Art and Anthropological Concerns : Spatial Agencements : Processual Circulations.

Thursday, 4 December 2025

Marking~Clay : The~Transition~of~Matter : The Lived Duration between Two States.

New Assemblages/Materialisms.

Spinoza/Lived Durations.

The Silent Transformations.

Spatial Bodies : Constellations/Spatial Composition.

Friday, 28 November 2025

Dwelling/Reverberation/Poetics : Physical Grammar/Passages

Outpost 200623

On The Experiential Level of Life

Investigating/Expanding 'The Spatial/Sculptural'
Space over Time/Operative Design

Tony Cragg

IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL

Demonstration

Tony Cragg : I basically mean the effectiveness of the object, of the material. But because the metaphysical and physical association are already occupied, I'm interested in somehow establishing some relationship with the materials and the things around me without using any preconceived notions of an already occupied language. It is a bit like taking away a Christian name and depersonalising something. What I mean is that it's an attempt on my side to restart the relationship with the material, which I think sculptors have to do anyway.

Jon Wood : Thinking of the increased awareness that this side of your work tries to capture and harness in the viewer, can you say a bit about the kind of sensitivities that you would like to be heightened? What would you see your work as demonstrations of and for? Your sculptures are triggers for what kind of thinking?

Tony Cragg : Well there is an attitude to looking at things and to looking at objects and materials which is based on a meditative tradition of contemplation : the universe in a grain of sand idea, or maybe even religious ideas where you actually get in contact on some level with the material world, on a deeper level than the one you obviously are capable of reaching in an everyday situation, so on an extraordinary level, outside of your own experiences.

I am not saying that that's not interesting or important. But I also think that this leaves the battleground for the everyday life to be governed by non-contemplative thought and non-meditative thought. And this may sound like a mixture of terms, but I think that there is a job to be done even on an everyday, “second for second” level of life—on the experiential level of life. I think there is a job to be done here improving the quality of contemplation about an awareness of the material world—the material world seen as an immediate extension of the communal social effort, the cultural effort that you are part of.

Jon Wood : How does it move from being an individual contemplative experience to being one that has a communal relevance?

Tony Cragg : In the main part it only has communal relevance. All you can do for yourself is formulate your sentences, cook yourself a meal that suits you, get dressed in a fashion that suits you, and everything else you have to put up with as having been made by other people for you. But obviously, even if they didn't ask your permission, there's something consensual about that, isn't there? Even though you don't like it, it doesn't look like you're making an effort to change it. And maybe there's some active thing there. My idea is that even if I don't like it, I wouldn't be able to change a great deal of it, but I could sow the seed for some change in the direction that I would feel would be important. It's a measure of how much responsibility one takes for the change. Looking for more in the visual world around me and looking for more language, in a sense, is one way of heightening sensibilities and expanding a vocabulary and then expanding the responses to a vocabulary is a way of heightening sensibilities. I'm not a politician, but I think we still live in a world that is greatly dominated by mesmerism and mystical models, which are very distracting because they actually stop us from really trying to face reality.

Objects/Subjects in Space : Passages in Sculpture

OPERATIVE DESIGN : SPATIAL VERBS

To serve as a fundamental tool for spatial and architectural interpretation

Spatial operations, illustrated beginnings to activate architectural inquiry.

This catalogue thus introduces the possibility of understanding spatial formation as a process that can be derived from fundamental actions, here grouped into volumetric addition, subtraction, or displacement, which define a lexicon of starting points for the creation of space and also imply the relationship between oneself and the space created.

OPERATIONS

MAKE SPACE

Space matters. We read our physical environment like we read a human face.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses

Juhani Pallasmaam Steven Holl

2005

How to set the stage for creative collaboration

Scott Doorley, Scott Witthoft, David Kelley

2012

Surface + Volume

Generative Process

Combinations and Aggregations

Implementations

Writing and Seeing Architectue

Christian de Portzamparc, Philippe Sollers

2008

In and Out of material : Passages in Sculpture

COMBINATIONS

Languages,dialogues,conflicts that can evoke form,experience and interaction.

