A Troubling Spatial Study of Bodies, Atmospheres and Correspondence.

Reading Apparatus.

Speculative spatial inquiry / practice-based research.

This is not a study of interiority. 

It is an attempt to stay with the movements through which interiority becomes perceptible.

Permeable Hosting : Around Moreton’s Interiority is an exploratory spatial study emerging from a practice of clay, ceramics, drawing, photography, fieldwork and material inquiry. It considers interiority not as an enclosed place but as a movement between bodies, surfaces, atmospheres and materials. Through the ideas of permeable hosting, correspondence, ecological bodies and the Permeable Chamber, the text follows how spatial relations emerge through trace, immersion, material duration and withdrawal. It is deliberately unresolved: a spatial text~script intended to remain open to further encounters.

surface → trace → field → body → host → atmosphere → threshold → chamber → withdrawal → correspondence

Permeable Hosting : Around Moreton’s Interiority

Interiority becomes a movement rather than a place.

This proposition begins to gather something that has been moving through Russell Moreton’s spatial practice for some time: an understanding of interiority not as an enclosed condition, nor simply as the space within a body, but as something produced through the correspondence of bodies, materials, atmospheres and forces. Interior is not necessarily what lies behind a surface. It can emerge across a surface, within a field, through a trace, between bodies, or within the temporal unfolding of a material encounter.

Moreton’s fieldworks begin from this instability.

A troubling spatial study does not resolve the spatial. It makes the spatial capable of further correspondence.

Clay, charcoal, wax, cyanotype, paper, photographic residue, light, weather, dust, earth and other relatively simple matter(s) are brought into situations where their distinctions can become unsettled. These materials are not employed simply as means towards representation. They become active bodies within an expanded field of relations. A charcoal mark can register pressure and movement while simultaneously becoming atmosphere. Wax can act as a skin, receiving, obscuring and holding. Clay can become surface, field, trace or body. Cyanotype can receive light and weather over duration, allowing an atmospheric condition to emerge through its exposure.

The field is therefore not a neutral ground upon which things are placed.

The field becomes a body through the relations moving across it.

What appears as an indexical body can begin to dissolve into its surroundings. Figure and ground lose their certainty. Trace merges with material residue; drawn bodies become absorbed into atmospheric surfaces; photographic processes allow light, fluid and weather to become participants. The body is still perceptible, but its edges are troubled. It becomes difficult to say precisely where one body ends and another begins.

This troubling is important.

The work does not seek to resolve the body back into a stable form. Instead, it attends to what becomes possible when bodies remain partially merged, when their differences continue to act upon one another. The resulting field is immersive not because it surrounds the viewer with an effect, but because it proposes another spatial condition: a space in which bodies are already implicated in one another.

What happens when a body is understood as something capable of hosting what exceeds it?

Here, permeability becomes more than a physical quality. It becomes an activity of correspondence.

A permeable body receives. It is affected. It changes through what enters it, while also changing what it receives. Hosting is therefore never a neutral accommodation. There is no unchanged host. The hosted body is altered, the hosting body is altered, and the threshold between them becomes an active interval.

This is where Moreton’s interest in the simple matter(s) of the weather world becomes significant.

Weather is not treated as a subject to be represented. Light, moisture, atmosphere, temperature, duration and exposure become ecological participants. The cyanotype made through a pinhole intermediary over hours of sunlight is one such condition: an image emerging through the passage of light, weather and time. The photographic surface hosts forces that cannot themselves be held as objects. Something of the weather world becomes materially present through its effects.

The work becomes an emergent atmospheric condition.

It is an ecological body enacting its presence through its unfolding durational existence.

This is close to the piddock, but not the same. The piddock makes its presence through the removal of matter: boring, excavating, inhabiting, producing a chamber through its activity. The cyanotype works differently. Its presence accumulates through exposure, registration and duration. One leaves a cavity; the other leaves an atmospheric trace. One makes absence perceptible; the other makes an elusive presence perceptible.

Both, however, trouble the assumption that a body simply occupies a material world.

Bodies make worlds through their activities within matter.

This becomes increasingly important across Moreton’s fieldworks. The indexical body is not merely a record of where a body has been. It is a material event through which other bodies become perceptible. A rubbing carries something of the surface encountered. A photographic exposure carries something of the light that produced it. Charcoal carries pressure, movement and gesture. Wax receives and holds traces. Clay absorbs force, resistance, touch and time.

