Saturday, 21 March 2026

Circulating Objects/Assemblages : Making Spaces/Creative Strategies

Outpost 091124

Occupant Spatial Relations 







Sites centred around interactions of creative practice and architectural theories of making spaces.

Architecture understood as a collection of collective parts.

A diagrammatic art of lived abstraction and lived-in abstraction.

A space for inhabiting experience.

Attention to material : Architecture as the excitement of building/dwelling/becoming
















An inhabiting event is the medium of architecture.

Garden : Spatial Markers/Bodies/Paths.

Spatial Practices : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies. Tate Modern. #7

Zuzana Kovar, notes that the shortcoming of Tschumi's event is that while it introduces a processional understanding of architecture and mobilizes the body in space, space it self remains static.


Equation becomes a spatial assemblage for occurrences.


For Deleuze, an 'assemblage' extends the understanding between bodies and spaces.


Program is determinate.

Event is indeterminate.


A program gives a fixed outcome, a fixed spatial experience. An event does not, critically the 'notion of event' is that it activates potentialities. Each space, may be thought of as composed of multiple singular potentialities that lay dormant, unless activated. 


All spaces contain multiple potentialities.


Event Is Not Program.


There is no architecture without actions, no architecture without events, no architecture without program.


Architecture=Space + Event.

Tschumi.


Program is to be distinguished from 'event', a program is a determinate set of expected occurrences, a list of required utilities often based on social behavior, habit or custom. In contrast events occur as an indeterminate set of outcomes, revealing hidden potentialities or contradictions in a program and relating them to a particularly appropriate (or possibly exceptional) spatial configuration that may create conditions for unexpected events to occur.


Generating uncommon or unpredictable events through particular spatial configurations of the in-between.


Abject(ion) Studio Space.

Subjectivity/Spatial Bodies.









Discursive Objects/Architectural Occurrences/Resonances.

Assemblages, fired, raw pigments, paint, chalk, wax, plaster. 


The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.

Erin Manning.


Ceramics Speculative/Exploratory Practices.


New Ceramic Forms of Research/Theoretical Objects.

Wednesday, 18 March 2026

Speculative Gestures of Agencing Attention : Template and Form/Enchantments and Insights between materials

Making Objects : Of a critical and theoretical nature.

Clay : Atmospheric Interpretations.

Ceramics~Abstract Painting : Re-Consolidations/Abstract Vessels.

https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/russellmoreton









THE BODY AS A TERRITORY IN RAW CLAY

Developing Formative Histories/Indexical and Involuntary Markings 

Observational essay/account whilst work is resident in the Yard,

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft

Temporality. The state of existing within or having some relationship with time. A clay form with its pre-performative drawing used as a template.

These distinctively different yet closely related works are arranged with the clay piece on its custom made trolley with its calico material that acts as a sheet on which the clay work rests. The drawing is placed behind it fastened to a wall with the drawings bottom edge just making contact with the floor adjacent to the castors that grant the clays supportive trolley mobility. The clay work has a direct relation to this adjacent drawing, the drawing is revealing the traced female that is just discernable on the surface of the clay. On closer inspection of the drawing it is just possible to see a rubbing taken from the periphery of the clay form. Both the paper and the clay seem to be in some reflective mode of mutual intimacy, marks transferred between one another during the manufacture of both are subtly replicated on the form of one and the surface of another. The pierced clay slab (vessel) is the first visible casualty of the entropic process of shrinkage. A significant crack separates the clay vessel into two separate but unique entities that share the same defect as if they were still whole. This division through the continent of the body has been subtly marked by the raised furrow of silica deposited when the clay bodies were in closer proximity. The calico has also rendered a new visual territory around the entire periphery of the form, created by the deposited silica sand and the resultant shrinkage that is taking place. There is the sense of this form moving in two dimensions, creating an extended footprint of previously covered territory whilst continuing to shrink bodily within the details and markings on its surface. This phenomena seems to give the piece a strange complexity of both temporality and a duration on which that temporality is directly charted, the calico is instrumental in registering this perception. The agencies of both the silica sand and the calico sheet between them regulate and guide our understanding of the observation of the clays infinitesimal shrinkage. The compression of the clays structure due to its shrinkage increases its density and visually alters the arrangement of the piercing that are mapped over its surface, the concise circles and holes cut through the clay have now blended into the overall tension imparted by shrinkage, there is a sense that precision of the marks, their machined appearance which contrasted to the locality to the clay around them has been lost, reclaimed by the inner natural torsions taking control of the piece as a whole. The clays surface with its sandy granular deposits whose particle size has become visually larger at the expense of its hosts shrinkage now auger for a territory, a land mass devoid of water, the sense of this territory becoming anhydrous, giving rise to thoughts of thirst and fragility, even the once precise holes give the impression of barren watering places isolated within a landscape in a state of drought. The once visible markings are now obscured by the action of the shrinking territory and its granular coating as it now gains in its ability to obscure features. The traced and drawn female form is still harboured somewhere under this obscuring sand. Yet she now resides as a brittle uncompromising inscription of her former self, the plasticity that once gave her a sensuality into the yielding and pliable surface has succumbed to the unstoppable internal shrinkage of the clay particles starved of moisture. The clay is acknowledging the atmosphere of its given surroundings, our environment.