Research, inquiry and practice as a systematic approach through operative terms.

Investigating the 'Spatial' its formal/experiential essence/action and character for spatial opportunities.

The Feeling Of What Happens

Body,emotion and the making of consciousness

Antonio Damasio

1999

The Architecture Of The Jumping Universe

A Polemic

How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture

Charles Jencks

1995

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

ARCHITECTURE, ART AND DESIGN

V&A Contemporary, Lucy Bullivant

2006

to fold

to modulate

of tension

of entropy

Richard Serra, "Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself" [1967-1968]

to roll to crease to fold to store to bend to shorten to twist to dapple to crumple to shave to tear to chip to split to cut to sever to drop to remove to simplify to differ to disarrange to open to mix to splash to knot to spill to droop to flow to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to bundle to heap to gather to scatter to arrange to repair to discard to pair to distribute to surfeit to compliment to enclose to surround to encircle to hole to cover to wrap to dig to tie to bind to weave to join to match to laminate to bond to hinge to mark to expand to dilute to light to modulate to distill of waves of electromagnetic of inertia of ionization of polarization of refraction of tides of reflection of equilibrium of symmetry of friction to stretch to bounce to erase to spray to systematize to refer to force of mapping of location of context of time of cabonization to continue

AGGREGATIONS

to | Reflect | Expand

Reflect + Pack | Skew

Pack | Inflate

Pack + Stack | Branch

Stack | Bend

Array + Stack | Rotate

Array | Taper

Join + Array | Pinch

Join | Split

Poetics and Place

The Architectures Of Sign, Subjects and Site

Kristen Kreider

2014

A Hut of One's Own

Ann Cline

Open Office/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture

Texts,Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines,

SPATIALITY

Writer as mapmaker, literature of the city and urban space, concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism.

Robert T. Tally Jr

2013

OPERATIVE DESIGN

A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs

2012/18

IMPLEMENTATIONS

to | Carve + Offset

Poli House : Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Offset program | Perimeter Services | Thickened Openings

to | Embed + Branch

Villa 1 : Powerhouse Company

Branched Programs | Volume Wrapper | Embedded Entry

to | Embed + Overlap

Casa para un Carpintero : RCR Arquitectes

Overlapping Program | Circulation Core | Embedded Entry

to | Expand + Nest

House N : Sou Fujimoto Architects

Expanded Outer Volume | Nested Private Program | Nested Living + Dining

Collage/Drawing Frame : Passages in Sculpture
to | Overlap + Expand

House in Minamimachi 2 : Suppose Design Office

Overlapping Light Wells | Stacked Program | Expanded Volumes

to | Bend + Shift

Nursing Home : Aires Mateus

Shifted Volumes | Bent Massing | Embedded Massing

to | Embed + Taper

Leimondo Nursery School : Archivision Hirotani Studio

Tapered Volumes | Thickened Roof | Embedded Program

to | Lift + Carve

Gouveia Law Courts : Barbosa and Guimaraes

Carved Massing | Lifted Program | Carved Plinth

to | Lift + Extrude

Carabanchel Housing : Dosmasuno Arquitectos

Extruded Living Spaces | Lifted Massing | Carved Plinth

to | Overlap + Rotate

Ironbank : RTA Studio

Rotated Volumes | Stacked Utility and Circulation Cores | Plinth and Street Facade

Anthony Di Mari

Nore Yoo

Volumetric Spatial Operations/Agents/Variations/Combinations

Additions

Subtractions

Displacements

Colour/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture/Architectural Glass

Mesh Topologies : Pattern and Chaos

Speculative Narratives 12

DSC_0018 Spatial/Visual Apparatus

Spatiality : Space over Time
DSC_0476 Spatial/Architectural Drawing

Reading Collage : Spatial Drawings/Documents/Analogue Photography

Speculative Narratives 8
Flickr

Tuesday, 25 November 2025

Photography/A Fragmentary Whole : The Temporal Flow of Things

Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."