The trace therefore becomes more than evidence.

The trace becomes another body.

And when traces gather, they produce an atmosphere.

This is perhaps where the spatial practice moves beyond an understanding of interiority as architecture or enclosure. The interior can be produced without a conventional inside. It can occur within the density of a material field, within the interval between bodies, within an aperture, or through the atmospheric relations of a situation.

Could the interior begin before enclosure?

Could a chamber emerge through correspondence rather than construction?

The clay~ceramic body takes this question somewhere else.

Field clay remains immersed in the instability of making. It can be folded, scraped, pierced, smeared, layered, collapsed and reworked. Its interiority remains close to the movement of the hand and the contingencies of matter. Clay is open to intervention.

Firing changes the proposition.

What was fluid becomes materially persistent. What was provisional becomes a body that can no longer be entered through making in quite the same way. The ceramic withdraws from the hand while becoming available to other bodies. Its surface carries the pressures and traces of its making, but its interior is no longer simply recoverable. It becomes atmospheric, spatial and withdrawn.

The body withdraws, but correspondence continues.

This withdrawal is not closure. It is another form of hosting.

The ceramic body carries something of the immersive field into another material condition. Its apertures allow light and air to pass. Its surfaces receive atmosphere. Its chamber gathers shadow. Its material persistence holds something of what happened while making itself available to what has not yet happened.

The Permeable Chamber emerges here.

It is not simply the interior of a ceramic form. It is an interval between retention and release, surface and depth, immersion and withdrawal. It gathers without completely containing. It hosts without remaining unchanged. It becomes spatial through its capacity to encounter other bodies.

The chamber is produced through correspondence.

This also changes the meaning of touch.

Touch is not restricted to direct physical contact. Light touches a photographic surface. Weather touches paper. A piddock touches clay through excavation. Fire touches clay through transformation. Air touches a ceramic aperture. A viewer's body touches a withdrawn ceramic through perception, proximity and duration.

In~~Touching therefore becomes an expanded ecological condition.

It is an attentiveness to how bodies become perceptible through the forces by which they affect and are affected by other bodies. Touch can occur across an interval. Correspondence can happen without contact becoming literal. A body can be touched by something it cannot hold.

The spatial practice gathers around this possibility.

Fieldwork, drawing, photography, collage, walking, architecture, clay and ceramic are not separate activities so much as different material situations in which interiority can move. The field merges bodies. The trace carries an encounter. The atmosphere troubles the boundary. The aperture enables passage. The chamber gathers. The ceramic withdraws.

Field ~ trace ~ body ~ host ~ atmosphere ~ chamber ~ ceramic.

These are not stages towards a final form. They are active conditions within a larger ecology of making.

Perhaps this is where Moreton’s spatial practice now gathers most intensely: not around the production of spatial objects, but around the possibility that space is continually produced between bodies that remain capable of affecting one another.

Interiority is consequently not a place waiting to be entered.

It is something that happens.

It gathers across surfaces and within bodies. It moves through atmosphere. It becomes perceptible through traces, apertures, residues, pressure, light and duration. It can immerse, trouble, withdraw and return.

Interiority becomes a movement rather than a place.

And the spatial body becomes the body capable of hosting that movement—permeable, attentive, troubled and open to correspondence with other ecological bodies.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates.

Spatial Practice; Interiority; Permeable Hosting; Spatial Bodies; Correspondence; Atmosphere; Ecological Bodies; Materiality; Permeability; Clay~Ceramic; Indexical Bodies; Thresholds; In~~Touching; Futurity, Weather~World; Fieldwork; Material Reciprocity; Immersion; Withdrawal; Permeable Chamber; Trace; Duration; Ecological Practice, 

It reverberates.

It troubles.

So the text itself becomes a small Permeable Chamber.

It gathers fieldworks, indexical bodies, weather, clay, charcoal, wax, cyanotype, piddock, atmosphere, firing and ceramic withdrawal — but doesn't close them into a system.

That makes “troubling spatial study” more than a subtitle. It describes the mode of inquiry:

EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS/Innerness → Permeable Chamber : Performativity/Unbounded Outcomes

Interiority / Atmosphere

Wayfaring a spatiality that is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

The space of the vessel is already more than an enclosure. Surface and interior become mutually perceptible, light moves towards darkness and back again, and the body of the pot becomes a site of correspondence between maker, material and inhabitant. Walking extends this relation into place: paths connect, scatter, remember and open outward. Read through the current practice, innerness begins to move away from enclosure towards permeability. The interior is not simply what is inside the body; it is something produced through contact between bodies, surfaces, atmospheres and movement. The chamber becomes active because it remains capable of encounter.

