression is blind, disconnected from perception, rather it is led by muscular, tonic and plastic sensations.

The 'Stage of Drawing' is at attempt to discuss what Avis Newman believes to be a crisis in art as to how an artist deals in a non-literal way with a sense of humanity, which for her is part of the essence of the artistic project. Her selection from the Tate Collection is based on a definition of drawing not as expression, but as an act of consciousness, the manifestation of which is culture, and by extension the social and political realm. In this exhibition, drawing tends and relates to the indexical as the effect of a corporealized process. In fact the aim is partly to divest drawing of the artist, so one can see this act of consciousness.

According to Newman, this indexical definition of drawing is opposed to a materialistic one, which would be about investment/authorship in the material world and would concern itself indirectly with sociological art, for Newman on the contrary we are trying to locate the area where meaning has no economy and does not have to justify itself by purpose.

Drawing 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.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through which without colliding would provide/produce the establishment of places, localities made special for one reason or another.

In looking at drawing, one may see not the thing itself but its possibility, its suggestion and its uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.

What ever the intent, the drawing is always the artist's response to whatever, draws-the-artist's attention. To what Cezanne called the 'little sensations' and for the artist it is a question of how to rescue sensation from its subordination by representation.

Drawing as experience and experimentation, demands that the artist be susceptible to and capable of taking advantage of the uncoupling of everyday space-time and with it the expansion of the field of consciousness, to engage in what Klee once described as 'polyphonic attention.'

In the end drawing is rooted in the dematerialized space of the image, indexical or imaginative, privileging more the world of shadows than the world of appearances. The drawing surface is confirming the possibility and use of a language that albeit in a fragile way, leaves open an interstitial passage through which the imaginary may realize itself as an image.

Drawing manifests the very nature of a feeling-thinking-consciousness-of-the-body.

Drawing makes visible the synthesis, its interval and split between subject and object, between the desiring subject and the subject of language.

To draw is to protect the intensity of thought-feeling, and as such the drawing is always a formulation or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment/instant in which it translates itself, makes itself 'visible' as an image.

The material of art, any material is that which imprisons and makes definitive desire. It is the way the material is manifested in revealing what defines the split between the imaginary and the subject. Drawing becomes the apparatus, the mechanism that tends to give order to the only dimension in which desire moves, space and time.

Drawing seeks always to reveal the gesture of the artist through the space of the surface, to capture the moment that precedes the birth of the sign. The external space becomes a specular surface, a field that captures and organizes the image. The image always corresponds/is a correspondence to a pulsion of desire, a vector that puts it in communion with tactile and visual sensations.

Drawing makes reversible the movement of desire/attention suspending it in a place understood as a place of projections and reversibility. For John Berger, the drawing shows the paths taken.

Drawing/Spatial Practice.

UCA Canterbury.

Artist Statement. 2009

Zones/Studios/Sites of Inquiry/Concern.

Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create flows formed from their permeable boundaries gathered from material, relations and differences. My drawings are about and are inside this temporality of site.

Thresholds.

Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione.

Antonello da Messina.

St. Jerome in His Study, 1474-75.

National Gallery, London.

The only figurative work in the world in which entering and crossing coincide in a unique concept of physical space, defining the specificity of the architecture by transforming the limits of solid materials into the construction of a liminal space which can be crossed by passing through thresholds.

The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space that becomes physically visible when one enters the space itself. In Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa, architecture thus becomes an art form which helps us to overcome the absence of life by expanding the horizon of our minds and hearts, freeing us from our bodies, giving dignity to the void left by the loss of living presences and emotional ties.

The spatial dimension of this small building is a metaphor for the mental workings of meditation. The pavilion is the place where we can enter the mind's empty space, where we can get away from all our passing concerns.

Small cylinders of different heights and sizes, barely visible below the surface of the water. A small, inaccessible maze. A maze through the water, a maze through time, a maze of symbols and enigmas. Here, as in the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, the maze is an allegory for the complexity of the world, which cannot be understood merely through reason. The maze itself was created to confuse those who rely on reason alone. Its winding paths lead us to a reality that lies far beyond that existential normality which hides deeper complications.

In 'The Garden of Forking Paths' Borges describes the possible outcomes of an event, each of which leads to a further multiplication of consequences, in a continuous 'branching off' of potential futures.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Catherine de Zegher.

Architectural Body.

Arie Graafland, Michael Speaks.

Drawings and Ceramic Models.

Making-Living-Environs

Hannsjorg Voth 1973-2003.

City of Orion.

Boat of Stone.

Hassi Romi.

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces : Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

 Outpost 200423

A4 Ruled Notebook.

Blue/April 2012.

Amongst Lightness and The Reverberation of Material.