-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

“Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”

Literary cartography is not a literal form of mapmaking, after all; rather, it involves the ways and means by which a given work of literature functions as a figurative map, serving as an orientating or sense-making form.

Lukács’s Literary Cartography:

Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Path : Circular, Stonehenge

Transparency,time and matter #2

Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011. #4

Dark Session's : Shadowy speculations in the pottery. Kilquhanity 2011

Silver gelatin prints from a "room obscura" set up at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011 as part of "Back to Free school, Drawing out the Archive".

Blue Spaces : White Absences #2
https://visualartpractices.wordpress.com/

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

London/Millennium Bridge : Architectural Abstracts/Drawing Traces

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Working Notes : Edmund de Waal : How the history of pottery and the philosophy of pottery has informed contemporary practice.

Working Notes: Edmund de Waal.

Independent research for Studio Practice Theory and Analysis.

UCA Farnham, MA Interiors. 2014.

Why does Edmund de Waal make architectural interventions through the arrangement of porcelain pots?

To what extent, if any is this Ceramist interested in the ability of the single pot to engender meaning?

How is the “innerness” of pots that he talks about so eloquently actually manifested in his architecturally staged installations and exhibitions?

Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramic Galleries 2009.

During his career Edmund de Waal has moved from that of being a domestic potter to that of an installation artist.

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. This site specific installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Central to Edmund de Waal’s practice is the concern to offer a ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, preservation and display of ceramics.’ (Graves,2009:8)

He has further explored the use of installations and vitrines in the pursuit of framing and underpinning these intellectual concerns. The use of purpose made structures, shelves and boxes adds the aesthetics of a tightly control clean minimalist style of presentation to his assembled collection of pots.

Interpretation and display are now central to these ‘grouped works’ that have become presented as ‘cargoes of pots’ that now seem at home in the collecting environment of the museum.

‘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)

De Waal working with specific settings has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)

‘By altering the character of a known space, by intruding on areas within it that might not usually be associated with the display of art, the viewer’s awareness of both the changes and the space are heightened.’ (Graves,2009:10)

This methodology of display ultimately disappears as if it were never actually present, leaving the underlying fabric of the interior space as it were untouched, the impermanence of the work now resides only in its memory.

What remains of these sensing spaces (interiors) through spectacle, event and place? Proposal for the ceramics department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Site specific work in the new contemporary ceramics gallery that responded to the architecture of the space, and that could remain in place for years. An installation or feature that could remain in place and yet allow the gallery to function as a location for frequently changing displays and exhibitions.

De Waal’s response is Signs and Wonders ‘a lacquer red metal channel tracking the circumference of the dome and housing more than 400 of his pots; is an act both of daring and of breathtaking elegance and simplicity, a magisterial achievement on a scale surpassing anything he has previously undertaken.’ (Graves,2009:10)

Signs and Wonders is in reality a major contemporary architectural adaptation into the very fabric of the historical building. Its very reality creates a physical link between the past and the present, and it represents a long term commitment that began with the redevelopment of the ceramic galleries into the new Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.

Edmund de Waal’s Signs and Wonders is an iconic statement of intent for the Contemporary Ceramics Gallery, it underpins a new platform for the expanding territory of creative practice in ceramics. Signs and Wonders actively seeks to simulate new ways of seeing ceramics.

Architectural feature that comprises of some 425 thrown pots made of porcelain by Edmund de Waal and installed under the oculus of the great dome situated directly above the main entrance hall.

Edmund de Waal reflects on the vitrines that used to be found in the old ceramic galleries (room 137) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1970s.

