Anachronistic Grisaille/Space and Architecture : Cyanotype/Diaphanous And Indexical Negatives

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.

Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.

SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

Concrete/Abstract Painting : Areas of Grisaille. Outpost Studios, Norwich.

We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but a vector of subjectivation.

Guattari, 1995 :25

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide.

The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure in 1842.[1] Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints.[2] It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection.[3] Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.[4]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blue Spaces Of Everyday Enchantments : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal

The Enchantment of Modern Life.

Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett

Tracing Light : Petworth House, West Sussex 2000
David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

Light And The Genius Loci
For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in 'a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun in the system of perception'.

Mutations Of Light
Petworth Window, 6 July 1999

Light's Windows And Rooms
Passing towards the Invisible.
The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent  theme in William Henry Fox Talbot's early speculations.

BROUGHT TO LIGHT
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900

Sight Unseen
Picturing The Universe
Corey Keller
Invisible objects, penciled by nature's own hand.
In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the 'world itself'.

The Social
Photographic Eye
Jennifer Tucker
Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.
An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand.

Invisible Worlds
Visible Media
Tom Gunning
William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6x22.5 cm.

Techniques Of The Observer
On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century
Jonathan Crary

The Camera Obscura and its Subject
Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' world.

UNDER THE SUN
By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.

An Epiphany Of Light
David Alan Mellor

Sensual Objects/Temporal Skin : Intersubjective Spaces/Aesthetics

Blue Aesthetic : Vicarious Causation/Exploring/Thinking with Causality

Realist Magic
Objects, Ontology,
Causality

Timothy Morton

On Vicarious Causation
Graham Harman

http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/harman=vicarious-causation.pdf

EXPLORATORY CLAY/CERAMIC BASED INQUIRY : Ceramics and Architecture.

 

EXPLORATORY CLAY/CERAMIC BASED INQUIRY  2023 Russell Moreton.

Working Title/Creative entanglements in a world of materials.

Ceramics for a reflective solitude, an architecture of silence. 

My intention is to develop further ceramic processes and forms that can be further articulated into specific site based objects. I am very interested in the spatial relationships and aesthetics of ceramics and their place in architectural settings. I wish to further develop my practical working knowledge, and a creative sensibility towards the haptic qualities of  making with clay and the unifying element of fire.

Studio program.

Clay bodies, making facilities, ceramic tests, development of simple forms on which to present ceramic experimentation. Analysis of findings, further developments from exploratory findings into new processes and ways of making. Sketchbooks, drawings and photography, text and collage.

Thrown Vessels, innerness, Edmund de Waal. 

Spaces between Ceramic Objects, Giorgio Morandi. 

The Ceramic Surface, Richard Hirsch.

Supporting Notes. Current Interests.

Areas Of Presentation and Participation.

Historic and Social Sites, Art venues and Exhibitions. Making Theoretical Objects, Installation, Workshops.

Reading/research alongside residency. Intertwining Thinking and Making.

The Eyes Of The Skin. Clare Twomey

Tony Cragg

Julian Stair 

Bryan Newman

Gordon Baldwin

Richard Hirsch 

Edmund de Waal 

Juhani Pallasmaa 

Steven Holl

Objects for a Landscape.

Marking the Line : Ceramics and Architecture. 

With Fire : A Life Between Chance and Design.

Paintings of nothing series, ceramic,raw material, dry pigment, wax. 

Bridge/Boat based conceptual forms.

Urban Spaces, palimpsest,impressions, traces. 

Ceramic Processes 

Additions to clay bodies

Hybrid combinations and making processes

Plasterwork, pressmoulding, sledged forms, templates, slabwork, thrown, handbuilt. 

Firing processes and new possibilities of scale and quantity.

Red Kiln, refurbished, Harleston.

Once fire Raku based clay bodies and engobes/slips/oxides and other surface treatments.

Spatiality/Spatial Agency/Light Laboratory : Literary and Visual Cartographies : Lightness,Quickness,Exactitude,Visibility,Multiplicity,

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

Spatial and Literal Cartographies.

Lightness,

Quickness,

Exactitude,

Visibility,

Multiplicity, 

Consistency 

ItaloCalvino,  6 memos for the next millennium.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.

Dwelling Apparatuses, Heidegger.

RAVENINGHAM 2025

WORKING NOTES

Developing relations on the specificity of a landscape and the weather.

