Site~Emergent~Ecologies~Landscapes : Drawing translations within/between the photographic document.

Site~Making~Fieldworks.

Borderlands.

Alternative Photography.

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects~Enchantments

Topologies, mappings and their correspondences (thinking~feeling) between here, there, and elsewhere.

Playing with 'phronesis' a poetics of a spatial encounter and its enclosure forming an immediate immersive environment.

Developing inquiry through a process of familiarization and not-knowing, being undone by theory where things emerge, are accumulated, and are nurtured into being through relations (Continuous~weather-world sites) with human bodies and spatial bodies.  

Archiving materials, sites and events, resulting in an incidental aesthetic gathering.

Outpost Studio 030222

Immersed in Matter(s) of an Emergent and Continuous Weather World.

Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape.

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach.

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.

To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Drawing is a philosophical trigger/Roni Horn : Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities

Brian Massumi refers to all arts as 'occurrent' because any and every perception, artefactual or natural is just an experiential event.

It is an event both in the sense that it is happening, and in the sense that when it happens something new transpires

Semblance and Event, Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts.

Brian Massumi 2011.

Drawing is a philosophical trigger.

Roni Horn.

Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities.

Outpost Studio 14/03/2022

Occurrent Assemblages : Knowledge Objects

Choreographing

Events and Demolition

Trace and Encounter

Data Captured/Visualizations

Material/Semiotic Flows/Subjectivity : Towards Disentanglement

Social behaviour is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.

Franco "bifo" Berardi

And : Phenomenology of the End

Signs and Machines : Capitalism and The Production Of Subjectivity
Maurizio Lazzarato

Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization. Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information.

Panopticons~Contested Social Structures of Surveillance

 Speculative architectural volumes and surfaces around issues of ethics and aesthetics.

Innerness~Interior : Hans Coper and the Egyptian Vessel/Wallace Stevens 'Anecdote of the Jar'.

Innerness and Interior : Surface Pleasures

In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?

Theory and Analysis. Russell Moreton

Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. 2015

This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.

In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?

Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.

This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)

A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.

Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.

There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.

‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson, 2009:36)

Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)

Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)

The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?

Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.

I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)

Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.

‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.

Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.

Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.

The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.

Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.

His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.

Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)

Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)

In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)

His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it helps us to gather in our surroundings.

‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson, 2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves, 2009:8)

This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.

His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?

Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.

Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.

Tarkovsky filming the Instant : Flux and Quality in Nature's Time

Reflective Narratives around The Instant.

Art and Aesthetic Patterns.

The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature. 

Filmic Modalities

An Ecology of Mind

We are so accustomed to thinking of aesthetic phenomena as a discursive or representational construct, that we often forget that without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible.

Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information it contains

Bateson credits art with playing the role of confronting the quantitative limit built into consciousnesses

Art assists mind in recognizing that the potentiality of heightened consciousnesses exist and that it resides in you and in me

Flux and Quality in Nature's Time

Perception of Environment/Relational Situations

Tim Ingold

Each thing framed dwells in the world differently.

The frame and framing, through its configuration, must never offer a gap or a bridge through which as it were, the world could get in, or from which the picture could get out.

The picture frame reminds us that the work of art, while it hangs in our room, does not disturb our day-to-day sentient and perceptual ecologies.

It is like an island in the world that waits until one approaches it and which one can as well pass by and overlook.

On The Picture Frame, Simmel

Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing

Aesthetic contemplation blurs reals and emotional space in a way that produces tangible affects in the world

The thinking hand that mediates a haptic bridge in which creating and holding, becoming and grasping are all practical everyday activities extending the thinking body

Objects that stand in two worlds at once and becoming drawn into the movement of practical life through the virtue of being held in the hand

The intermingling of persons and objects in pictorial space and the aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things

The pictorial space is one in which persons and images intermingle and passions can be aroused. 

Art and Agency, Alfred Gell

Nature as “Comfort Zone” in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky by Donato Totaro 
 

Volume 14, Issue 12 / December 2010  18 minutes (4324 words)

In this essay Totaro analyzes the unique thematic and aesthetic import of Tarkovsky’s use of nature.