‘Most of the vitrines were firmly policed into taxonomies of kiln or modeller or religion, less ’pseudo-scientific’ than a slightly desperate attempt to control the vastness of the collection. Some of the vitrines had the work of a single potter. All the pots by Hans Coper used to be in one mahogany case, huge early textured vessels shadowing the fine later Cycladic forms. They barely fitted.’(De Waal,2009:16)

De Waal’s memories of the old galleries in the 1970s was that they were an attempt to compare pots from different galleries, of the strangeness of seeing through one great case into another; the tops of a row of bottles cresting a line of dishes and the layering of one series of forms or colours onto another. And of course the fact that there were very few people.

Signs and Wonders; Edmund de Waal.

‘I have made an installation of pots for Gallery l41. There are 425 vessels made out of porcelain and they are placed on a red metal shelf that floats high up in the dome. You can just see it from the entrance hall through the square aperture in the coffered ceiling if you stand in one of the mosaic circles on the floor. It is called Signs and Wonders.’

I want to make this installation part of the fabric of the V&A. (De Waal,2009:20)

‘It began with the combination of a gesture of a pen and the plans to this austere bit of Edwardian architecture.’ (De Waal,2009:22)

The porcelain vessels are on a red shelf, the colour of lacquer.

The integrity of the shelf is upheld by being made from a proper material so as to form an accord with the historical architecture.

De Waal has experimented with placing porcelain on steel shelves and by having pots placed within lead lined boxes. He is aware of how these materials can form provocative combinations from their inherent densities.

The controlling presence of the vitrine is an intervention itself of its own display, (decommissioned mahogany vitrines from the V&A, illustrate the phenomenal weight of these enclosures)

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 Modem era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists.

‘This is not a simple linear relationship, but part of a flow around into Modernism and back again. It is a perpetual rediscovery.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

On Pots Behind Glass:

The shadows of the stacked pots.

On the memory of objects, the afterimage, its distillation, and the blindness of looking away that gives it its form. What is left to be adapted or to be pared down through volume and angle into these new reflective forms?

Derrida on drawing from ‘blindness’.

‘I wanted to work with objects that have been part of my life for 30 years, and to make sense of my memories of how pots lived in the galleries.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

‘Other sections, one run of bottles that are in different celadons for instance, are a memory of vessels from disparate parts of the ceramics collections brought into a taxonomic focus. This is the use of memory and the after-image as the intense holding of a form on the retina.’ (De Waal,2009:26)

In Heidegger’s work ‘not least in his use of etymologies, his writings are imbued with a sense of historicity; a sense of the passage of time, of destiny, and of the past as a reservoir of thinking available to contemporary life.’ (Sharr,2009:99)

The Architecture of Place :

Architects that were sensitive to site, dwelling, inhabitation and place. Form Making as a Response to Site and Inhabitation.

In The Ethical Function of Architecture 1997, Karsten Harries seeks to reclaim a sense of meaning in architecture that he feels has been lost to a scientific rationality. He sees ornament as being able to convey meaning by linking and reflecting stories and in so doing it gives us an appreciation of nature. This type of ornament has a poetic function in that it helps to locate people with their place and community.

Dalidor Vesely believes that architecture can manifest the attitudes of its builders, and that this can describe through the very fabric of the building the very thinking of the society that implemented its construction.

Vesely ‘explored what he considered to be the tensions between instrumental and communicative, or technological and creative, roles of architecture. He argued that these roles have become divided; a split which is recorded in the respective roles of architects and engineers. Vesely traces the historical origin of this division to that of mediaeval optics and the development of perspective; to the first attempts to privilege a scientific description of light over immediate experiences of the qualities of vision. This division is a crisis of representation, that that is displacing meaning in architecture from human experience to the visual qualities of surface and appearance.’ (Sharr,2009:103)

For Vesely, creativity remains the antidote to technology.

Zumthor shares with Heidegger in that he believes in architecture’s potential to evoke associations and invite meaning.

Regionalism, a critical dialogue with the site, a rapport between place and building as if it had always been there.

‘Stone and water are more than materials or phenomena for Zumthor; they’re also intellectual notions, traditions of thought with a long history.’ (Sharr,2009:104)

Critical Regionalism, see Kenneth Frampton, ‘Zumthor aligns himself with Frampton when he writes about a critical dialogue between his designs and their sites, unafraid to claim meaning from locality.’ (Sharr,2009:105)

Choreographing Experience.

