Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape

Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape.

The task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience, architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009

This exploratory project centers around the heritage site of Waverley Abbey. This site has ruins from its ecclesiastical architecture that could be utilized in the sensory aspects of an architectural experience. The site offers up the possibility of constructing and choreographing enclosures and interiors by directly working with its unique sensitivities of place, mass, light, materials and surfaces. This project sets up real potentials to explore the possibility of crafting interior spaces that can host a rich layering of place perceptions. Currently my research has explored a number of themes and formal structures that might engender these concerns through my professional engagements with contemporary art practices and experience in the construction industry.

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects 2007

Leon van Schaik, Spatial Intelligence 2008

Henry Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light 2009

Architecture is not made with the brain. The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.

Architectural Association 2005.

Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.

Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.

Holistic Practices.

The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker,2005:85)

Transitions between spaces.

‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining. ’(Schregenberger,2005:82)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)

Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker

Urban Structuring.

Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.

The Everyday.

Life between buildings.

The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.

Heavy Prefabrication. Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.

To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’

We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker,2005:85)

The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.

Cultural Background.

Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker,2005:85)

The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.

Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.

Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.

Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itselfi importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time). ’   (Krucker,2005:87)

The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).

Neutrality and Character.

‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.

The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker,2005:89)

‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker,2005:90)

Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates.

‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions.’

Research Contexts/Materials

The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.

What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.

Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.

A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project. 

‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison,2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings. 

A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.

Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution. 

‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison,2005:94)

Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project. 

‘The concept of Ways as a means of organizing circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison,2005:94)

A simple organizing circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.

Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.

By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.

The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison,2005:97)

Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)

‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways, etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison,2005:97)

Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership. 

‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison,2005:98)

Could it be that where a human settlement seems structure less, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?

‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)

‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison,2005:98)

From One Place to Another : Contained Inner Spaces/Systems.

Outpost 220724

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space.

Art is energy.

Graham Gussin.

We take ...our everyday external reality very much for granted: the room that we sit in, the streets around us, the virtual space of billboards, and movies and TV ... we take all this for granted. But in fact it is, literally speaking, an illusion generated by our central nervous system. It's as much a virtual reality as the one the cyber people are working on ...Within our minds all these different planes of spatial reality are intersecting.

J.G. Ballard, KGB 7, KGB Media, 1995

All of Graham Gussin's work engages in some way with the human experience of the infinite. He is conscious that our perception and understanding of the world is manipulated and transformed by a complex layering of mass communications and consumer culture. Often his work suggests a sense of displacement, playing on our desire to be somewhere else, in a different time or space.

He has been particularly influenced by science fiction, especially of the sort that presents a set of circumstances requiring resolution, such as H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, or touches on what J.G. Ballard has described as the 'internal landscape',

Any Object in the Universe relates to a romantic tradition of landscape, together with the idea of a uropian space which is often explored in these types of science fiction.

Much of Gussin's work is experiential, dependent on the viewer for its completion. In Beyond the Infinite of 1994, for example, the artist appropriated a scene from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He edited and displayed two film loops of the same scene, one slightly longer than the other so that one loop appears to wait for, or follow, the other: 'The shorter loop has the spaceman wandering around the hotel, endlessly looking for himself. The longer loop includes not only this search but also the discovery of himself as an old man', Kubrick's narrative sequence is effectively disrupted. Standing between the two monitors, the viewer becomes a conductor of time and space between the two scenes.

States of mind seem to be the main subjects of Gussin's work, conditions or states that might be, for example, associated with the sublime, the sense of awe and wonder that takes one out of oneself, But it is the failure to find the sublime moment that he appears to linger on. In Fall (7200-1) he deals very literally with the agitated state of expectation, Confronted by a large video projection of an unspectacular landscape the viewer stands on the edge of it waiting for something to happen, Suddenly the tranquility and emptiness of the landscape is disturbed by something falling dramatically out of the sky, shattering the still surface of a lake: 'I like the idea that Fall embodies the possibility of this thing happening without anybody seeing it. The splash occurs infrequently so the subject of this piece isn't really the disturbance- rather it's the possibility of it happening'.

The idea for Any Object in the Universe stemmed from a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, A Tale Of The Ragged Mountains, which the artist summarises as follows: 'The whole text is a vision ...there is a character who takes a lot of opium and coffee. He then goes for a walk and slips into a previously unrecognised region within his geographic locality. Within that second or parallel space he dies, but somehow returns to tell the tale of his death in that space. When his tale is complete he dies in real space and time. So it's a kind of closed loop, returning in and out of and being effected by two parallel spaces, an illusory space that becomes so powerful that it results in death'.