Construction site, towards an alchemy of thinking and making space and the instants of the wonderous.

Some ways of thinking.

Processes enabling situations through strange constructions.

Diffractive apparatus of components, materials and filtered light.

Explorative, site specific and performative.

A fictive space articulated through the alchemy of light and water.

Sensing space, seating for a site of speculative inquiry.

Material Matters : Architectural/Perceptual/Sensing Phenomena.

Correspondences, Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Reflections/Movements/Environments/Landscapes

Using site as a research instrument, a compounded object of self assembly, and crafted components, materials and substances. A sculptural intervention, event based merging the poetic with the tectonic.

Apparatus/Device/Model.

Sensing composition, situating a site for speculative inquiry.

An exploratory and site specific installation that can open up our interior world to the proximity of both the situation of a natural environment and the experience of a conceptually made object/space that facilitates a sense of wonder, resulting in  an alchemy between these two realms of experience.

Art works constantly to  brokers these relations within us.

 

Making Bodies~Experiential Clay : An emotional rootedness in our primal self, Beuys.

Sensory Corporeality

Intrinsic to how we gain consciousness of our world.

Abject(ion) Explorations, something instinctive, innately human, visceral, an organ exploring a strange situation.

Joseph Beuys.

Clay as process : Moving~Eruptive~Living~Experiential

Beuys understood that creativity is central to human existence. Making-works-with-matter that makes the mind~body~move through change and transformation as well as emotional rootedness in a primal self.

Tactile experience adheres to the surface of our body, we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quiet becomes an object, correspondingly as the subject of touch. I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere. I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go in the world and tactile experience occurs 'ahead of me' and is not centred in me.

Maurice Merleau Ponty.

Phenomenology of Perception. 1945

CARETAKING/INTERSPACES The Weird And The Eerie/fluctuating networks of existential events : Photographic pathologies of alterity

RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES CRITICAL THEORY

SPATIAL PRACTICES : CANTERBURY 2009

PERIPHERAL VISION : RELATIONALITY, ROBERT COOPER.

I have quoted the entirety of this abstract, as its concise and articulate statement needs to be preserved as a fragment capable of reconstituting interest for others and, by keeping its first reading authentically present, it is presented “live” and synchronic with its other enactments.

“The act of relating is analysed as a constitutive feature of human agency .Relating is viewed as the continuous work of connecting and disconnecting in a fluctuating network of existential events. Relating re-lates the human world as a restless scene of flowing parts in which whole, self contained objects take second place to the continuous transmission of movement. The relating of the world of moving parts is illustrated through the examples of modem methods of mass production and the transmission of information which both produce a “weakening of reality.”

Keywords: human agency, information transmission, the latent, part-whole relationship, production-prediction

Robert Cooper’s observation that relating is a continuous connecting and disconnecting, probes the possibilities of spatial encounters that can be grafted onto and within our readings of place. The notion of the temporal and the contingent, are never far away in this “fluctuating network of existential events.”

Cooper makes an informative comment on modern methods of mass production and communication, “categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality but they also hide its underlying complexities.”1

This sense of partial visibility, made and controlled by things, intrigues me as does the parts on the periphery of perception which remains with the potential to become relational. My work seems to be seeking out and mediating the interspace between the individual and their environment. For me this interspace becomes the space of unfolding implications, whose dynamics, or resonances, are achieved through connections that imply disconnections.

The photographic evidence utilized in my practice, the way emergent findings are presented and then over written, suggests that this idea of inter space, is totally contingent. This gives a sense of an archaeology of perceptive meanings, which are manifested as visual consolations. These held in an ever emergent state of contingences interests me. The space and time of relativity and relationship, Cooper notes is a place where “nothing can be itself and everything is suspended in an unfinished betweenness that seems to refuse simple location and identity.”2

Betweenness/walking into a latent field of relationality?

“Relationality re-lates latency. It re-lates in the double sense of connecting terms and thus creating coherent structures of relations out of gaps and intervals of disconnection, as well as narrating and making explicit the dormant and implicit nature of latency.”3

1 Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality (London: Sage Publishing, 2005), page 1689. 

2  .Ibid., page 1692.

3  .Ibid., page 1693.

Helena Elferova~Synagoga : Photographic Pathologies~Saturnian  lead, greyness, analogue processes.

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

PORTRAITS, STILL VIDEO PORTRAITS AND THE ACCOUNT OF THE SOUL, JOANNA LOWRY.