Zumthor ‘I need time to create an atmosphere, I have to be careful about things otherwise I won’t have this atmosphere and the whole objective of my work somehow would be gone. That’s the way I work.’(Spier,2001:19)

‘Much of the installation uses memory in a different way to produce the blurred after image.’ (De Waal,2009:28)

De Waal cites the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto as being a revelatory influence on this notion of memory and the blurred after-image. In particular the series

‘Architecture’ which features blurred photographs of Modernist architecture. These images seemed to have the ability to take ‘you back to a particular moment standing in front of a particular building. It was that they seemed to be simultaneously images of a memory of place.’

Sugimoto ‘Architecture’ The German Pavilion from Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe. ‘A graduated run of whites into greys is a memory, for me, of the archive photographs of Bauhaus ceramics with their regimented attempt at teaching pottery by breaking forms down to component parts.’

(De Waal,2009:30)

Hans Coper builds up spatial interiors in his pots by using component parts thrown on the wheel.

The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

‘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)

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer 2009

Procession, the choreography of light for the moving eye.

Iconic works of space in motion: The Perceptual Flow.

‘Related concepts relevant to architecture are found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom cinematic flow is a living rather than linear experience, achieved when film is stretched and lengthened by human memory and by images that evoke something significant beyond what we see before us, allowing time to flow out of the edges of a frame. ’(Tarkovsky, 1986:117)

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vais.

Donald Judd’s Untitled 1980.

Jean Nouvel’s Culture and Congress Centre 1999.

‘More important still to de Waal’s project is the way that Judd’s stacks use interval. These cantilevered boxes are literally, one thing after another; but they do not touch. Rather the positive steel and plastic elements are separated by negative spaces that are their exact equal in volume. The works operate according to a binary, on/off logic, suggesting temporal as well as spatial extension.’(Adamson,2009:40) see also

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews: Chicago, 1967/1998.

Fried recognizes the durational aspect or dimension of minimalist sculpture, but condemned it for its “quasi-theatrical presence” that by occupying the time of the viewer this sculpture became mundane and everyday rather than transcendent.

Stacking is a way for de Waal to engage with the history of sculpture. It can be thought of as a compositional tool that suggests the storeroom, the kiln or a way of just putting pots together. Stacking produces a visual syntax through ‘exploring the formal and implicitly psychological relationships that pots can have with one another. ’(Adamson,2009:38)

Simultaneous Temporal Structures: Windows or Objects in Sequence.

‘Pictures in motion have long been exploited by Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, who describes his buildings as “scenographic” with routes composed along a series of camera angles and apertures.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

‘Another technique Tarkovsky employs to loosen time from any rigid progression is the directorial power to endow not only the entire film, but also its segments and even separate frames, with simultaneous temporal structures that are not unlike William’s “ice in March” or Viola’s “parallel times”.’ (Plummer,2009:56)

Steven Holl ‘movements are threaded rather than linear, pulled vaguely along by what Holl calls sequences of shifting and overlapping perspectives. Beckoning light draws the visitor onward step by step, and image by image, through a fragmentary rather than comprehensive narrative. (Plummer,2009:56)

Gianni Vattimo, Italian Philosopher.

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. 1991.

Weak Ontology/Fragile Thought.

A latent learning under the safe light of the darkroom. The red pages of the signs and wonders catalogue links a narrative with spatial object of his installation by its colour, but it might also reflect the inner space of the photographic darkroom.

‘Light neither centres nor aligns space, as in the past, but appears in the periphery as a vague and marginal background event.’(Vattimo, 1991:85)

‘Filled with intricate constellations’: (Adamson,2009:34) Looking/seen from the oculus of the dome.