Active Thresholds~Hosting Permeability.

Speculative inquiry 190926

This post opens perhaps the most important architectural question for the current ceramic body:

What if interiority is not what a body contains, but what happens between bodies?

That is a substantial shift.

The earlier vocabulary is:

vessel → interior → innerness → dwelling → surface

The current vocabulary can re-enter it as:

body → threshold → aperture → permeability → correspondence → chamber

And this is where the old architectural research becomes materially redistributed through clay.

The hut, pot, interior, path, ruin, walking body and atmosphere do not have to become references for the ceramic. They become correspondent bodies that have already been thinking through the spatial questions that clay is now materially troubling.

MATERIAL and AFFECT

EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS

RUINS and SUBJECTIVITY

Encounter with place through transpositions/re-deployment of materials/technologies and design.

The rules followed by medieval cathedral builders could not and did not prescribe their practice in every detail, but instead allowed scope for action to be precisely fine-tuned in relation to the exigencies of the situation at hand. The cathedral and the laboratory, MAKING, Tim Ingold

PATHS alert us to how we are scattered as well as affirmed by the places through which we move. Edward Thomas.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF WHAT HAPPENS: SPACE, POLITICS and AFFECT.

Nigel Thrift

VISUAL FINE ART / TRANSACTIVE through Digital Technologies POETIC / EVERYDAY ABSTRACTIONS

MAKING / MANIFESTING FORMS / STRANGE TOOLS

INDEXICAL / ITERATION ( new version, repetition, closer approximation, scrutiny, observations, sequence, finding a solution/perception to a problem)

UNBOUNDED OUTCOMES / ITERATION becomes the starting point of the next iteration PROGRESSION through PERFORMATIVITY

AGAINST SPACE

Making : anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.

Tim Ingold

Immaterial architecture creation and contemplation artist and architect

The contemplation of art is primarily a form of visual awareness, of a single object by a single viewer, in which sound, smell and touch are as far as possible eradicated. Placed in a hermetic enclosure and protected against decay, the artwork is seen and not used. The viewer leaves no trace or mark because touch would undermine the artwork’s status as an idea and connect it to the material world.

To translate the drawing into the building requires an intimate knowledge of the techniques and materials of drawing and building.

ATMOSPHERES

THE EPIPHANY OF ARCHITECTURE

CIRCULATION, ENCLOSURES and their LIGHT

TOTAL ARCHITECTURE, Walter Gropius

TOTAL ART, Theo van Doesburg/DE STIJL

GESAMTKUNSTWERK, all embracing aesthetic, where art becomes architecture and architecture art. A synthesis, and revolving intersection where each medium exists at the service of formal innovation; a kind of essentialist discourse or tradition that might be buried in the past.

Brian Clarke, Nerves of Ecstasy by Robert C. Morgan, PACE 2013.

ARCHITECTURAL FORMS OF ENCOUNTER/DEBATE

HISTORIES, PHILOSOPHIES, AESTHETICS

Katsura Detached Palace. Kenzo Tange, Walter Gropius. 1960

(extended in a modular fashion and adapted to changing royal needs over the centuries)

Katsura consolidates all qualities in history but not in a creative way. Since it lacks in the strength of its unifying all members, its impression is lyricism but lacking unifying tension. KenzoTange

Ise : Prototype of Japanese Architecture. Kenzo Tange, Noboru Kawazoe. 1961

(Ise Shrine rebuilt every 20 years with new materials)

Ise Shrine manifests primate yet powerful, simple yet noble, and serene yet ecliptic qualities, which cannot help moving us. Tange

THE PRIMATIVE

JOMON POT, 2000 BCE, (Jomon period 14,000 BCE-300 BCE)

Jomon, (means Rope pattern) wildly decorated pottery, idols, and thatched pit dwellings. The style comes to stand for the savage and dynamic.

Jomon appeals to us with the flooding energy of the fundamental life of the people. It has a resilient strength and a sense of mass, which comes out of through their wild battles with nature: it also has a free and agile sensitivity. Kenzo Tange

THE ARISTOCRATIC

YAYOI EARTHENWARE, 350 AD, (Yayoi period 300 BCE-250 BCE)

In the Yayoi period, earthenware becomes more refined, and structures like granaries are raised on stilts, building developments reflect the emergence of social hierarchies.