A similar notion of slipping between two spaces underlies Any Object in the Universe. Walking in to a darkened room the viewer steps on to a slightly raised floor, each step producing an electronically generated echo. The walls are clad with what appears to be sound-proofing material. Projected on to one wall is an image of the same room, empty but for a microphone on a stand. Confusingly, the echo appears to be coming from the fictional, projected space. 'What at first seems to be an echo chamber becomes a space where sound cannot escape, a trap of some kind.' The viewer, like the echo, seems to be caught between a real and an imaginary space.

The other fictional space that influenced Gussin's making of Any Object in the Universe is the sound- proofed capsule depicted in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth, a capsule where, as Gussin describes it, 'all sound is deadened and disappears ...It's an enclosed, very precise and exactly measured space, but also an infinite space ...In the film David Bowie falls to earth. The whole film is a struggle against gravity, ...about him attempting to get back into the sky, which he doesn't achieve'. Commenting on his use of an image from the cinema screen the artist has said, 'I like the way that filmic space spills out into reality'.

As if standing in front of a painting by Mark Rothko, or on the 'beam-me- up' platform in Star Trek, we stand on the raised floor, waiting for something to happen, desiring to be transported in some way to another dimension. The artist explains: 'What I was interested in trying to do was to place the viewer in the space that is projected, just for a split second, so that it makes him or her disappear from the space he or she is standing in to occupy that space, even just for the blink of an eye ...That's where the work really lies, in that momentary confusion of not being able to tell'.

Alongside Any Object in the Universe Gussin shows a number of black and white line drawings. Like the installation, these Drawings of Nothing and Nowhere explore how we experience space. The rectangular shapes seem to hover on the surface of the paper yet perspectivally they disappear towards a central vanishing point. As familiar as the introductory credits for Pearl and Dean advertising that prepare audiences for the immersive space of cinema, they ask the viewer to think about location, about their position in time and space. The drawings cannot succeed in the aim suggested by their title, instead they draw attention to the way we attempt to articulate and measure both internal and external space.

Text written by Virginia Button

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/art-now-graham-gussin

From One Place to Another.

From Another System.

Contained Spaces/Systems.

It's true, I know, that there are more gaps in the island than there used to be. When I was a child, the whole place seemed ... how can I put this? ...a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn't worry.

Yoko Ogawa.

The Memory Police.

Things oriented in time present themselves to us as irreversible phenomena.

Drawing, traces that create the intermediate spaces of perception.

Visual traces of both the macroscopic and microscopic phenomena/memory/of matter.

Art is all about energy (free energy from one system/person to another)

Durational/Immediate Matters of Concern/Media.

Things/Correspondences in their propositional state of becoming.

Developing the creative liberty with a conceptual structure. This development grows through analogy and recombination. Making an analogy involves taking an aspect of a concept and re-using it in another context, preserving something of its original meaning, while letting something else go. In such a way that the resultant combination produces new and effective meaning.

Carlo Rovelli.

Drawing as an analogically informing process.

Architectural/Conceptual Frameworks.

Making Immediate Spatial Relations/Situatedness.

What Remains?

Why Does It Remain?

The intermediate/immediacy space of drawing as the traces of disequilibrium. 

The formation of every trace is nothing other than an intermediate step towards equilibrium. 

If the present has traces of the past it is solely due to the disequilibrium of that past. It is for this reason that we remember the past not the future. Because of the disequilibrium in the past, we know the past, because there are traces of it in the present, in our memories for example. To say that the past is determined is to say no more that we have traces of it. It is not a direction intrinsic to time that makes the past knowable, determined.

What we call the past is how things were arranged at one point in time.

It is the disequilibrium of the past, only that, that gives rise to traces.

A meteorite that falls on the moon carries free energy with it, its crater is the trace that it leaves until the incessant unravelling of things erases it. In this intermediate phase, the crater is a trace of the impact/event, a memory of it. Only traces exist in this intermediate period. 

The same goes for a photograph, for the memory in our brain, it exists thanks to the fact that free energy has arrived in a system, the camera film, our brain, from another system that was not in equilibrium with it, and the fact that it takes time for equilibrium to be re-established.

White Holes

Carlo Rovelli.

Notes

36. The low entropy of the past is the ultimate source of all the information contained in every trace or memory.

37. The distinction between causes and effects has no meaning in the microscopic description of phenomena. At the microscopic level of things there are regularities, physical laws, and probability and these notions do not distinguish between past and future. The distinction between past and future is a property of history of the universe from the variables that we call macroscopic, it is only for this reason that we can speak about causes.