‘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)

“When they are so high up they become blurred”

Rather than the object stranded on the plinth attempting to flag you down, if you place it elsewhere there is a feeling of possibility and latent discovery, similar to the feeling that you get if you are lucky enough to see the stores of the museum.

(De Waal,2009:30)

In between spaces/stores and other latent spaces, re Mike Nelson, photographic darkroom between rooms. London 2007.

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919) Heidegger, The Jug, “gathering vessel”

“What is de Waal charting in these looping circles within circles?”

De Waal acknowledges the influence of Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Glenn Adamson remarks how the special qualities of the round perhaps thrown pot is itself both an object, brought into the being by the world and encircled by it. (Adamson,2009:34)

In so “being” the vessel brings its own order, a subjectivity that acts and takes dominion everywhere. This communion (spatial relation) between the vessel and its environment is further echoed in the lines of the poem “the wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild”(Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)

Signs and Wonders is about seeing 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/we gather our surroundings. 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.

‘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 sherd, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44)

Temporal Zones/Re-Imagined Social Landscapes: Archaeology/Making : Pot Shard/Pottery.

See Tim Ingold the four A’s, Anthropology/Archaeology/Art and Architecture.

Working Notes : 26 February 2014

Theory and Analysis/Tutorial with Simon Olding CSC.

COMPONENTS :

Essay 2000-3000 words and a research journal that informs the essay/texts. Interested in using this research to inform my “Object Analysis” and its exploratory essay.

The Object:

Ceramic Vessel made by Hans Coper.

A Level Ceramics at Farnham Sixth Form College. Workshop experience locally at the Hop Kiln Pottery, Farnham and at Grayshott Pottery.

HND in Ceramics, Epsom School of Art and Design.

Self employed and freelance as a ceramist until 1992.

Currently working with clay in a contemporary practice that includes Architecture, Fine Art and Performance.

Research Questions.

What “anthropological traces” remain within the vessel of the “Pot”

What is its Symbol-Function-History.

How much of the artist’s social biography is caught up in its making.

Does the object in question underscore a deeper humanity/ a visionary present. How does the craft of making affect the perceptions of our surroundings.

The worn vessel/telluric values and the sensuality of humans.

Making: The Contemporary Craft Praxis. Research Texts.

Making, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of The Environment (Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill) Tim Ingold.

Heidegger for Architects, Adam Sharr. A Potters Book, Bernard Leach,

Hans Coper, Tony Birks/Contemporary Potters/Ceramic Review. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard.

Rethinking Materiality, Colin Renfrew. (At The Potters Wheel)

How Things Shape The Mind/A Theory of Material Engagement, Colin Renfrew.

Thursday, 20 November 2025

Huts/Follies/Pavilions : Experimental Lives/Reworking Subjectivity.

Outpost 241024

It seems that the significance of an aesthetic event is in its future.

Timothy Morton, Realist Magic : Objects, Ontology, Causality.

Reworking Subjectivity.

Actualizing Traces.

Vectors/Inscriptions and Field Conditions.

Theory and Things.

The Intuitive Practices of the Untutored Maker.

Experimental Lives.

On Simple Huts.

On Exercising Experience.

Huts, as Folly or Pavilion, serving a deeper impulse of curiosity, pleasure, experimentation, discipline. While the primitive hut belongs equally to 'what architecture is' and to 'what architecture is not' ironically its greatest significance may derive from the many non architectural ideas it engages.

Anne Cline.

Giving way to the nature of materials, new sensitivity, new subjectivity.

Ceramic objects of open intervals, intersections, inner places, and places in-between.

These primal images give us back houses in which the human beings certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life. A life that would be our own that would belong to us, in our very depths.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Ann Cline.

It would seem then that the search for the primitive hut begins in play. A deconstructing process in which children seem to examine what is given them, intent upon taking it apart. While Rykwert's primitive is founded in the expression of origins, collectively imagined and believed. Bachelard's primitive is founded in the expressions of youth, not as vulgar nostalgia (as he emphatically warns) but in images as we should have imagined them during the 'original impulse' of youth.