In Yayoi, man and nature are synthesized to create a calm lyricism, acknowledging nature’s blessings. A passive attitude, submitting to the surroundings prevails. A flat equilibrium and quiet balance with no dynamism are left in a transient mood.

Kenzo Tange is originally drawn to the Yayoi style, but starts to oscillate with the Jomon style in the late ‘50s’ For Tange and the future Metabolists there is no conflict in their simultaneous study of tradition and modernism. Tange insists on exploiting tradition as a means of innovation, while building prolifically in a modern mode and strategizing the high-tech avant-garde of Metabolism.

There’s more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvised builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don’t need permission for them. There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.

Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees. Roger Deakin.2007

PAO, a structure that you can repeatedly put up and dismantle. Because of occupant’s nomadic life, it needed to be lightweight, and be able to be built very quickly and have the ability to be taken apart and re-built many times. Even materials that have already been used can be reused so long as they are disassembled correctly and preserved properly.

To maximize the reuse of components one needs to standardize them so they can be pre-fabricated. The order of construction becomes important as it influences the disassembling of the structure; the technical features of joints, assemblages of materials and their localities can become both conceptual to the experience of the space and its architectonics and to the actual innovative building process.

In the Mesopotamia city of Ur, they bricked over houses buried in the mud and built new houses in the same spot over and over. Its been learned that they repeated this eight times. There was apparently a very strong impulse to create an eternal building.

Kiyonori Kikutake

Rem Koolhaas

SO THE MUD HOUSE BECAME THE RENAISSANCE AND THE TENT BECAME METABOLOLISM?

Kiyonori Kikutake

YES, IT BECAME A METABOLIST STRUCTURE MADE OF WOOD. AND I THINK THE NOTION OF ATTAINING ETERNITY WITH A MUD HOUSE-OR ATTEMPTING TO-IS REALLY FASCINATING.

In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. 

Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.

Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment. 

Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.

Defined Interiors : By material, agency and social and private architectures. 

Interiors of Pots : Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude. Fragment as a broken shard, from notebook March 2014.

Innerness

The light of reflection and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light; from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.

The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.

The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.

Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).

Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.

Reflections on Heidegger,

We traverse from light to dark many times as we gather in the pots (thingness) as it were unfolding in our presence (nearness).

Vessels as Spatial Metaphors around Innerness and Difference. 

The Jar

Heidegger as a pouring and gathering social metaphor. Anecdote of the Jar.

Dominion over the Unmade.

Wallace Stevens, poem cited by Edmund de Waal.

WORKING at the transitional surface/stage in the HUMANITIES as it re-boots itself into THE POSTMODERN.

A SOMATIC ARCHIVE, of subjectivities whose perceptions and environments are going to change forever; like the particularities of the analogue trace in photography that is now becoming a distant experiential condition, an orphan extinct from the subjectivities of its originating culture/organism.

The imagination and process aesthetic of the Posthuman Condition 

A Theoretical and Semantic search amongst Ruins and Archetypes 

Historical Perspectives

Dwelling/Poetics Heidegger Archetypes/Symbols Jung

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Flesh and The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze/Bacon 

Feminist Geographies The Posthuman

Posthuman thought inscribes the contemporary subject in the conditions of its own historicity.

Posthuman Subjectivity : Rosi Braidotti 

LIGHT into SOMANTIC SPACES

Continuum and Chora (light and the shadow of chora)

Life expresses itself in a multiplicity of empirical act: there is nothing to say, but everything to do. Life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualiizing flows of energies, through codes of vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networked systems. (Braidotti, 2013:190)

De Architectura, Vitruvius

Architecture consists of order, arrangement, proportion or eurythmy, symmetry and decor, and distribution.

Arrangement as an “Idea” refers to the Aristotelian notion of “Image­ representation” as phaantasia a precondition to drawing, effectively occupying and revealing a space between Being and becoming.

INTERIOR DESIGN UCA FARNHAM

DESIGN AND RESEARCH PROJECT 2015 SPACE BETWEEN PEOPLE.

SITE-PLACE-DIALOGUES

THE RUINED ABBEY, stands as architectural remnants of a pastoral community now set in parkland and open to the public as a site for recreation.