Tarkovsky relies on nature and natural phenomena to underscore and often dictate the time-pressure (rhythm) of a shot. The movement of time, its flux and quality, flows from the life-process that is recorded in the shot. Even though the fires, downpours and gusts of wind are staged, re-shot or recreated there still remains the spontaneous element of “nature’s time” within the filmic time. Each of the natural events and elements (water, wind, fire, snow) have their own sustained rhythm. Tarkovsky uses these natural rhythms to express his own, that of his characters and the temporal shape of the film (23-24).

I would like to conclude this analysis of Tarkovsky’s unique use of nature as a ‘comfort zone’ by saying a few things about his two science-fiction films, Solaris and Stalker. Solaris is based on the great same-titled science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. The many philosophical and ethical differences between the novel and film can be summarized by the fact that, whereas the novel begins in space on the Solaris space station orbiting the planet Solaris, the film begins with a 45 minute prologue on earth, which establishes the importance of home, family, and ‘mother’ earth to the psychologist Kris Kelvin (and by extension all humans), who is soon to leave for outer space. The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature is established right from the opening, a (second) slow motion close-up shot of plant life swaying under a crystal clear stream that slowly pans right to reveal the hand of a man wearing brown trousers and a dark leather coat standing amidst waist high reeds.

http://offscreen.com/view/nature_as_comfort_zone




Waverley Abbey
Reflected ruins in flooded interior

Photogram formed from a design collage for The Reading Room, Waverley Abbey.

Intuition of the Instant : Gaston Bachelard

Espace-Milieu : Painting as Environment/Sensual Engagements

 Aerial/Generative Drawing.

Social Mappings. Winchester Cathedral : 

Space for Peace 2011.

Cyanotype from performative drawing.

Bricolage Processes : Creative Audit of Research Topics and Processes

Interiors/UCA Farnham. 2014

THE ARCHITECTURE OF NATURAL LIGHT, Henry Plummer. 2009 THE OTHER ARCHITECTURE, Constructing metaphysical space.

Catching The Light.

The Entwined History of Light And Mind. Arthur Zajonc

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time PROCESSION

Choreography of light for the moving eye VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light in a diaphanous film ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light through a porous screen CANALIZATION

Channelling of light through a hollow mass ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

ADVENTURES OF THE FIRE, VESSELS THROUGH TIME CERAMIC GATE

“The existing architectural environment is thought to be more or less official through the hierarchical arrangement, providing an rigidity to the public. The base for a creation is a freedom and I proposed an asymmetrical form for the gate to break the official space, bringing an atmosphere for freedom of creation. ”

Jung-mook Moon. CERAMIC PAVILION

“People make space, and space contains people. ” Seong-chil Park. (Exhibition Space Designer)

PALIMPSEST AS REMAINS OF A CREATIVE PRAXIS STUDIO SPACE AS A PHILOSOPHICAL WORKSHOP

PALIMPSEST IN ARCHITECTURE

“Architects, archaeologists and design historians sometimes use the word to describe the accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time. Whenever spaces are rebuilt or remodelled, evidence of former uses remain. ”

Wikipedia

RODIN AND BEUYS

THE ALCHEMY OF BUILDING WORKING PRACTICES

RUINS, REDUCTIONS, and the LOSS of SUBSTANCE.

FRAGMENTS, ASSEMBLAGES and INTERIORS that re-enter the world of creativity.

The Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities.

