Studio : Making movements in thinking ( the way is made in the walking of it )

 Outpost Studio 24/10/2021 

Outpost Studio 221021

Material in space, working with spatial agency/thinking movements

The use of any material that helps any figure/organism exist in any given framework/environment.

Working Things/Coalitions of Material, Meaning and Form

Heuristic Discontinuities and  Materialism

Studio images, black windows, arch model,

Kounellis/Oren Lieberman

Architectural Proposal/Spatial Agencies

Marking/Demarcations/Corporeality

Drawing as an impromptu heuristic tool.

Gordon Baldwin, charcoal drawing for a vessel in a landscape. 

Drawing Materials, Blue lever arch

Exploded contents into critical/subjective analysis/displayed as assemblage around the environs of the studio

Content/First Readings/Shifting/Splitting discontinuities between organism, person, environment.

Richard Serra

Drawings Work Comes Out Of Work : Eckhard Schneider

There is no way to make a drawing - there is only drawing

Richard Serra, 1977

A sculpture grammar, based on formal reductionism, an active site-specific reference, and the central theme of gravity and balance. This results in sculptures that let the viewer experience the critical balance of different forces and whose large-scale dimensions impart a strong physical and emotional experience.

Large scale drawings and monoprints

Paintstick on paper and cloth.

Pressure is exerted on the back of the paper with a hard marking tool.

The paper treated as an active substance rather than a passive ground.

Liquid material under pressure shoots out and produces the explosive markings at the edges.

I don't see the drawing I am making until the paper is pulled off the floor and turned over or the screen is lifted.

Precisely because every illusory strategy is avoided, the forms are at the same time able to imply weight, mass, and volume.

Warming or melting the material for his drawings, he applies it either directly onto the paper with large sweeps of his arm, or he uses a window-screen as an intermediary surface through which he presses the colour.

The material and the entire work process serve to build the drawing step by step. It is an elementary process, which, carried out with intense energy, is the result of direct action. By splitting and discontinuing the flow, Richard Serra avoids the gestural and allows a dense superficial construction. Serra avoids gestural features in order to sharpen the awareness of the viewer and draw attention to one's own corporeality. He is not concerned with subjective gestures or narrative references; at the core of his drawings is the principle of marking, of the anonymous characteristic style in which the drawing seems to find its form through the density of the material and the compact work process.  

Unlike the site-specific Wall Drawings, which, rendered directly onto cloth, operate with the proportions and scales of the existing architecture, Serra's drawings on paper are not bound by content. The frame serves, instead, to separate the paper drawing from the wall.

Serra is fully aware that the weight of a drawing does not just depend on the layers of paintstick applied, but above all on its form.

I like to draw. It is an activity I rely on, a dependency of sorts. Drawing gives me an immediate return for my effort and the result is commensurate with my involvement. It is an activity that requires solitude, it is the most concentrated space in which I work.

The colour he uses is black, a dense layer of paintstick absorbs and dissipates light; what emerges is the mass, density, and volume of the drawing.

For Serra, black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a large volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging. To use black is the clearest way of marking against a white field. He finds it also the clearest way of indicating something without triggering associations because black is interpreted as a material substance rather than a colour.

Convertible Facts : James Lawrence

Drawing is transformative.

Drawing is a primal, fundamental concept, an activity intimately connected with the raw terms of life as it is lived. Artists prize drawing not only for its inherent qualities, but also for its virtues as an  impromptu, heuristic tool. Rapid and agile, drawing is easy to adjust, erase, supplant, emulate, and if necessary, discard. It is a fluid means of anticipation, often prior to translation into more celebrated form.

Tony Cragg

In And Out Of Material

Interested in the coalitions of material and meaning and in the content of form.

MATERIAL IN SPACE

Working Things, Reflections on Tony Cragg's Sculptures : Robert Kudielka

Materialist

Materialism means the sculptor's experience that only through the effort of working things is thinking also able to move and change. The material assumes a new form, and the sculptor discovers new contents and meanings.

197

For Cragg, the German language in particular provides a unique possibility of distinguishing clearly 

between the thingness, objectness and objectivity. Kant.

The Rebirth of Sculpture from the Spirit of Matter : Christoph Brockhaus

Art Povera

The relationship between people and their environments and the things, materials and images in this environment, the relations among things,materials and images.

Collecting and Ordering Found Objects, Things, Materials, Images.

Formal Thinking With Matter

THINKING IS FORM

The Drawings of Joseph Beuys : Temkin, Rose

Northern accretion of detail from many sources, he explored several directions and mediums at the same time. 92 

RODIN BEUYS

Rodin's lines don't just represent carnality, they are themselves carnal, invasive, sexy. 

