Wayfaring Places : Studio Compositions~Immersive Cells of Inquiry.

Undisciplined small spaces, places of refuge and solitude. A physical space, where an atmosphere quietly echoes spatial metaphors of enclosure, interiority and the sited and situated condition of making.

Studio Environments : Reconstructions and Fictions. Studio spaces for speculative making.

Wayfaring Landscapes~Affective Aesthetics of Difference.

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

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

 

 

A collection of slab-built ceramic sculptures crafted by artist Russell Moreton.

These works are described as exploring themes of "making" and the metaphysical nature of architectural spaces.

The sculptures are intended to evoke the silence and tranquillity found within historical architectural settings.

Moreton's process often involves slab construction techniques and research into specific historical sites to develop these forms.

The research collage depicts a curated collection of materials focused on late 20th-century art and architecture, likely from a research board or publication. Jannis Kounellis: The large black-and-white image features an installation by Jannis Kounellis, a key figure in the Italian Arte Povera movement, known for using raw materials like iron and coal. Carlo Scarpa: A handwritten note identifies another part of the collage as related to Carlo Scarpa, a Venetian architect renowned for his masterful renovation of historic buildings and intricate detailing. Architectural Detail: The top-right image showcases a historic stone structure, typical of the locations Scarpa worked with, showing a sculpture placed inside a renovated architectural space. Art Montage: The overall composition functions as a visual research montage, contrasting structural, industrial forms with historical contexts.

The documentary image and pinhole photograph features text referencing Rodin | Beuys Working Practices and includes a photographic portrait of a man reminiscent of artist Joseph Beuys. The collage incorporates elements that resemble technical drawings or maps of buildings, possibly related to architectural studies or documentation. This style of layering images with text overlays and handwritten annotations is consistent with artistic practices aimed at disrupting conventional viewing, similar to the "dynamic labyrinth" concepts explored in 1960s exhibitions.

Overspilling with Viscous Light~The Excess of Changefulness~Openings

Forward to The Sympathy of Things, Lars Spuybroek.

We see the excess of changfulness, at once immanent to and over spilling the structural integrity of the form.

Brian Massumi.

Overspilling Forms~Sympathy~Abject(ion)

Light forming compositions, architectures of processual excess.

An untimely beauty that will not stand still in its place.

Interiors, intimate sociological thresholds.

Spatial Bodies : Capacitors Of Light and Dark.

Visual Minor Keys : Gestures of sympathies/colour thoughts in a relational field.

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

Bodying/Scaffolds/Tentative Architectures : Modes of Existence creating Architectural Surrounds

Outpost 291024

Space And Subjectivity.

Collage with glass and documentation from Francesca Woodman.

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

Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.

Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)

Tentative/Processual Architectures. 

Arakawa and Gins.

Lucy Orta.

Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.

One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.

Henri Lefebvre.

Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.

Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.

The In-Between.

There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.

Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.

Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.

Frameworks/Scaffolding.

Affective Matter/Mattering.

Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.

Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Disclaimer.

Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.

Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.

This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).

Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.

Project 3.1

Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.

The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The  Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Species of Spaces.

Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.

Russell Coates.

Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.

Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.

Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.

Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.

The simple issues of attending to the material.

Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.

Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.

Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .

Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

The Process of Abject(ion).

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.

A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.

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

Transactive Spatial Gestures : Anticipation and Action/Affective Energies/Luminosity

12/10/2022

Reading with Deleuze and Spinoza~Radical Intuitions : Interacting with clay

Speculative and Exploratory Field Works.

Inscriptions, handwriting, cognitive connections across visual art materialisms. 

Gathered readings, walking across holloways and embodied dispositions, surfaces/inseparable cartographies of embodied experiences.

Undisciplined knowledge enables and sustains actions, gestures of a post disciplinary field.

Inseparable categories (containers and bodies) and their contents.

The Aesthetic,

The Economic,

The Political,

The Social,

Textures of Light : Vision and Touch in Irigarey, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty : Cathryn Vasseleu.

Bento's Sketchbooks : John Berger. 2015

Spinoza, practical philosophy : Gilles Deleuze. 2001

A concise and illuminating book about the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science.

Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and this reading of Spinoza by Gilles Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence."

Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, "Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount."

Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes.

Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.

Gilles Deleuze's Luminous Philosophy : Hanjo Berressem. 2021

'The plane of immanence is entirely made up of Light', Deleuze writes in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Engaging the whole body of Deleuze's work, including less rehearsed texts such as The Actual and the Virtual, Lucretius and the Simulacrum and his lectures on Spinoza, Hanjo Berressem traces the 'line of light' that runs through Deleuze's thought. The focus on the philosophical luminism that suffuses Deleuze's work delivers a novel reading of Deleuzian philosophy from the perspective of the complementarity of the photon. Berressem reveals a wealth of surprising and brilliant insights for anyone with an interest in Deleuze and in the implications of Deleuze's philosophical photonics for historiography, literary studies, painting and film.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781474450720

Slow Materials~Silent Transformations/Philosophy : Spaces beyond objects/The Movement~Sympathy of Ideas and Feelings.

 

Outpost 220921 

Loose Assemblages : The Movement of Ideas and Feelings.

The Sympathy of Things.

Lars Spuybroek.

‘If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty’ writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must ‘undo’ the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of ‘sympathy’, a core concept in Ruskin’s aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin’s ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.

 Xenotheka

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

Existence appertains to the nature of substance.

A substance cannot be produced from anything else: it will therefore be its own cause, that is its essence necessarily involves existence, or, existence appertains to its nature.

Ethics, Part 1, Proposition VII, Proof

Conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between organism and an object-to-be-known. 

The Feeling of What Happens, Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness

Antonio Damasio. 1999.

Architectural Body

Organism-Person-Environment

Arakawa and Gins.

The Silent Transformations.

François Jullien.

To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption&;just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern&;specifically Chinese&;ways of thinking about time and processes of change.

Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought&;s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, offers a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and provides insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.

In The Silent Transformations, Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy.

Xenotheka

Drawing is a  form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

The Human Body through drawing and philosophy

Berger/Spinoza 141

Matters of a discursive consciousness are explicit and explainable, and the line between discursive and practical consciousness is fluctuating and permeable, both drawing on the other in the act of agency/making social.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

Generative energies, entanglements, sensorial diversions from an open studio window overlooking Anglia Square

Improvisations/choreographed with the music/ambient noise are exploratory encounters  between flesh and sound

A hut of ones own (within and bounded by others), crafted and organized around simple processes and interactions within a fallow site given over to creative ecology of energies and enterprise

Vibrant yet curiously passive form of  urbanism

Affectivity as a mimesis of lively transfers between things, humans and non-humans

Human subjectivity : Mimetic Encounters/Explorations

Art works by gathering up forms and materials for affective experimentations in subjectivity

Corporeal unconscious animated by sensitivities/sympathies, a putative affinity (haptic) between certain things including bodies and organs which makes them liable not only to be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence one another. 

Intentionality/Sympathy/Sentiment/Difference

Inducing a particular set of ethical/political/social responses in actor/social audience 

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Calling a sympathy/subjectivity between coloured cloth/wallpaper/display cabinet and human flesh

Francesca Woodman

Mimesis and suggestion in the social, enacted through layers of mediation surrounding humans, objects and non-humans.

Camouflage. Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming 

Architectural Stratification/Installation : Crafting/Painting Transformative Reconstructions/Relationscapes

Outpost 200623

Sites of building over lived lives.

Of doing and un-doing, of being~becoming un-done by theory. 

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 

Sensing Spaces/Caryatid.

Painting Matter, Lime, Gesso, Charcoal, and Indian Ink on paper.

Clay.

Water.

Ceramics and Architecture.

 Architectural Stratifications, Carlo Scarpa, Intervening with History. 

The Placing of Pots.

The Hungate.

The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

A Moment of Pure Presence.

Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett

The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.

Analysing The Observed.

To abstract from the observed means to simplify the complexities of seeing.

Piet Mondrian.

Space and Form are ignored in this type of Abstraction, the Lines and their Vectors of Movement become a Map, Mapping Forces onto the Surface of the Picture.

Thinking with directional, durational markings/feelings/intuitive judgements.