Ceramic installation in white cube space.

Open Pit Firing, Shards, Ash, Ceramic Pieces, Low Table, White Cloth, Human Outline

We maybe more sophisticated in material ways, but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the axial age, and because of our suppression of mythos, we may even have regressed.

The history of myth is the history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, link us to our ancestors and each other.

A Short History of Myth.

Karen Armstrong. 2005 

Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire.

Stone Circle, Storytelling, King Stone, Whispering Knights, Witch,

A Summer's Work.

Odyssey/Beauty/Struggle.

The Material Acts.

Summer 1994 : Artist's Studio.

The viewers nevertheless allow themselves to be drawn into his game, in order to 'see' as though for the first time the pure existence of things. 

Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

Art is contemplation and must act upon our consciousness.

Objects/Things are part of the artist's immediate existence.

Contemplative experiences become truly meaningful when they occur in everyday life and when nirvana or the state of superior awareness blurs into samsara or ordered time.

For Tapies, repetition is above all else a perpetual questioning or a perpetual becoming.

A working process that is additive, which incorporates changes and accidents and as such his methods are hardly erasing anything that is already present on the canvas.  

A Summer's Work, Antoni Tapies.

The Embodiment of Minimal Gesture.

The Solitude and Discipline of Firing. 

Heja Chong.

Drawing from the philosophy and traditions of Bizen, she has undeniably developed her own aesthetic identity, embracing the raw materials of her new world, the pots and firing responding to the evolving nature of her life and environment. Adhering to the principle of Bizen, she is conscious  that her level of involvement within this tradition, may not always be recognised or understood by others.

Viewpoint/Distance/Synthesise Forms.

Framing a Figure in Space.

Drawing is not the form, it is the way of seeing the form.

Edgar Degas.

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

R. Bruce Elder. 

Raveningham.

The Autonomy of The Natural Environment.

Sculpture/Playing with the existence of things.

Field Studies : Pathways around the Sun.

Drawing : Assemblage of Lightness and Weight.

Enmeshed Space : Working Drawing with Handwritten Notes.

Lawn Deliberation/Mappings of Human Agency/Space/Time.

Space projected from the body is biased towards the front and right.

The future is ahead and 'up.'

The past is behind and 'below.'

Time as a structure/place to observe things in constant motion/relation.

Drawing Site/Spiral Windings/Diagram/Spherical Markers

Terracotta, lime wash/lamp black/blackboard paint/chalk/ink

Ground Pegs/Labels/Text Markings/Archival Information

Points becoming lines, Tim Ingold.

Spatial Construct : mediated space anticipating a destination, as seen through the fragmented myths, movie locations or souvenirs that vanguard the real place, access to places through their likenesses.

The workshop proposes strategies to confront our bodies with the multiplicity, unpredictability, directness and autonomy of the natural environment. The aim is to explore and develop consciousness of the body itself being an ever evolving landscape within a greater surrounding landscape.

Body/Landscape

Frank van de Ven.

The Psychology of Time.

Temporal Perspectives.

Relative Orientations/Past/Present/Future.

Time is  often referred to as 'the tacit dimension' within psychology because unlike other types of perception, it is not directly available to any sensory organ but can only be apprehended through change and the dynamic flow of environmental events. And yet despite its ephemeral nature, time is a dimension that has a significant impact upon a wide variety of psychological behaviour. 

From a cognitive perspective, it can be demonstrated that the orderly nature of one's environment stems, in part, from the fact that events' spatial characteristics are structured in and over time. Music, speech, body movements and walking gaits are among the many events in which the sequence of notes, words, or actions unfold with a characteristic rhythm and tempo over a given time span. The particular arrangement of this spatial-temporal structure not only influences how an event is perceived and remembered, but also the overall accuracy with which the event's velocity and total duration are subsequently judged.  

Different cultures have different conceptualizations of time which can be reflected in the types of metaphors that are used to describe time as well as the overall pace of life.

Curriculum Making.

The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

An Ontology of Dwelling.

The dwelling ontology we want to describe rejects any possibility of living in the world through mental schemas of the world, and insists that the material-relational world is the only world in which we live, the only source of our capacities to communicate and learn, the only world in which our activities take effect, and the only world in which meaning inheres.

Greg Mannion, Hamish Ross.

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who has looked at the interface between people and the environment. In The Perception of the Environment, he argues that ecological psychology and the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the world becomes  meaningful through active inhabitation, or 'dwelling', rather than cognitive representation. 

Re-registering Overlapping Spaces #2

Public intimacies, personal dialogues in social spaces.

'Blocking In' of a private studio space of creative inquiry into the public realm as a permeable intervention.

Main reception area, UCA Canterbury 2010

Russell Moreton, Spatial Practices MA.