This text taken from Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image is of interest, as it analyses the properties of the compression of time into a single image and our reading of such material. It is this central issue of time, or rather that photography can intercept it, that interests me through the use of simple light gathering devices. Joanna Lowry remarks on the ability of photography to disrupt “ our common-sense understanding of the relationship between past and present, stopping the flow of time and holding it in an uncanny stillness for years on end, revealing to us a present without a future.”1

Photography seems to be more about what remains after time is interrupted; it reveals “a fissure in the field of the visible.”2 This fissure could be said to be a frame of a detachment of time, a hermetically sealed dimension, preserving its own unique value of dwelling and promoting a sense of temporality of human subjects, surrounded by an exactitude of place.

One of the interesting properties of these “time based stills” is that they give a visual site for the triangular relationship between subject, spectator and time. The time element is duration, so therefore these images are filmic semblances, witnessing their subjects, or as Benjamin termed them as “growing into the picture”. The spectator of these encounters (framed by time) becomes aware of a photographic duration. This duration is constantly emerging and it is also constantly forming “sedimentary remains”. Perhaps as Lowry comments “they offer us a new enchantment with the provisionally and fragility of the pose."3

This new enchantment, or the site of its alternation, is created by a photographic absorption of a human performance. This phenomenon, of an absorbed and distracted subject as Benjamin has noted, belongs to the earliest forms of photography. What is also relevant here, is the observation made by Mark Godfrey “new technologies produce new forms of subjectivity.”4 Photography produces and procures a difference and a distance. It is a “differentiated space of the visible.”5

1 .Joanna Lowry, Portraits, Still Video Portraits and the Account of the Soul (Brighton: Photoforum, 2006), page 65.

2  .Ibid.,

3  .Ibid., page 78.

4  .Mark Godfrey, Fiona Tann : Countenance (Oxford: Modem Art Oxford,2005), page76.

5 Joanna Lowry, Portraits, Still Video Portraits and the Account of the Soul (Brighton: Photoforum, 2006), page 77.

Artist Statement/Analysis  re Spatial Practices/Methodologies

My previous experiences have been drawn from a physical relationship to “site” and the possibilities that might be embedded to be encountered for others. It is in the spatiality of Drawing from which I am attempting to create a form, that allows the multiplicity of material associations and yet has a sort of transparency and physicality, that allows specific readings to be experienced through this membrane. Spatial practices offers up a frame of references and cross multidisciplinary approaches that are already offering possible solutions. 

My initial use of surfaces Ceramics and Glass, in architectural surroundings, is being redrawn into relationally with the notion of an interlocutor being an active participant and for those others whose proximities and contingences they might create. 

Analysis of my assemblages, which are housed in book form, reveal a spatial overwriting of both written annotations and diagrammatical routing of specific elements. All of this occurs, or is illuminated adjacent too and between, photographic evidence of place.

This evidence of place is itself a surface of compressed time, inscribed during that time by light. Light therefore suggests itself as the ultimate vehicle of transparency, of both being able to illuminate information and also being able to stream and superimpose seamlessly contingent knowledge’s as they appear. 

The intertextuality of Language, as something that might be configured as an inclusion into physical place is a possibility. My work seems to require this transparency on one hand and yet recent reviews of my drawings, reveal a dynamic engendered from precisely drawn articulations, to a nebulous semblance on the same surface. In effect my interests are on the transition points, thresholds even, of the periphery of perceptions being retained, whilst other things become open and emergent. 

This dynamic across a spatial volume activates the possibilities of seeing things becoming interwoven with creative potentials.

Other observations, brought from the presentation of working practice, have been the issue of intensive notations, almost as if the photographic surfaces, themselves vestiges of solitudes were being re-enacted by a choreographic sense of re-encountering place. The embedded durations, overwritten by light within the photographic surface, give a semblance of the notion of inter- textuality, or rather its creative possibilities; in fact they are ensnared continuances. 

J G Ballard refers in his writing that it is being envisaged in the visionary present. The extended durations of “the present” captured on a photographic surface could be said to be a concretization of the present by the past. 

These extended durations of always “becoming present” have something about an indexical mark in a state of a constant erasure of becoming, held captive within them. A further visual distortion, achieved by the use of a chamber as the receptacle to mediate the relations between the light outside with the light that penetrates, produces a kind of visual psychosis, a distorted sense of being captive which seems to accompany the image.