The Drawing Book : Tania Kovats

Drawing and Random Interference/Quantum Chance

ECSTASIS/MATTERING

QUANTUM CHANCE : Janna Levin

DRAWINGS : Antony Gormley

BODY, 2009-2011

A state of becoming, a dispersion of being part of space and time.

WRITING ON DRAWING : Essays on Drawing Practice and Research. Steve Garner.

The Erotics of Drawing : Jonathan Cooper

 

 

Aesthetics of the Everyday : A Creative Human Praxis

Working Praxis into Creative Research
Clay, Paint, Matter/Everyday Landscapes

The Subject Matter of Lived Experience

The Potter's wheel creates cognitive enactments (materiality) through encountering clay.

The Heideggerian Roots of Everyday Aesthetics
A Hermeneutical Approach to Art
Cristian Hainic

The mere aesthetic experience of understanding one's being-in-the-world as made up by everyday phenomena, is in itself overwhelmingly sufficient to constitute a foundation for an aesthetic of everyday life. 

Textuality/Interpretations (Texts and their inherent lack of perceptual immediacy)

Everything in language belongs to the process of understanding

Human understanding/interpretation takes place not in the immediacy of representational thinking but rather in the lack of  objects and experiences available for direct confrontation. 

John Dewey
Live Creature, an aesthetic experience comes to be defined as active and alert commerce with the world. Life does not merely go on in an environment, but rather because of an environment and because we interact with it. 

Up, Across and Along
Tim Ingold

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1853)
Dunwich, Suffolk,c. 1830


THE ART OF SURVIVAL
Jacqueline Rose's catalogue essay on Therese Oulton

How to paint the earth lovingly but without false solace,a world in which love might be impotent?

But then, at the very moment you have ceded such intimacy, she manages to give you the sensation of a world hurtling to the point when there might no longer be anything, or anyone there.

The Art of Jeremy Gardiner
UNFOLDING LANDSCAPE

LANDSCAPE, MEMORY, AND PLACE
Robert Ayers

Often for these painters the experience that they concern themselves with most directly, is that of nature, which in its vast and enormously inflected range can act as a metaphor for lived experience.

They are concerned more with how nature feels than how landscape looks. They share too an awareness that it is the translation of that feeling into paint mark, the achievement of an equivalence, that is of crucial importance. It is in the consummation of paint and experience that picture-making finds experience.

Paint marks flicker as we look at them between substance and illusion.

CONTESTED SPACE
Urban/Social/Landscapes

Landscapes are contested, untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making. Our landscapes of modernity are frequently on the move and peopled by diasporas and migrants of identity, people making homes in new places.
An Anthropology of Landscape

Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

ORDINARY LIVES
Studies in the Everyday
Ben Highmore

Lukács’s Literary Cartography:
Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel
Robert T. Tally Jr.






https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/26224308391

The Sleeper Awakes : Veiled Melancholy/Book Narratives : Film Collages. #3

Preface (1921) ” The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare of Capitalism triumphant, a nightmare that was dreamt a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil may be in store for mankind, but to this immense, grim organization of servitude, our race will never come” H.G. Wells. Easton Glebe, Dunmow,1921.

28/01/2016

https://uk.pinterest.com/russellmoreton/art-objects-russell-moreton/

"Spatial turn" The increased attention to matters of space, place and mapping in literary and cultural studies, as well as in social theory, philosophy, and other disciplinary fields.

Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. Routledge 2013.

 The Politics of Architecture : Theorizing through speculative spatial practices.

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects : Apparatuses, Things and People in the Making of the City and the World. Alberto Altes Arlandis, Oren Lieberman. 2013

"He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear - evidently his sleep had  benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. Above his arm- and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow - was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this bed was placed in a case of greenish-coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum  and minimum thermometer was recognizable."

H. G. Wells : The Sleeper Awakes. 1899/1910

Interactions of Colour and Bodies : Rothko/Neri/Kundera/Schiele, subjects alone in a moment of utter immobility.

Manuel Neri

Milan Kundera

Josef Albers

Mark Rothko

Egon Schiele

The use of the word 'immobility' recalls an article that Rothko wrote in the 1947

"For me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human figure - alone in a moment of utter immobility."

p84, Possibilities , 1, New York, 1947

The world is overloaded/the nature of things : Peter Zumthor, Jean Baudrillard

The world is overloaded of signs and information, representative of things that nobody completely understands, because they are in turn nothing but signs representative of other signs.

The real thing remains hidden. Nobody can ever see it.

Peter Zumthor

The nature of things cannot be discovered by analyzing them according to their functions, by labeling or categorizing them but by understanding their relationship to people, their behavior and emotions which caused creation of these objects.

Jean Baudrillard

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.

Materials at the Hungate Norwich/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Outpost 050823

Dwelling/Reading with Intensity.

Hungate Medieval Art.