The Draught, J G Ballard 

The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

The Disposition of the Body, Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract)


The clay suffers, dehydrates as its moisture is absorbed by the surrounding atmosphere, giving up its plasticity and its almost inhuman sensuality and tactility. Presented amongst us, it is rendered into a state of its own homogeneity Conversely the working drawing which has evolved from being a simple template to aid the registration of celestial information within the territory of the body. Has itself become involved in its own creation as an art object. On completing its initial purpose, the task of transferring details onto the surface of the embryonic clay form. It has now become embroiled and entangled as it were with the creative issues of the clay form; “they” have become members of the same intuitions the same creative flux, sisters. The drawn “sister” contains the origin of their shared inscription, the originating female trace. The gesture and act still remains, visible only by physical impression of transference; which is left proud, raised and projecting passed the original flatness of the paper. These material read together render insights into superimposed temporalities shared by the art object, they question and reveal the reverse side of origins, of the work or its working drawing, they all underline the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary art practice.





The Drawing strangely or ironically displays values in a state of stasis, now lost with its sister. The cyanotype “sea” with its fluidity bleeding into the porosity of the news print. The “ streams” of residues washed from other areas are now deposited into the interior space where they have collected finally to evaporate leaving their watery remains. Only the clarity of the “permanent” marker pen remains untouched by any entropic activity. Objectively the drawing materials has slowed down to the point when one might grant it a measure of completeness. Its particular temporalities now exist within the interactions it can manifest from others, other things, other situations that are drawn into its proximity, its particular field of intuitive reverberations, its unique dwelling place.

The clay form seems to have gathered up its history of temporal acts that culminate in its present form. This presented object, with temporalities marked on site has become a vehicle, a vessel for its own entropic voyage, another temporality that itself adds a spatial dimension. This object for me appears to be totally contingent yet relational to aspects of space and time, it exists uniquely “once” in the present, presence it creates with its observer. The result of this contingent object is that “we through it” are constantly travelling away from its point of origin, we as a result feel the passage of the entropic value of time through the human condition. Whereas the drawing does refer to a now and a past, an elsewhere ,it seems locked between these two comprehensions.

The clay form has clearly an entropic element which seems to give rise to phenomenologically driven inquiry which in turn helps to creates our sense of a spatiality. Uniquely formed between observation and our own movement, we are in effect made to sense that the object heralds our own becoming.


Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

Visualising Environmental Agency


"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Art and Agency, Alfred Gell 1998)"

"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.


Drawing intervention and speculative sculptural environment. 









Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School. 

Teacher Education Manual

Insight-Bohm-Krishnamurti. 1979

David Bohm, Are we saying that insight is an energy which illuminates the activity of the brain, and that in this illumination the brain itself begins to act differently?

Krishnamurti, You are quite right. That's all-that is what takes place. That is -this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set.


a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari


Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.


Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Christopher Wilmarth : Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Light : Drawing into Sculpture
Archive Material/Folders 2008/2013



The sense that glass provides an opening, a means of passage through to something else, is as central to Mallarme's Poetry as it to Wilmarth's Art.
Steven Henry Madoff


Christopher Wilmarth
The Museum of Modern Art
May25-August 20, 1989

The exhibition features glass and steel constructions that manipulate light and shadow and suggest poetic, even romantic content through a constructivist, geometric idiom.

Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.












Monday, 16 March 2026

Artists Book, "Leylines" an art based inquiry.

Artists Book, "Leylines" an art based inquiry. by Russell Moreton

Artist’s Book: white and coloured pages, card covers with cyanotype of Winchester Cathedral.

A hand bound book comprising of five signatures each with four folios. This book contains a collection of postcards made from contact prints and photograms from Tidbury Ring using the cyanotype process. Other pages contain some cyanotype paintings/abstracts around the theme of dwelling and hut. Silver gelatin images of St Catherine’s Hill are present as are some experimental pinhole photography.     

Writing has nothing to do with signifying, it has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.
Deleuze, Guattari. 1988.



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.