Thursday, 12 March 2026

Art Workings~Visual Art Practice: Visual Art Archive : Russell Moreton

Art Workings~Visual Art Practice: Visual Art Archive : Russell Moreton: Making : Anthropological Objects ~ Fabrications on Humaning . Tim Ingold . Ceramics ~ Fired Clay . Russell Moreton Saatchi Artist . Waiting ...

Clay~Fire~Colour : Following Resonances : Interiors in fired clay.

Ruins · Jozef van Wissem · Zola Jesus

When Shall This Bright Day Begin

℗ 2016 Jozef van Wissem and Zola Jesus

Released on: 2016-02-05

Mixer: Jozef van Wissem
Producer: Jozef van Wissem
Composer: Jozef van Wissem
Music  Publisher: Wissem Music
Lyricist: Zola Jesus








Monday, 9 March 2026

Wanderlust : Visual Feelings of Anarchism and Beauty

Wanderlust : A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit.

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour
This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but improvisational act.

Land : Antony Gormley, Clare Richardson, Jeanette Winterson.

Temporary is human. We don't live long. Our ancestors lived less long. Graveyards and ruins remind us of the atom and jot of our span. Against the reality of temporary, humans stage heroic battles for permanence : Archives, museums, endowments, societies.

Wandering is "not purposeful". A lot of art is made while wandering about either in your mind or on foot, Its a necessary aimlessness.
Jeanette Winterson

Anarchism : A Very Short Introduction, Colin Ward.

It is possible to discern four principles that would shape an anarchist theory of organisations: that they should be voluntary, functional, temporary and small.

The Rings of Saturn : W.G.Sebald.

I pressed on to towards Dunwich, which seemed so far in the distance as to be quite beyond my reach. It was as if I had been walking for hours before the tiled roofs of houses and the crest of a wooded hill gradually became defined.


Inside Phenomena/Catching The Light
Layered drawing : Sensuality, Drawing and Astronomical Space.
Locality/Social Complexity- Works on Paper
An ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse : The Book of Tea/A Hut of Ones Own
Reading Into the Visual : Exploratory Images
Littoral Zone

























Visual Poetics/Bricolage/Red is not a colour : The Studio/Space of Real Situations

Spatial Collage : Research/Discourse/Apparatus

Farnham University of the Creative Arts


rhythmanalysis : Space, Time and Everyday Life.

Lefebvre


Jannis Kounellis

Carlo Scarpa


Translates the painterly relationship of figure and ground into the space of real situations

The Visual Poetics of Jannis Kounellis, Suzanne Cotter and Andrew Nairne.

Modern Art Oxford, 2004-2005.


Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous.









Speculative Raku Firing. 2012


Red is not a Colour. Bernard Tschumi.

bricolaged notes  from STUDIO UNBOUND : Lane Relyea

Institutional Critique : Studio/Post Studio Activity


SPATIAL AGENCY : Spaces of Fluid Interchange Between Objects, Activities, People.

Today studio and museum are superseded by more temporal, transient events.



The Function of the Studio

Daniel Buren

The Studio is no longer as seen as belonging to a system.

No longer a retreat but it now INTEGRATES

It is all exterior.


Material Flows 2007/2017 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


The Network places the artist as a 'like item' within an integrative inventory or database.

Networks are both integrative and decentralizing in that they privilege casual or weak ties over formal commitments.

Being part of a network that privileges itinerancy and circulation over fixity, that diminishes hierarchies and boundaries in favour of mobility and flexibility across a more open extensive environment. 



'The Studio made into a showroom display'


Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. 2004


Claire Bishop



The Individual and The Social


A place where meanings, properties and behaviors fluctuate radically.

Bennett Simpson. Can you work as fast as you like to think. 2003


The hosting/re-created artist's workspaces, like a threshold between private and public actuality and potentiality.


The Notion of the Evolutionary Exhibition.


Placing greater emphasis on INFORMATION, DISCUSSION and GATHERINGS



Establishing NETWORKS, fluctuating between highly specialized work by scientists, artists, dancers and writers

Obrist/Vanderlinden, Laboratorium, Antwerp. 1999

MODULATION, Deleuze


Immaterial Social Acquaintances/Information

Along with the rise of Networks comes a new Ideology, one that Advertises Agency, Practice and Everyday Life.