Small Perceptions/Perceptions in Folding.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another, as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze, 1993.

Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaging landing sites.

Relationscapes.

Erin Manning.

'Incoherence' exists, which is why the composition 'Art' exists.

Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them. By giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they remain forever incoherent.

Andre Aciman/Edmund de Waal. 

For nearly fifty years my darkroom and studio have been the focus of my solitude.

Landing Sites.

The Expanding Field of Relations.

Organism/Person/Environment

I need silence to be able to think clearly, and an empty space where my thoughts can accumulate undisturbed.

Duration.

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid flowing time which is intertwined with an experience of being, where past, present and future merge into an experiential time of the individual being/becoming.

Steven Holl.

Darkrooms were dangerous places as well as magical ones, they are a painful metaphoric yoking of creation and destruction.

My final print is a golden square enclosing the pinkest dusk sky I had ever seen or imagined.

Filtered Light/Pot Metal Colours/Silver Stain/Filtows/Filters/Shadows.

The Light Gatherers.

Bodleian Libraries.

March 2022-October 2023.

Light Laboratory/Creation as Duration.

Glass vessels, as light filters shining the enlarger light through them and creating photograms. Garry's work oscillates with differential velocities. He works with great deliberation and then he works with abandon. I keep thinking about the tension between deliberation and abandon. You look at a painting by Agnes Martin and experience the temporal aspect of lines repeated slowly over days and weeks. A cell like structure repeats and changes, you repeat so that in return you can find the smallest oscillations of difference. An expanded field where you sense the development of different kinds of time, movements and their durations.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

Farewell to an Idea, Wallace Stevens/Edmund de Waal. 

Haecceity, thisness of things, which engenders feelings between ourselves/things/world.

I was grateful to have been able to live with so much pure colour for so long.

Space-Enfolding-Breath

Lake Of The Mind.

Ideas are already abstract.

Abstracted Transcriptions.

Drawing, Vectors and Forces of Subjectification.

Lines, mappings of forces across the surface of the picture.

Drawing on, analysis with, Dominants.

Formed by the dynamic forces derived from the outlines of objects and their surrounding spaces.

Palimpsest Collages

Psychogeographic Mappings

Architectural Models

The Process of Drawing/Building is Left Visible.

Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley.

Crafting Recovery and Regeneration.

Transformative Reconstruction.

SPAB, Summer 2023.

Michal Saniewski.

Falerone, San Francesco Monestry. Italy.

It's the forefront of modernisation, something that we thought the city was. The countryside is still the place where new ideas and experimentation actually take place..

Countryside : The Future.

Guggenheim Museum, 2020.

Heritage Conservation/Preservation

How do we insert new fabric into old and respect layers of history, of which the earthquakes are an inherent part? Perhaps some of the scars and cracks should be preserved to serve as a poignant  reminder of the past, becoming a living memorial? And perhaps there is potential to develop a new language of additive, 'surgical' architecture, where the contemporary timber frames serve a protective function, supporting and bracing the damaged medieval walls,  but at the same time can be inhabited, framing new uses and reprogramming internal spaces.

The reconstruction process should be used as an opportunity to add value beyond what existed before the earthquake. 

Exploring possible new functions and uses of currently empty spaces and damaged buildings, the local community was asked to participate in the act of psychogeographic mapping and thus rediscovering and revaluating the town on different levels.

Key themes of the New European Bauhaus initiative.

Renovation of existing buildings and public spaces in a spirit of circularity and carbon neutrality.

Preservation and transformation of cultural heritage.

Regeneration of urban or rural spaces.

 

Could Falerone become an experimental hotbed, an example of sustainable, community-driven reconstruction of urban fabric and place identity? The new crafts school could be an opportunity to achieve just that, stimulating collaborations not just with other towns and universities, but with regional authorities and even with the EU. 

Studio Cyanotypes.

Tools/Working Drawings and the Semblances of Spatial Agencies.

Keywords.

Visual Substance, Causal Doing, Investigating, Inquiry, Process, Agency, Matter, Material, Discursive, Iterative, Creative Apparatuses, Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies That Matter,