Wednesday, 21 May 2025

Making/Building Utility and Relevance : Works are rooted in the physical world.








 








Outpost 241122

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


Elective Affinities.

Tate, Liverpool.

Penelope Curtis.


The Liveliness of Materials.


The nature of our involvement is crucial as we begin to select our meanings, as we have to also begin to exercise personal choice. 


The starting point for this exhibition was to find art which involved the spectator, an spectator immediately and which makes the body the bridge between the art and the spectator.


Using works that elicit a reaction from us based on physical recognition.


Engendering affinities both psychological and philosophical, much of the meaning in our world relates either actually or metaphorically to the body.


Creating art works that set up a network of psychological allusion.


Drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages,scribblings and drafts, which are the secret and unformed property of the artist. These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script along. They are a support system of manic tangential information. 


What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit. To me these pieces have a different creative energy to the formed works, they are raw and immediate, but no less compelling.


Stranger Than Kindness.

Nick Cave.


Properties do not reside in objects, they are between objects.

Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet.


Intimate Everyday Notations.

A Book Of Days.

Patti Smith.


The 'works' evoke a physical affinity that sets up a complicity in which the viewer is implicated in the work.


The possibility of identification with the 'works' is frequently assured by their liveliness.


Fundamental to this art is the fact that its viewers stand in front of it and physical experience is highlighted or becomes part of its conceptual framework.


A photographic skin neither dead or alive, it is the blemished surface which gives the work a fragility.



Ultimately it is the ambiguity of this photographic flesh, its skin of visual tenderness that is most unsettling.



This phantasmal world of quanta is our world.


Speculative Experiential Formwork.

The Nature of Matter/Liveliness of Materials.

The Primal Level of Physical Being.


The Order Of Time.

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.


Cyanotype Process and Concepts of Practice.


Technically the work is more in line with that of the photogram. It is used to record light and shadow from a specific site, through the use of intermediaries, stencils and their movements across the duration of daylight.


Conceptually the use of the cyanotype process historically references architectural blueprints and the proofing of early photographic procedures.


Outpost 241121


The Artist's Reality

Philosophies of Art

Mark Rothko, 1940-41.


Without question the work I  found as incomplete and in places, frustratingly obscure, but it was a book, and a substantial one. It was clearly written as a volume, its contents speaking to a public rather than constituting an artist's private musings

Christopher Rothko, 2004.


The Artist's Dilemma

Art as a Natural Biological Function

Art as a Form of Action

The Integrity of the Plastic Process

Art, Reality, and Sensuality

Particularization and Generalization

Genalization since the Renaissance

Emotional and Dramatic Impressionism

Objective Impressionism

Plasticity

Space

Beauty

Naturalism

Subject and Subject Matter

The Myth

The Attempted Myth of Today

Primitive Civilizations Influence on Modern Art

Modern Art

Primitivism

Indigenous Art


Rembrandt discovered that his patrons were not interested in his plastic preoccupations with light when he painted The Night Watch, and that they preferred the obvious illustrative gifts of his contemporaries and followers. Monet and Cezanne discovered the same, watching Sargent and the exhibitors at the academy sell far inferior goods, succeeding because they adopted the French masters' method in its superficial aspects, while including enough familiarity so that the spectator revelled in the familiar while he was talking about the unfamiliar.


Things and Bodies/Shifting Signs

The haptic image/indexical/involuntary markings and the present instant, a body at the limit of its moment when it is most definitely intensely alive and in the present.


Beyond the body's blurred contours and indexical markers, to see through, to see sense challenged.


Time is persistently liminal, a suspended, extended present.

Mattering/Mutability,Accident, Flux

Experience/Existence/Presence 

Life Drawing/Staging Oneself/Others

Body in Space/Resilience,Endures

Organism-Person-Environment


Haptic slippages/propositions between subject and object, human and non human, between what is alive and what is animate.

Drawing/Anamorphic Perceptions, apprehended and felt, more than seen.


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

Edgar Degas.


The human figure, like any animated object is alive. Even when in a seemingly static position- whether sitting or lying- it is actually in constant motion. To capture this fundamental fact, which makes the body profoundly different from a statue or a mannequin, one must learn to see both its physical structure and its actions in space.

Daniela Brambilla.


Between seeing and drawing, what is felt, hidden, made rendering visible.

Blindness, searching, instants marking the barely known phenomena between organism, person and environment.

The searching and reflexive nature of drawing, a questioning through the performative social body, and its perceptual spatial agency and with materials, environments and others.







Human Figure Drawing

Drawing Gestures, Postures and Movements.

Daniela Brambilla, 2014.

With a series of curved lines drawn quickly, without lifting the pencil from the paper, in a loose way and almost without looking away from the subject, identify the lines that make up not the outside, the external contour or the details, but the morphological whole of the figure at that precise moment- in a certain sense the internal engine, a synthesis between intentions and actions, between mind and body.

To achieve this result draw around the form's centre and at the same time beyond it, without defining volumes with closed lines.

Gesture

Seeing Contours

Superposition

Interior and Exterior

Proportions

Modelling


What It Isn't

Memory

Balance

Techniques

Light and Shadow

Chiaroscuro

Viewpoint

What to Say?


Movements of the Soul

The Forms of Age

The Sketchbook

Imagination

If you have learnt to write, you will also learn how to draw. The manual skill is the same; you are just changing your way of seeing and feeling. To understand the meaning of this statement, ask yourself:

 “Where am I when I am drawing?”


Thinking Bodies : Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-woman

Nicole Dawson, 2008.