The Dividual (The New Mobile Creator) Deleuze


Someone who is 'UNDULATORY In ORBIT, in a CONTINUOUS NETWORK

Colour Nexus : Promiscuous Mobility

OBSCURED MATERIAL




OUTPOST STUDIO 3.16

Notes from sketchbooks


Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze


Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)


Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

Materials bound by contact/canvas

Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,


A philosophy of Reading

Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,


Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things


Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects


Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

Sunday, 8 March 2026

Speculative Learning Environment : Study~Studio : The Library/Hidden Curriculum

Hidden Curriculum #2 by Russell Moreton





Study~Studio : A Philosophy of Solitude~Making

Hidden Curriculum , a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.
26/10/2013

Inquiry into learning environments through contemporary art based practices.
Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.
Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School. 

a thousand plateaus
Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage
Becoming
Body Without Organs
Nomad
Rhizome
Smooth Space
State
War Machine

Monday, 2 March 2026

Overflowing Forces~in-acts of Sympathy with the Anarchic share of Existence.

Extreme Atmospheres : Fired Clay Labyrinths.

Interpenetrations~Visual Art Materialisms.

//russellmoreton.academia.edu












Clay~Anarchive Matter(s) : Transitive Forces of a Minor Key.

Research-Creation as Spatial Practice.

Clay Bodies~Baffles : Atmospheres and the Continual Weather World.


On a making that is a speculative pragmatism reaching out into the more-than anarchic share of existence, creating the conditions for living better. Moreton/Whitehead/Manning/Ingold.


Making Processual Architectures.

Clay+Ceramic+Anarchive : Minor Gestures~Interstitial space of emergent expression


An anarchive is a dynamic, creative, and "feed-forward" process that acts as a repository of traces rather than a static, traditional archive. Coined by philosophers Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, it functions as a "living" collection that encourages new, generative creations and potential rather than merely documenting the past.


Key Characteristics of an Anarchive


Active Process: Unlike an archive, which preserves and fixes, the anarchive is in constant flux and continues to evolve, focusing on potential rather than just the past.

"Feed-Forward" Mechanism: It is a "springboard" or "curating score" that triggers future artistic, social, or research-based work, rather than just acting as a reference to a past event.

Traces vs. Documents: Anarchives collect "traces" or fragments of events, which are seen as "carriers of potential" for further, often unpredictable, development.

Subversive Nature: It acts against the rigid, linear, and "destructive tendencies" of traditional archiving.

Collaborative & Experimental: It often involves the co-creation of knowledge, often in the form of multimedia projects, such as the anarchive.net project. 

The term is often used in arts-based research, such as the "Walking Anarchive" project, to describe how researchers can work with memories, experiences, and artistic materials in a non-linear way. 

Wednesday, 18 February 2026

Pure Presence~Clay Stories : Ethics/Aesthetics/Politics, Jane Bennett

Anarchives/Clay Stories : Lines of Flight/Dovecotes for Philosophers.
Discursive Documents : Enchantment/Somatic Affects, Jane Bennett.
Visual Art Materialisms : Spatial Bodies~Human Bodies
Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

2013













Monday, 16 February 2026

The Minor Gesture : The Diagram of the Painting/Fielding the Feeling of Force taking Form

Outpost 240723

russellmoreton.com







The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.


Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.







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


The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.

Relationscapes, Erin Manning.



Propositions of Force/Appetition.

The Work's Diagram.


The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.

Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.



Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.


Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.


Creating work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.


Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s). 



The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.  



We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.

Erin Manning.



Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment. 

Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging. 

Organism-Person-Environment


A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.


Fielding how we think-feel.


Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.


A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.

Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.



A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.

Erin Manning. 



The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.


For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.



We Land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Actuality is the decision amid potentiality. 


A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.

Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.


For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.


A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.



Apparatuses/Diagrams


Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.



In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.



The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.


The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.



Sculpting in Time.


Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.


For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.

Erin Manning.


Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall


Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.


Cultivation Field Research Collage

Geological era 1800.

The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'

Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.

Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.

Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared. 

Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy

Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman




Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.

From Models to Drawings.

Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments 

Filtered Light.


Sunday, 15 February 2026

Atemwende, a breathturn : Adam Gopnik and Edmund de Waal

Craft and Art : Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)


Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:
About the Art Of Edmund de Waal
Adam Gopnik. 2013.

‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, 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 Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)

Ceramics and Architecture.
Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment
The Porcelain Rooms




The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience of possessed space.
These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

‘ The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.

‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.
The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.
The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.


Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots.Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)