The Abbey and its experiential values and feelings have been employed as both a reality of a lived experience and as a virtual diffractive site for thinking through contemporary issues in arts (relational aesthetics), and architectural design through exploratory spatial inquires with the specifics of place studies.

What this project is not

Gift Shop and Visitors Centre What this project might become

Proposal for a symposium,

Personal Structures, artists and writers talk about “Time, Space and Existence”. Setting for an exhibition that can promote the symposium.

A room containing a virtual work of design that challenges and opens up the physical architecture.

A design for a interactive (mobile) component, a structure that can act as an interlocutory apparatus in the transposition of the phenomena of place.

Building Partitioning of Space.

Architectures as atmospheres that promote the contents and support the interaction of things including humans.

Design as a tool of transposition, of layering and collaging different spatial values both cultural and experiential.

Painting Subjectivities, matter drawn and crafted from site inquiry.

LIGHT VALUES

The Transmission of Light,

Instantaneous psychological effect that stimulates the senses. The Specificity of Colour

Synergistically working with place and symbolizing abstract concepts and thoughts.

Humans use colour in their surroundings for decorative purposes or to chronicle their every day lives and other important events.

Earthy, Corporeal, Spiritual, Pastoral. Capricious.

Colour has always been used symbolically, whether pained directly on the body or worn in garments to announce the wearers’ social status, their tribe or country’ or other significant group.

The Abbey, On-Site (qualitative research with stained glass samples) Analogous Colour Fields with Monochromatic Features, utilise complementary colours or forms to focus the difference and diversity of the design installation.

Red, Flashed Ruby glass.

Brown is the ultimate earth colour associated with a “durability” of terra-cotta, clay.

Amber, Light, Medium and Dark. Yellow, Orange, Imagination/Enlightenment, Intensity, Sunlight.

Purple, Red/Blue, Spirituality, New Age, Cutting Edge Technologies. Diversity, Complexity, Artistry, Uniqueness.

THE ABBEY AND THE CISTERCIAN ORDER

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION : Caruso St John

HISTORY IS THE RAW MATERIAL OF ARCHITECTURE. Aldo Rossi

TRADITION AND MODERNISM

CONTINUITY-LEGACY-TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION

Today the nuances of language that make up these architectures only exist as an intellectual discourse and do not operate at the emotional level that would have engaged the original inhabitants, or audiences of these buildings. And yet we are still emotionally affected by these structures. Denied access to the specific culture of their iconography. We respond, at a more visceral level, to the more general culture of their construction.

Adam Caruso on the medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire.

Towards an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing. 2002

Thinking with Walking/Paths/Huts

WALKING was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings; Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.

The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot. Robert Macfarlene

ON REFLECTION

What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?

What does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

For Edward Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses-between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events.

HE IMAGINED HIMSELF IN TOPOGRAPHICAL TERMS

HEIDEGGER’S HUT

A TOPOLOGY OF BEING, PLACE, WORLD. Jeff Malpas

METHODOLOGIES OF DESIGN

GESALT, GRISAILLE, LEITMOTIF, MATRIX, FORMAL PATTERN, SURFACE

VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio

MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM

THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR

A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN

THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :

The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.

THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.

CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES

THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL

PAINTING, Robert Mangold.

TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY

BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO

ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS

WORKING NOTES 20 August 2018

Fragments/Thoughts CONSTELLATIONS NIGHT DRAWINGS

OUTPOST URBAN FROTTAGES/ Drawing Strategies

SCULPTURE TRAIL/ Minimalist, Post Modem, elements, assemblage, collage REFLEXIVITITY / AGENCY / POST STUDIO

Mobius Strip, experiential feedback into REAL LIFE / NOWNESS SEARCHING for creative anthropologies from the landscape.

ACTIVE and creative engagements. PERFORMATIVITY LANDSCAPES

SENSORY WALKS

USING the topology close to hand, the unique geographies of the rivers from source to sea.

The four together

I think these four should not be made to look like a chronological development. Their power is in the fact that each contains a different activity that the current practice can return to.

Older post Active body now

The Arts Trace → permeability

Lightness / Synthesis / Solitude Multiplicity → gathering

Time / Action / Diagram Kairos → futurity

Emotive Spatial Encounters Innerness → permeable chamber

And there is a really interesting movement across them:

Trace

↓

Gathering

↓

Movement / Kairos

↓

Interior / Atmosphere

↓

Clay

↓

Ceramic

↓

Permeable Chamber

↓

Futurity

But I wouldn't put that as a diagram explaining the archive. I think it is better understood as a wayfaring possibility through the archive.