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche Can one achieve architecture without resorting to ‘design’? What if, instead of designing a new building, you keep the one skated for demolition? How do you insert an original program inside the old and new structures simultaneously? How do you reconcile coherence with multiplicity? Bernard Tschumi 2012

 PROGRAM. Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 1999/2012 Architecture was no longer an autonomous and isolated discipline but participated in the movement and confrontation of ideas. Tschumi, Red Is Not A Color. 2012

Questions of Space

Abstract Mediation and Strategy

CREATIVE AUDIT of RESEARCH TOPICS The Craftsman, Richard Sennett. 2008

“Making is thinking, the good craftsman uses solutions to uncover new territory; problem solving and problem finding are intimately related in his or her mind. For this reason curiosity can ask, “Why" as well as “How " about any project. ”

Prologue: Man as His Own Maker CRAFTSMEN

The Troubled Craftsman The Workshop Machines

Material Consciousness CRAFT

The Hand

Expressive Instructions Arousing Tools Resistance and Ambiguity CRAFTSMANSHIP Quality-Driven Work Ability

Conclusion: The Philosophical Workshop BRICOLEUR BRICOLAGE, Barkow Leibinger. 2013

“Bricolage indicates an approach that is inclusive, ie open-ended, and can come either from within architecture itself or from external sources. ”

CASTING WEAVING

FOLDING BUNDLING PRINTING ANTICIPATING

FROM MODELS TO DRAWINGS, Marco Frascari. 2007 CRITICAL STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURAL HUMANITIES

THE WAVERLEY PROJECT

Imagination and Representation in Spatial Practices (Architecture, Fine Art and Performance).

Historical Perspectives Emergent Realities Critical Dimensions

CRISTINA IGLESIAS Guggenheim Museum 1998

“Concrete and iron, glass, yellow, terracotta and tapestry, aluminium and photo etching, leather and amher glass, wood, resin and bronze powder, blue glass and alabaster. ”

Introduction, Carmen Gimenez

Screen Memories, Nancy Princenthal Stained With a Pale Light, Adrian Searle Wanting Shelter, Barbara Maria Stafford

CHRIS WILMARTH. 1986 Delancey Backs (and Other Moments)

Etched float/polished plate glass, steel and bronze, blown glass.

BURNING ISSUES AND PRACTICAL CONCERNS

THE READING ROOM

The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries.

‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’

Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)

‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)

Reading The Landscape.

What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism. (Woodcock,2000:55)

Radio On by Chris Petit.

The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear. (Woodcock,2000:115)

England Dreaming.

Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, ‘Each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog.’ Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place. 

(Woodcock,2000:31)

The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday.

WATER AND DREAMS

AN ESSAY ON THE IMAGINATION OF MATTER Gaston Bachelard

Viscosity/Water in Combination.

Tacit and intimate contact, relationships and encounters between water and the potter. Water is his/her first auxiliary.

WORKING NOTES for InDESIGN Document/Mood Board.

Old Buildings/New Designs: Architectural Transformations. Charles Bloszies. Knocktopher Friary is a quiet place of contemplation. The new residential cloister unifies the friary and the church. The composition of the architecture is a knitting together of two original forms with a ribbon of concrete, glass and wood. The new buildings are crafted from a minimalist vocabulary where the palette of materials was kept to a minimum. One of the interesting design features is that the new elevations never touch the old facades with a solid-to-solid intersection; the new is either set back from the old (Ashley Castle) or the joint is glazed. The existing church floor is used as both a datum for maintaining the new floor level in the new construction, and as a vein of closely controlled changes of materials and finishes. The resultant architecture is played between subtle material exchanges of concrete meeting wood, concrete meeting glass, and concrete meeting concrete with slightly different surface qualities. What results is a clear differentiation between the old and the new, both are remarkably quiet architecturally reflecting the concerns of the site as a Carmelite monastery in the southeast of Ireland.

Working Thoughts

The Phenomenology of Reading. GLAS, Derrida Literature and Language.

Barbed Nature, Pierced Flesh. Graham Sutherland 1903-80

He never worked in situ but collected information to be worked on in his studio. The detailed sketches and notes he had made when through a transition in his mind before the final painting, culminating therefore in an inner landscape rather than a factual rendition.