11 Princes Street.

Norwich.

NUA Degree Show, Interior Design/Architecture. 2023.

Boardman House.

Redwell Street.

Norwich.

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

Dwelling with Intensity.

In our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology  of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. There is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. The experience of home, like that of a large cradle, is essentially an experience of intimate warmth. Our houses, and their homecomings from snow-covered landscapes turn the pleasure of the skin into a singular sensation.

Gaston Bachelard.

Architecture in the flesh of the lived world not as a construction of an idealised vision.

An Architecture of Visual Images.

The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past 30 years, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated.

Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.

The current deluge of images has consequences on the architecture of our time, producing a retinal art for the eye. Instead of being a situational bodily encounter, architecture has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. 

As buildings lose their plasticity, and their connection with language and wisdom of the body, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision. With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body, and particularly for the hand, architectural structures have become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction.

The contemporary city is the city of the eye, one of distance and exteriority.

The haptic city is the city of interiority and nearness.

The Significance of the Shadow.

In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.

Take the use of enormous plate windows, they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.

Luis Barragan.

An architecture that addresses our sense of movement and touch.

Acoustic Intimacy.

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. The wide, open spaces of contemporary streets do not return sound, and in the interiors of today's buildings echoes are absorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shopping malls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acoustic volume of space. 

Sight is the sense of the solitary observer, whereas hearing creates a sense of connection and solidarity. Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of its streets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials.

On Skin-Architecture-Corpus-Corporeality-Matter-Sensuality

Architecture and its materials of patina and petrified silences.

The hollow smells of abandoned houses stimulated by the emptiness observed by the eye.

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a dramatic description of images of past life in an already demolished house, conveyed by traces imprinted on the wall of its neighbouring house. The retinal images of contemporary architecture certainly appear sterile and lifeless when compared with the emotional and associative power of the poet's olfactory imagery.

Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter-space-light. 

The most persistent memory of any space is often its smell.

Every dwelling has its individual smell of home and every city has its spectrum of tastes and odours.

The experience of home is essentially one of intimate warmth.

The Visible and the Invisible.

The Intertwining – The Chiasm.

The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand.

Spaces of Intimate Warmth.

The fireplace and its immaterial alcove, sensed by the skin, a warm cave carved into the room itself that is an intimate and personal space of warmth. Antonio Gaudi, Casa Batilo, Barcelona, 1904.

The bath with its heightened experiences of intimacy, home and protection are sensations of the naked skin. Pierre Bonnard, The Nude in the Bath, 1937.

The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition, through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us, the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome  and hospitality.

My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself.

Merleau-Ponty's sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the flesh of the world. Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them. Merleau-Ponty saw an osmotic relation between the self and the world - they interpenetrate and mutually define each other – and he emphasised the simultaneity and interaction of the senses. My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens; I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of a thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juhani Pallasmaa.

Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Here in the phenomenal realm we can no longer say that one is more real than the other. Consequently, this 'mark X' no longer rises out of ground as before, but remains an integral part of, and interacts with, its circumstances. To quote Merleau-Ponty on this point, 'Our visual field is not neatly cut out of our objective world, and is not a fragment with sharp edges like a landscape framed by a window. We see as far as our hold on things extends. Far beyond the zone of clear vision and even behind us.'

The Condition of Postmodernity

The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed (David Harvey uses the notion of 'time-space compression), and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions – a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

Silence-Time-Solitude.

A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude.

Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. Buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time. They enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life.

The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.

Power Of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Anne Dufourmantelle.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Enchantment/Embodied Knowledge : The Intertwining of Vision and Movement.

The Embodied Image.

Imagination and Imagery in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa. 2011

Drawing Studio/Life Room

Outpost 280122

Assemblage : Wire, Fabric, Fired Clay, Glass on drawing.

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries

A spatial inquiry, a means of exploring agential cuts/spatial agency.

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing,entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.

Leylines 2012 : Spatial Drawings on Paper and Glass. #14

Spatial Drawings on Paper and Glass. #14, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Practices on Solitude/The Alchemy of Imagination/The Permanence of Childhood

Outpost 290524

Between The Lines.

Drawing as notation/mapping of an event/time/place recorded.

Sunlight Six Hours on Paper, Harleston 2022.

Sunlight on Wood.

1974. Starts making timed sun drawings in the time scale of one minute or one hour.

As many have for centuries I want to offer back into the world an affirmation of what is wonderful. I work on the surface but am aware that the spirit is often hidden within life a shadow in the darkness.

Roger Ackling

There is an aspect of Roger Ackling's work that might easily be forgotten in its assumed familiarity more usually performed onto something come across and minutely altered in the middle of a journey.

Simon Cutts.

The Work and Teaching of Roger Ackling.

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.