Gaston Bachelard never developed a metaphysics capable of unifying his reflections on science and poetry.

Much that our powers here cannot sustain is permitted there.

We fly to the other side of space and of time.

The equations of quantum gravity describe a world more complex than a simple spatiotemporal continuum.

Indexical Trace/Drawing : Anthropocentrism/Hospitality.

Outpost 14082

Figurative Anthropocentrism in the Visual Arts/Humanities.

Organism-Person-Environment

Architectural Body.

A figure in congress with its environment.

Attunement is a living dynamic relation with another being, it doesn't stop.

De-constructivist Drawings.

Causal Matter Remains.

Reclaiming the papers reserve, its infinite space, through the reclamation of mark making.

Drawing/Veering towards things.

All lines as vectors of movement, situated to have immediate phenomenal values.

Seeking out, a line that searches for a corporeal congress.

Immediate primal territories of making/tuning differences.

Marks of attunement and adaption that we can own and explore.

Indexical Trace/Butades, definitive space/body of a boundary of sensation. 

Bodily inclusion, a drawing hidden yet revealing its presence intimately to the papers total surface. 

A lines movement, its attunement/demarcation to the body, of the body, creates the flow of sensation, simultaneous lines make explicit the absence of the matter into form.  

On the manner of attunement, since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. Nor is this attunement a 'merely' aesthetic approach to a basically blank extensional substance. Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing. 

In Art As In Life.

What would it look like if we allowed more and more things to have some kind of power over us?

There is an excessive intensity to the energy of things that can't be contained efficiently. This can produce a type of restricted economy, that is an economy in which the dominant theme is efficiency.

Living in a society based on principles of restriction and efficiency, a modern life that is tight and restrictive and full of all kinds of police and policing, of policing pleasure, of keeping lifeforms alive. In the end any style of efficiency is going to be stifling and uncreative, not allowing for malfunctions and accidents.

Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities, which contains a lot of different temporal formats, realising this is what ecological awareness is all about. It's the equivalent to acknowledging in a deep way, the existence of things that aren't you with whom you coexist. Once you've done that you can't un-acknowledge it. There's no going back.

All Art Is Ecological/Tunings. Timothy Morton.

Painting adds perspectives of emotions through colour.

An idea for a painting is a way of seeing inquiry/nurturing it/gathering an idea for exploration between interior-exterior. 

 

Spatial Object Diagram/Drawings as Tuning Towards OOO

All Art is Ecological.

Timothy Morton.

On the significance of things, an attunement that is alert and relaxed.

Site drawing from a propositional garden.

Causal Environment.

Cyanotype/Sculpture Trail.

Art/Agencies and movements that open up the world to curiosity, wonder and lightness.

Figure/Foreground/Afterimage : Drawing

In drawing the moments of choice have been kept visible.
John Berger, Berger On Drawing.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artists own needs.
The Drawn Line-A Recession-A Past Statement Brought Forward

The Body of Drawing
Drawings by Sculptors
South Bank

Drawing registers the transforming effects of the imagination and the memory.
Drawings are images of flux; flux both imaginative and physical.

Drawing is a verb.
There is no way to make a drawing-there is only drawing.
Richard Serra

The Drawing Book
Tania Kovats

Drawing is something where you have  a really direct-immediate relationship with the material. You make a mark, and then you make another mark in relation to that mark.
Kiki Smith

The Body
Rodin's lines dont just represent carnality; they are themselves carnal, invasive, sexy. Uninterrupted by the space between the material and the body; the line made by the drawing hand stands in for other haptic things. The body is where drawing begins and where it ends.

Looking at images does not lead us to the truth, it leads us into temptation.
Marlene Dumas

Sexuality and Space
Beatrice Colomina

Drawing and Random Interference
From Chaos To Order And Back Again
Sally O'Reilly

Quantum Chance
Janna Levin

AFTERIMAGE : Drawing Through Process
Cornelia H. Butler


Rather than regarding life-drawing as an event of realism, it may be more productive to
explore it as an assemblage of events, a field of practices, or as a cluster of performances.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/26820152469/in/photostream/

The Architecture and Analogies found in Interior Spaces : Analogue Processes in Photography

 Analogue Processes in Photography 

"The imprint of light on emulsion"

"The alchemy of circumstance and chemistry"


Tacita Dean : Filmworks, Kodak Analogue, page 96/97


Analogue : On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean. Margaret Iversen 2012

It is only now, with the rise of digitalization and the near-obsolescence of traditional technology, that we are becoming fully aware of the distinctive character of analogue photography. This owl-of-Minerva-like appreciation of the analogue has prompted photographic art practices that mine the medium for its specificity. Indeed, one could argue that analogue photography has only recently become a medium in the fullest sense of the term, for it is only when artists refuse to switch over to digital photographic technologies that the question of what constitutes analogue photography as a medium is selfconsciously posed. While the benefits of digitalization—in terms of accessibility, dissemination, speed, and efficiency—are universally acknowledged, some people are also beginning to reflect on what is being lost in this great technological revolution

http://murrayguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Iversen-Critical-Inquiry-36-4-Summer-20121.pdf

Translucency/Waverley Abbey, (Harold Brakspear FSA, courtesy of Damien Blower)
Pinhole Photography, Winchester Discovery Centre and Library.