These landscapes were no idyllic reverie but evoked a sense of the mysterious and dangerous. In many ways they emitted a foretaste of the approaching Second World War. (Woodcock,2000:25)

Ruins, Shadows and Moonlight. Elizabeth Bowen

“It is a fact, that in Britain, and especially in London, in wartime many people had strange, deep. Intense dreams. We have never dreamed like this before; and I suppose we shall never dream like this again.” Elizabeth Bowen.

The awareness of the social changes which broke through wartime society is evident in her novels and short stories, the feeling of boundaries being broken, physically, psychologically and also on a spiritual level, where the sense of the living and the unaccounted dead, caused by the bombing, mingle. Her evocative descriptions of the quality of light, the particular smell of a room, of a garden after rain of walking over charred wood and broken glass following an air-raid, and even the effect atmospheres have on the individual all contribute to evoking a strong sense of place. She is a master at conjuring up the minutiae of the everyday world and the presence of another dimension. (Woodcock,2000:74-75)

Rogue Male. Geoffrey Household.

The novel evokes the solitude of the landscape as it was before the advent of the mechanisation of farming and the availability of the countryside created by the growth in transport of the following decades. (Woodcock,2000:77)

Tn the heart of this hedge, which I had been seeking all the way from London, the lane reappears. It is not marked on the map. It has not been used, I imagine, for a hundred years. The deep sandstone cutting, its hedges grown together across the top, is still there; anyone who wishes can dive under the sentinel horns at the entrance and push his way through and come out in a cross hedge that runs along the foot of the hills. But who would wish? Where there is light, the interior of the double hedge is of no conceivable use to the two farmers whose boundary fence it is, and nobody but an adventurous child would want to explore it.’

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male 1939.

The Stride of The Mind

Reading Rooms. Figuring Space. Text/Fumiture/Dwelling Reading with Paths

Relativity through Walking and Thinking. Subjectivity. Space - Politics - Affect

Waverley Abbey. Cistercian Monastery

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre- spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg

Scarpa, extensive use of concrete with different aggregates and finishes.

Ashley Castle, restoration of ruin into a domestic dwelling, sensitive use of materials and methods of joining or revealing the historical fabric (allowing the ruinous to remain visible) of the building.

The Dovecote Studio, a building made of CORTEN steel built within the interior of a ruined Victorian dovecote (see further notes).

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

Drawing Surfaces : Situated Knowledges/Constructing Atmospheres

Outpost 120123

Constructing Atmospheres/Test Sites for an Aesthetics of Joy.

Margit Brunner. 2015

https://issuu.com/aadr_publishing/docs/constructing_atmospheres_s

Red Is Not A Colour

Architectural Concepts

Bernard Tschumi

What role does the audience play in the definition of a provocative project?

What are the ways in which I want to construct my world?

The in-between chapters that reveal his underlying beliefs and influences. From movies to built spaces or from art pieces to historical events, a melting pot of his imagination. This is where we understand what Tschumi means by his endless questioning  of the world and what the architect's contribution could be.

Antoine Vaxelaire, AA 5th Year. 2013. 

Marking The Line

Ceramics and Architecture.

Christie Brown, Carina Ciscato, Nicolas Rena and Clare Twomey in response to Sir John Sloane.

Cathected

Aesthetic Phenomenon

Aesthetic Causality

Sensual Object

Allure

Graham Harman reminds us that moments of allure, the fusion of always accessible sensual qualities onto a reified sensual object, are ontologically special experiences, but they are very common in human life.

Architecture articulates our experiences of being-in-the world.

The very essence of the lived experience is moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision.

Pallasmaa. 2005

The simple complexity of the sensibility found in textures and the drama of shadows.

Developing natural aptitudes through the sense of touch.

The senses considered as perceptual systems are defined as a haptic system in which the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to their body and by use of their body.

J Gibson. 1966

In some cultures, the senses of smell, touch and taste have collective importance for memories, behaviour and communication.

Indigenous clay and mud constructions, with their plastic properties, seem to be generated more from the haptic senses than the eye.

Hapticity and Alvar Aalto's Architecture.

Sam Barnham.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. 1996

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin. 2005

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand. 2009

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. 1969