The deeper speculative proposition

What I think is emerging from these four posts is that the current spatial practice may not simply be about making ceramic bodies spatial.

Spatiality is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

The earlier work repeatedly approaches this through different media:

cyanotype allows material to seep beyond the traced body;

collage and montage allow fragments to occupy a shared field;

diagram allows temporal and spatial relations to remain in movement;

the vessel allows surface and interior to sense one another;

walking allows place and body to continually alter one another.

Clay now becomes a particularly intense site for all of these propositions because it can receive, resist, absorb, register, perforate, enclose, open and transform.

Then firing changes the proposition again.

The archive gathers the activities through which spatiality was already becoming perceptible: trace, movement, multiplicity, innerness, atmosphere and encounter. Clay does not resolve these bodies into form. It troubles them into correspondence.

The spatial practice was already there, dispersed across bodies. Clay became the place where they could touch.

That last sentence feels particularly close to what you are now calling In~~Touching.

The Arts and The Humanities : The inherent finality of the human condition is concisely and eloquently measured and mapped.

Drawing/Image.

The Active Body : From Trace to  Hosting Permeability. 

The traced body becomes a field rather than a boundary. Cyanotype moves through the drawn figure, botanical traces enter its surface, and astronomical markings exceed the body that appears to contain them. Presence and absence begin to occupy the same material territory. The image becomes a body of traces—part registration, part seepage, part cartography—where what is gathered cannot remain entirely within its assigned limits. Read through the current practice, the work begins to open towards permeability: the body as a threshold through which other bodies, times and forces pass.

Speculative inquiry 190926

This is perhaps the most interesting question I would carry forward:

What happens when the trace is no longer evidence of a body, but becomes a body capable of carrying other bodies?

That moves the work from indexical trace → permeable body → ceramic body.

The old cyanotype already contains the proposition that the boundary of the body can be exceeded by material movement. The current ceramic practice could be understood as taking this further: permeability is no longer simply represented on the surface; it becomes materially constructed through aperture, porosity, chamber and firing.

That feels like a genuine correspondence rather than a retrospective explanation.

.

Russell Moreton  Spatial Practices MA, UCA Canterbury.

Visual artist who currently uses simple descriptive gestures and processes drawn directly from the human body. His practice continues to explore issues around "Spatiality" and the "Postmodern Human Condition." The use of site specificity and materials "at hand" are employed to further underpin the practitioners sense of place, memory and dwelling. His descriptive working narratives are in effect physical working ideas, spatial  entanglements between the relations of  life and art.  

Drawing.

Installation and Working Sites

Architectural Glass and Ceramics

Liquid Light and Pinhole Photography

OUTLINE

Drawings by sculptors that place the relationship of the line derived from the body on the same field as material/media residues. These configurations give rise to conceptual associations and meanings. This contemporary approach is in evidence in a number of artists work where the per formative aspects of drawing are the key issue. To put it simply there is a growing awareness of the gesture of drawing as the work, and not just simply the representational merit of recognition that has previous acquainted skill and draughtsmanship. I am talking about the authentic gesture of inscription, the combination of both the trait and trace that the trait has circumscribed. This almost primal visual rendering from a sensation of blindness is captured succinctly in the myth of Butades, or as it has come to be known "the birth/origin of painting” This myth preserved through the device of its very nature contains an irony trapped, almost withheld until the contemporarily of its content could be recognized. It is my aim to expand on these issues using the situation of my own practice as a bridge to attempt to illustrate some of the complexities unearthed.

Analysis of a drawing.

Crafting the mind : Human Inhumation/Containment

Julian Stair

Quietus/The Body Politic

Morality

Jonathan Sacks

Jozef Van Wissem

Grand Central Confessional.

More Speculation~Other Bodies.

A body appears, but it does not remain entirely its own. Botanical traces, photographic fluids, celestial markings and the drawn line gather across its fragile surface. The cyanotype seeps beyond the territory of the figure, while the astronomical markings seem to pass through it from another side. The body becomes a host for other bodies.

What happens when a boundary begins to host what exceeds it?

The question is not simply where the body ends, but what begins to happen when other matter(s) enter, pass through and alter its territory. The body becomes atmospheric: not an enclosure, but an immersive condition of correspondence.