In Solarized Light : The Unbound Body #2
Photogram from Victorian corset.

Concrete Surfaces : Anatomy #2
Dark Gothic Sensuality
Contact Photography
Science and Art

Alternative Processes, Tate Modern.
Photography and Architectural Space.
Cyanotype from Pinhole Camera

Clay Impression : Form and Segments
Surrounding Objects : Critical Proximity ~2
Research Material
Photographic Drawings

PETER ZUMTHOR                 ATMOSPHERES 

Architectural Environments
Surrounding Objects
2006 Birkhauser, Basel, Switzerland.

Geodesic Drawings : Observatory #2

Core, Periphery and Semiperiphery : Spatial Drawings #1

EMULSION : Photographic Landscape

A few feet below the ground a thick line of rock would mark us off from all that had gone before. Condensed into that six-inch sooty layer would be our cities, vehicles, roads, bridges, weapons. Also, all sorts of chemical compounds not found in the previous geological record.

Ian McEwan : The Children Act,  2014.


Reverberations from excavated land #1 (Excavated Shells)
Reverberations from excavated land #5 (Leper Graves)

The Leper Hospital : Anthropomorphic Geography/Landscape on Photographic Ground
Against SPACE : Place-Movement-Knowledge

"I wish to argue, in this chapter against the notion of space. Of all the terms we use to describe the world we inhabit, it is the most abstract, the most empty, the most detached from the realities of life and experience."

Tim Ingold

Environments
Land
Earth
Pastures
Country
Ground
Landscape
Indoors
Open
Sky

Air

Excavated Landscapes : Morn Hill #2





























2017

Brian Clarke : Glas/Derrida : Trans-illumination/Dwelling and the emotional, existential experience of things.

Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Brian Clarke is one of the most important artists working in stained glass. Since the early 1970s, he has collaborated with some of the world’s most prominent architects to create stained-glass designs and installations for hundreds of projects worldwide. He is also a painter of international repute, and has increasingly engaged, over the last two decades, in creating complete architectural spaces - total works of art - that integrate painting, sculpture, ceramic, glass, metalwork and mosaic.

Stained glass has been one of the most spectacular of the European arts for centuries, since its full development in the early Middle Ages. References to stained glass in England date from the 7th century, and by the 12th century it had become a sophisticated art form. The basic techniques used in medieval times have barely changed: pieces of coloured glass are held together in a framework of lead. Early stained glass was made by melting sand, potash and lime together in clay pots. It was coloured by the mixing of metallic oxides - copper for green, cobalt for blue, gold for red - and by the mid-16th century many colours were being used.

A key figure in keeping this magnificent art-form alive and relevant in modern times, Brian Clarke is at once a leader in new technology, and a brilliant aesthetic innovator. The works in this exhibition are at the very frontier of what it is possible to do with stained glass. Stained glass entered the artist’s consciousness early. As a boy, as he was just beginning to determine his commitment to art, he tells us that “I saw a stained glass window being installed in a church in Lancashire and it filled me with interest for the medium.” He went on to be a painter, but he never forgot this early experience, and by 1973, barely into his twenties, he began to work with glass.

This exhibition focuses on two bodies of work produced over recent years: his stained glass screens, begun in 2015, and his works in lead - a core element in the stained glass process - continually produced from 2007.

The relationship between these bodies of Clarke’s work and light is intrinsic. The contrasting relationships are clearly visible - the leaded works absorb the light and the stained glass lets light through. Glass is a super-cooled liquid. There is a fluid quality to this barely static matter, as the layers respond to the changing light. The sense of movement comes from the journey the light makes, creating an ever-changing environment for the spectator.

The artist has always been involved with modern architecture, and has collaborated with Norman Foster on a number of occasions. Because of this, it was decided that the best way to show the stained glass screens - and to celebrate the fortieth birthday of the Sainsbury Centre building - was to show them in the main space, among and around the Sainsbury Collection.

Night Orchids

Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together. The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke's recent work; mortality.

The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.

There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes - Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.

Robert Storr.

Francis Bacon

The Logic of Sensation Gilles Deleuze

Memento Mori

The inevitability of things.

The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.

Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.

Objective and subjective visions of life - and death - come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.

Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.

A Valediction of Weeping.

Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.

Liminality Numinous Spiritual Transendental

A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.

Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.

Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal. 

The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.

I don't want to do anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being. 

Brian Clarke, 2018.

UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.

Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana. Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.

The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body. Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.

Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.

Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.

Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. (the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)

Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modem art.

The use of memory as a conceptual tool.

'Every instant has a thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.

Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level'.

Memory is a means by which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.

Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.

Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor

I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.

Brian Clarke, 2018.

The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material

Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.

The Interrupted Grid/Motifs

Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies

The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena

Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.

The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.

Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome. Grisaille

Pointillism Divisionism

Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thom Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends) The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.

Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.

Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.

An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making. The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead - a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline - into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.

All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.

Derrida, fragments GLAS

Derrida’s text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and families into unstable figures; their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual hierarchies.

Architectural Transformations, Old Buildings/New Designs.

Space is already structured (Deleuze), it is place that is the relational human praxis of space.

The Dehumanised Nature of Human Consciousness, Silke Panse. Screening Nature : Cinema beyond the human. 2013

Metaphor (as a spatial experience/sensation?) is itself a philosophical concept. Multiplicity and Memory : Talking about Architecture with Peter Zumthor. Six Memos for The New Millennium, Italo Calvino.

Interiors as book, poem, essay, philosophical treatise.

To define these spaces one needs decisive characteristics woven into the fabric of the building in its everyday function. These characteristics or spatial zones will define exact physical limits to be read or navigated as an experiential experience. These zones mark the outside limits or boundaries of layered experiences.

GLAS; Derrida, (a philosopher interested with the “between”) Gias in French means the death knell tolling of a bell. 

The methodology of reading.

Playful interrogations of the borders between philosophy and literary writing. “This anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature.”

Destabilising tactics through different typographical styles, formats and languages.

On The Lefthand Side.

Philosophy as expressed by Hegel, who believed that the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of absolute knowledge and its subsequent passing down through strictly controlled channels.

On The Righthand side.

Subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.

The experience of the text is its reading (like that of a collage) is that neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened up to the other column.

In each column, Derrida cites and grafts (what might these terms generate in architectural space) from Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s journal of the thief and his prose poetry.

GLAS; Has in fact a multiplicity (multiplicity and memory in architecture, Peter Zumthor) of author’s and their authority is always placed in doubt; in fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries that seek to divide it up inside itself. 

Peter Zumthor, interested in the authentic core of things, in emotions and imagining things and not theories. From the emotional/existential experience of things, Zumthor further embodies sensations of remembrance and memory into the fabric of his architecture.

Its fragments offer multiple beginnings and endings. Hegel’s Columns. (Heidegger)

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” spirals through dialogues of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis that is in tum interrogated by conflict and resolution (dwelling) until it comes to rest as an “ultimate harmony” presided over by “absolute reason”.

Genet’s Columns. (Winterson)

Metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles and dark labyrinths.

Derrida by placing both on the same page and in close proximity forces the reader to experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors that blossom up in explosions of meaning; from within the most rigorously unruffled philosophical prose.

Architecture on reality and living (dwelling)

Architecture can go too far in completing and controlling social space and influencing the politics of the everyday. Spatial practices are needed as a plastic and permeable social architecture that loosens and adapts the everyday from the imposition of both state and history. From these first speculative oppositions, architectural practice can be informed with the differences between the logic of design and the reality of place.

Clay-Ceramic/Thinking Architectures/Interior Places

What do I know?

Michel de Montaigne

Pigeon Houses/Dovecotes for Philosophers. 

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

Form Giving Improvisations : Creative Entanglements in a world of materials.

 Outpost 060123

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

Haecceity, a certain gathering together of the threads of life.

Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus. 2004.

Intermediaries : Inducing place between things and the process of practice.

The drama/performativity of encountering place.

Setting things in motion. 

Reading diffractive phenomena.

Bringing things to life, creative entanglements in a world of materials.

Life is all about relations that hold a being in place.

Tim Ingold, The environment without objects (EWO).

Graham Harman, Object-oriented ontology (OOO), a new theory of everything.

Steven Holl, Parallax.

Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland.

Penelope Curtis, Elective affinities.

Mark Burry, Jane Burry, Prototyping for architects.

Lynne Elizabeth, Cassandra Adams, Alternative Construction, contemporary natural building methods.

Bridget Riley, The minds eye.