In other times of cultural transition, the primitive hut, as invention or as a construct of experience, has brought humans to the edge of their normative existence and from there allowed perspective and experimentation.

The more 'primitive' the hut the more its creators recognized the arbitrariness of their own culture.

Within the inhabited hut, cultural issues and practices readily converge with an agility larger structures can never match. Huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and lifestyle. The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

Divertissements and spectacles cover over the most basic human aspiration, to know what it is to have a human life.

Earth-House-Hold.

Gary Snyder. 1969

AM1.

Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion, History, Photography.

The Production of Space.

The Poetics of Space.

A Species of Spaces.

Space is not 'a priori' but rather a matter of relations between objects (things/phenomena).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Spatial Practices/Making Agency.

Circulation Diagram/Body/Space/Living/Activities/Production.

Movements/Interactions/Spaces/Volumes.

Tentative/Procedural Architecture (existential experiencing of built spaces).

Arakawa and Gins.

Body/Bodies as vector of movements/interactions/overlapping/navigating through interlocking/disparate spatial volumes.

Making and Meaning.

Andrew Higgott.

Peter Salter: Building Projects.

Architectural Association School.

Work created in design units such as that of Mike Gold, starting with the human figure as generator, or of Peter Wilson, prioritized sensibility over articulated theory, the evocative over the concrete: but the approach came to be evident in many student projects beyond these units. Much of this work was concerned with creating new forms of an architecture of meaning, and generating this meaning through a variety of intuitive devices.

As Peter Salter's own work developed, his interest in structural ingenuity gave way to a new sensitivity and subjectivity. A sensitivity to site and to the nature of materials, subjectivity in terms of making the personal and particular response. Seeing precedent in the practice of the Smithsons and other recent architects, but also in the practice of the untutored maker of things.

Grounding his work in the realization of the transformation of materials from natural form to the making of space: actualizing traces of context and echoes of history in its making. Rather than the more obvious and simple course of collaging fragments of pre-existing forms, it understands such devices and has an intuitive resonance of them.

Architecture in Abjection.

What Greg Lynn in the 1990s is laying out here, following Deleuze and Guattari, is a relational understanding of the world, as opposed to an understanding based on things. For Deleuze and Guattari, relations occur not only between things but within the things themselves, such that the world is a vibrating field of potential, never in a moment of stasis or being but always changing. It is therefore very much about the in-between, and it is this in-between, this field of relations, that is a multiplicity.

Although Lynn's reference to and adoption of philosophical concepts has no doubt been productive not only for his own practice but for the architectural discipline as a whole, the simplification of that philosophy serves to overlook many further-reaching implications, such as the reworking of subjectivity.

Simplification of borrowed thought is thus one key criticism in this respect. The other, which applies not only to Lynn but also to architects engaging with the concept of emergence, rests in the application of that thought as an organisational and form-generating strategy.

Influenced by the emergent behaviours within networks, swarms, flocks and so on, the key thing to point out with the uptake of a processional or relational mode of thought within architecture is the shift in emphasis from the end product – the building – to the process through which the building is conceived – the design process. The important aspect is how a form is generated, and how its parts interact and are organised, rather than the form itself.

Flows of various kinds and scales, make up architecture and connect it with the world.

Event (Deleuze/Guattari) as defined by Movement in terms of vectors and field relations, of Time or the idea that all things change, and Scale an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales become pertinent.

Arakawa and Gins explore a house with a client that at appears at first to be a pile of material. But that upon occupation, it expands into a habitable series of rooms whose volume shifts in relation to the movement of bodies within them.

Sunday, 16 November 2025

MAKING as a process of translation in the process of spatial iterations : An expanded field of exploratory inquiry.

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities.

Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us.

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

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

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

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 Geographies of Making

ReThinking Materials and Skills for Volatile Futures

The skill to sustain the life of something through repair and reappropriation

Collecting is an example or a pre-emptive activity that people who are skilled with their hands commonly share

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.

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair.

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