Deleuze and Guattari have argued that we cannot reach outside of a dualistic conceptualization of human bodies simply by seeking to transcend or bypass it. They contend: “The only way to get outside the dualism is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo”. We  do not get past or move beyond the dualism. This is not a successive stage of progression. The dualism is a conceptual event whose historical and contemporary activity gives rise to consequences that cannot be invalidated or ignored, thus, the situation is not such that we put the dualism behind us, move on or forward as if unaffected. The only place to go, to move, if we are to get outside the dualism is between: “one must pass ...through binaries, not in order to reproduce them but to find terms and modes that befuddle their operations, connections that demonstrate the impossibility of their binarization, terms, relations, and practices that link the binarily opposed terms”.


A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari.


Volatile Bodies : Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz.


 




Being Alive~Creating physical origins/entities : Correlations of Utility and Relevance.

 Outpost 111122





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

Creating physical origins.


Biology of Cognition.


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.


Autopoiesis and Cognition.

The Realization of The Living. 1970.

Humberto R. Maturana.

Francisco J. Varela.



For Niels Bohr,


Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices, it has more imagination than we do.


The well defined and solid picture of the world given by the old physics is an illusion.


Meaningful Information : Utility and Relevance.

Natural systems rooted in the physical world.


Correlations that care both physical but also intentional.

Relative information is generated by the interactions that weave the world.


The organism cares about its relevant relative information, it connects between something internal and something else generally external, 


Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.


The Minds Eye

Bridget Riley.


POETICS/ARCHITECTURE.

Effective Correlations : Architectural Body.

Recasting/Reconfiguring Life.

Madeline Gins and Arakawa. 2002. 



Drawing Apparatuses: OUTPOST 2022.

Daylight observed, spatial exposures and tracked blueprints.


Intermediaries induce space between (relations) object and process, they create, set in motion diffractive phenomena.


Deconstruction, removal and revealing of objects by taking away, an archaeological process of context sheets to reference a layered and exploratory removal of material.


SPAB Shotesham Working Party.

An attitude to historical buildings.

Well-being within the preservation and social agency of what remains of the building.

Working with lime, soft capping, clay lump, flintwork.


The ruin, its tower and the early church in the landscape.


Wayfinding/Shelters/Involuntary Remains/Sculptural Outcrops. Exposed Architectural Fragments.


Lime/Flint a plastic architecture, a fabric made up of instances of building gathered from the locality.


The 'lift-line' and the shuttering and infilling of flint-work, prior to the whitewash render finish.


Undifferentiated Landscapes.

A Field of Earth.

Jean Dubuffer.


Dubuffer used a plasterer's technique, in which walls are coated using shaken branches instead of loaded trowels. He applied many layers, scattered substances such as sand and other materials, the mortar was scratched, poked and prodded until it gave the impressions of teeming matter, alive and sparkling, he could then use it to evoke all kinds of indeterminate textures, even galaxies and nebula.


Earth Colours.

CHROMAPHILIA.



A mortar of mixed material, of added soil, ash, gravels and other earth elements added to this viscous paste.

Anthropology, a study of what remains from  human societies, rituals and artefacts.

A contemporary art/architecture that takes on anthropological and sociological concerns.

The sensorial realm of practical making, learning and well-being through the hapticity of craft.

Mobility-Movement-Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.


Red Kiln 

Hebden Bridge, 2007.

Refurbish, new fibre lining, ceramic fibre adhesive, fire cement, gas burners.

Re-locate and re-assemble for larger architectural ceramics.


Outpost Members

Submit archive material. 


Anglian Potters.

Demo day with Rebecca Appleby.

Creative explorations of concept, media and scale.


An Artist Who Uses Clay As Her Medium.


In 2019 Rebecca started a new body of work titled 'Graces' which was of great significance and helped her to re-ground her practice in sculptural exploration of symbolic relationship between architecture, industrial and bodily transfiguration. 


In 2021 Rebecca was awarded a grant from the Arts Council to take risks and connect with a broader network and audiences, enriching and invigorating her career.


Interested in Order-Chaos-Impermanence, philosophical concepts addressing change.


Influenced by ceramists Gordon Baldwin, David Roberts.


Work/Making/Exhibition Titles


Urban Traces/Fragments/Translations.

Ceramics and The City.

Palimpsest. 

Fractures/Personal Trauma.

Concrete Cancer.


Ceramic sculptural works derived from Painting, Collage and Drawing.

Research material around abstract painting and architectural de-construction.


Ashraf Hanna, clay body, 55% mixed molochites.

Handbuilt slab forms fired to 1180 degrees centrigrade.

Monoprinting with slips on newsprint, underglazing, body oxide washes,  paper stencils, scratched, sprayed, and incised mark making. 



Monday, 12 May 2025

Diffracted Bodies~Matter(s) in Movement : Speculative~Performative Space~Time Drawings

Evidencing Atmospheres/A Calling To Think.

Reading diffractively through reimagined patterns/atmospheres that penetrate the body-text-space-time compositions. 

Spatial blueprints/propositional and emergent diagrams on speculative readings from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.


Apparatuses and Intermediaries.

Everyday Practices, Harleston. 2022










Monday, 5 May 2025

Diffractive Reading : Slow Philosophy

 










Orange School Graph Books

Harleston 2020-2021


A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy


Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010


The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve


Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically


Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010


Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010


New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay


The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object


Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad


Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012


From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

Materials-Centered Perspective


Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010


Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies


Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them


Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008


Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers


Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate



Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability


The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution


Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice


Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy


Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline


The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)


The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary


So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002


Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006


The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions


A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour


New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative


Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's


New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006


Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it


The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries


Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011


Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997


Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection


Expressing itself expressing


Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions


Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact


The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement


Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions


A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside


Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce


Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside


The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017


Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice


'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey


Ceramics In The Environment

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005


With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility


Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence


Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994


The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler


The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world


Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen