Tuesday, 27 January 2026

Drawing/Building Scripts : Collage/Photography

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 

















Thursday, 22 January 2026

The Body and Spatial Boundaries~A Spatial Inquiry into Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Outpost 280122

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries.

russellmoreton.com


Tim Ingold.

From science to art and back again: The pendulum of an anthropologist.

https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/2237/2055









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


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


The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.


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


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


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


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

Louis Kahn, 1959.


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

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.


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


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


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


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


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


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


Sunday, 18 January 2026

Making Matter(s)~Truth : The unison of experience and imagination in a world to which we are alive and that is alive to us. Tim Ingold

 Architectonic Space: Fifteen Lessons on the Disposition of the Human Habitat.

The purpose, dynamic and potential of Anthropology.

russellmoreton.com


The poetics of order:

Dom Hans van der Laan’s architectonic space

Caroline Voet








Already in his first writings in the 1930s, Dom van der Laan aims to define architectural principles that provide an intellectual expression of the act of dwelling (‘wonen’). To dwell is to enter into a relationship with one’s surroundings, meaning to understand them. For van der Laan, this is the primordial function of architecture: it makes space readable. From his Benedictine background, he draws concepts that enable him to understand this complex process of cognition. He studies the old church fathers such as St Thomas Aquinas, especially his comments on Plato and Aristotle. The Benedictine way of life builds upon the intertwined relation between mystery and matter, between intellect and senses, believing that this relation can be expressed through a Platonic order.5 Professor van Hooff, in describing the work of Dom van der Laan, defines cognition as a dual process of synthesis and analysis.6 On the one hand, there is the act of living, a synthesis of the concrete and singular reality. On the other hand, there is the process of analysis by the abstracting intellect. For us to know the concrete and singular reality, an intense interrelation between the two processes is needed.


http://www.vanderlaanstichting.nl/pics/pdf/130105-poetics_of_order-Caroline_Voet.pdf

Saturday, 17 January 2026

Oceanic Metaphors~An Interpenetrated Meshwork

On Human Correspondence.

For Marcel Mauss, real-life human beings inhabit a fluid reality in which nothing is ever the same from one moment to the next and in which nothing ever repeats. In this oceanic world every being has to find a place for itself by sending out tendrils which can bind it to others.

Thus hanging on to one another beings strive to resist the current that would otherwise sweep them asunder. Things do not aggregate and they do not fuse. They do however interpenetrate their many tendrils and tentacles interweave to form a boundless and ever extending meshwork.

 

On The Gift~Octopuses and Anemones.

The Life of Lines.

Tim Ingold









Monday, 5 January 2026

Artworks : Living on the macroscopic description/analysis of what happens.

Outpost 240724

Art, suggests that there are other ways of conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality. 

An intermediate period of free energy in motion from one system to another.

Living on the macroscopic description of what happens.

russellmoreton.com




Architectures, processes of thought that are analogically driven and developed into further recombinations, poetics.

The disequilibrium of the world we live in. 


We reread the notes we had made in the ferry logbook in order to commit everything to memory. Then, to be rid of the evidence, the old man tore out the page and tossed it in the stove. Engulfed in flames, the paper shrivelled and dissolved. We stood in silence for a moment, staring into the fire.

The work began the next day. I divided the research materials from the storeroom into small batches and burned them in the garden incinerator as though disposing of old magazines.

The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in aches. Why would I keep them when I don't think I will be able to recall the meaning of the word 'photograph' much longer. Nothing comes back now when I see a photograph. No memories, no response. They're nothing more than pieces of paper. A new hole has opened in my heart, and there's no way to fill it up again. That's how it is when something disappears.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa 









Art works through the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning. What happens when we react to  a work of art is not down to the art object in itself, rather it lies in the complexity of our brain  in the kaleidoscopic networks of analogical relationships with which our neurons weave, for what we call meaning.

We are involved, engaged, being into art, takes us out of our habitual, sleepwalking, reconnecting us instead with the joy of seeing something anew in the world. 

Carlo Rovelli.


The disequilibrium/entropic nature for traces and memory. 

Men feel free because they are aware of their choices and their wishes. But they ignore the causes that lead them to will and to choose, and do not give the slightest attention to theses causes.

Spinoza.




Thursday, 1 January 2026

Thoughts on Art : Janie says we all such a crush of want. Nick Cave.

little Janie wakes up on the floor & she says!!!!
we’re GONNA HAVE A REAL COOL TIME TONITE!!!!
(Janie says we are all such a crush of want half-mad w/ loss we are
violated in our sleep & we weep & we toss & we turn & we
burn we are
hypnotised we are cross-eyed we are pimped we are bitched we are told
such monstrous lies—)
Janie wakes up & she says
we’re GONNA HAVE A REAL COOL TIME TONITE!!!!


Today's Lesson.
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. 
DIG!!!LAZARUS DIG !!!. 2008


The Planet drowns  in an ocean of photographic emulsion.

The more civilised we are, the fewer moral choices we have to make. But the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither  from neglect. Once you dispense with morality, the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics.
Super Cannes, J G Ballard. 2000









Tuesday, 30 December 2025

Moments/Marks/Gestures differ because of their fecundity.

Outpost 010724


The Rehabilitation Of The Imagination.

Correspondences between humankind and the world.

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

russellmoreton.com




In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.

Gaston Bachelard 





Imagination must infuse a second life into familiar images, it must create 'metaphors of metaphors'.

Reverie, reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication.

Gaston Bachelard.


Moments differ because of their fecundity.

The Intuition Of The Instant.


The imagination is not a state, it is the human existence itself.

William Blake. 


For Bachelard, Blake's poetics, presents a complex around the dialectics of rock and cloud. A dynamic imagination, he is a poet of absolute imagination for whom the unreal directs the real.


The Reverberation of Images.


In a word, the phenomenological approach is a description of the immediate relationship of phenomena with a particular consciousness. It allows Bachelard to renew his warnings against the temptation to study images as things. Images are lived, experienced, re-imagined in an act of consciousness which restores at once their timelessness and their newness.


Therefore a poetic image does not duplicate present reality.


From phenomenology Bachelard retains above all the admonition to return to 'phenomena themselves' this requires putting aside naïve belief in the reality of things and approaching phenomena through consciousness which is always intentional, always consciousness of something.


I realized then we were thinking the same thing. As we looked into each other's eyes, I felt, once again, the anxiety that had taken root in our hearts a long time ago. The light reflecting from the spray of the fountain lit R's face.


The boy was fiddling with a nondescript stone as though it were a toy with some elaborate hidden mechanism. His plain light blue gloves had obviously been knit by hand. They were connected to each other with a strand of yarn, to keep them from becoming separated. I remembered wearing the same kind, long ago, and, in this basement so full of anxiety, they seemed like the lone sign of innocence and peace.


The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.


The Immaterial Body.

Proposals through transparency and trans-illumination.


Sensate Inscriptions. 

The Mechanized Image.


Thresholds and projections of creative perception.


Drawing into the visual field.

Paint, pigments, lines, bought to light. 

Gestures, lines from sensations and its seeing.


Life Drawing/Corporeal Social Bodies.

Drawing/Sensations into the memory and anxieties of physical things.


Drawing attention to the relations of the body.

Social and sexual politics.


The Modernist Offence.

Schiele And The Naked Female Body.

Gemma Blackshaw.





Feminist art historians have developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between sex and spectatorship.


As Abigail Soloman-Godeau has claimed in her exploration of photography and female subjectivity in the Second French Empire, the barriers between what is deeped licit and illicit, acceptably seductive or wantonly salacious, aesthetic or prurient, are never solid because contingent, never steadfast because they traffic with each other – are indeed dependant upon each other.


How might such an engagement with difference, with the binary system, shift not only our understanding but also our appreciation of Schiele's representation of the naked female body, of what continues to be described and displayed as 'the nude'? 


Egon Schiele.

The Radical Nude.