Can an atmosphere be produced through the correspondence of bodies rather than exist around them?

Here, trace becomes more than registration. It becomes a movement between bodies—seed, paper, light, fluid, hand, image, celestial map, memory. Each leaves something behind while carrying something elsewhere.

The host does not simply contain. It is changed by what it hosts.

The figure is therefore neither wholly present nor absent. Its outline fixes a body even as the materials moving through it undo that fixity. What appears as a final marking becomes another opening.

Body-as-site becomes body-as-host.

And perhaps the host becomes something stranger still: an immersive atmosphere of corresponding bodies, a temporary spatialisation in which nothing is quite contained by the thing that carries it.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It reverberates.

That feels much closer to the spatial script you are describing.

The bold questions aren't really questions requiring answers. They are apertures in the text. They alter the direction of reading. The declarative phrases then become propositions, while the questions open them again.

Nature Boy.

He said that in the end it is beauty

That is going to save the world, now.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

THE PHYSICAL

THE EMOTIONAL

THE CONCEPTUAL

First Intension (noun) Medicine the healing of a wound by natural contact of the parts involved.

Fecundity, Fertility, Creativity, Inventiveness, Fruitfulness, Productiveness. What response within ones subjectivity created the desire and its necessity to be embodied, to be brought into the realm of things?

CREATIVE POST-MORTEM 19.08.2010.

Outline of a female body on light-weight Chinese paper, life size, laid out as if in the process of making passage through a fluid. The body stance seems tensioned with arms outstretched and together above the head, as is it is being propelled, or conversely the feet together might signify the body is sinking into a space occupied by a fluid. The body seems to be caught in some sort of stasis, between sliding back or diving head first. This outline has been in places in filled with a blue photographic material ( cyanotype).

This material that displays a floral print caused by the displacement and actuality of seed heads having been placed directly in contact with the paper. This floral marking occupies only part of the territory which was once occupied by the body. There is evidence that this fluid substance (blueprinting of a fecundity) has transgressed, seeped through the boundaries of the traced form. It has done so through the cyanotypes fluidity and the absorbency inherent in the structure of the paper. Within the territory of the body, there are spaces void of the cyanotype material, these appear as barren areas, unfertile yet they seem to suggest an infinite space which gives the cyanotype surface its ability to both record an actuality and suspended it. This appears to question the spatio-temporal aspect of the relations between the application of the fluid and the drawing of the trace. 

What is apparent is that they have become superimposed and strangely contingent. There exists a sense of transition between fluidity of the cyanotype and the fixed “registration” of the hand drawn trace this creates different senses of temporalities on the same surface. The residues left over from the cyanotype process are still clearly visible, channelled into a flow which is delivered to a reservoir at the foot of the trace. The outline in what appears to be black marker pen preserves a permanence against this flow. This same marked permanence records an intervention of two back slashes which tags a closure of performance of the trace with a date simply stated across the foot. One might be tempted to consider if this marking and its proximity might have associations that reference the labelling of the mortuary corpse. 

The inclusion of this precise date marking, renders other material traces some sort empirical touchstone, an observation point clearly defined from which to see other phenomena present. This observational mode of inquiry is perhaps promoted by what appear to be astronomical markings that are only "‘present” within the territory of the body, curiously they appear to have been inscribed from the reverse side of the paper. They appear akin to body markings, tattoos or some other form of writing information on the body. 

These marks suggest some sort of cartography which can only be read by others, this information is clearly “hosted” for the benefit of others, a message that might contain an augury. The host body might be a vessel for these speculations, but it is clearly not their author in fact the astronomical details place their own authorship right through the vessel of this un-gendered female form. Given that the astronomical markings have been assigned to a human form, a form of mobility the knowledge of these marks therefore exceeds the temporality of the host form, in the literal sense this is already confirmed by an existence only recorded by its trace, its absent presence. 

This terrestrial being with its absent presence marked and dated is further appropriated into a territory containing celestial mappings and traces from its own host planet. The inherent theme of fecundity and fragility supported by the inherent finality of the human condition is concisely and eloquently measured and mapped. Like a shroud this work is delivered to reaffirm the body as a site.

There is no authority in the gesture, it is an act of reassurance, he is fixing reality. James Salter

The post is much more interesting for the current practice than its title initially suggests. The cyanotype, traced body, seepage, astronomical markings, date, absence/presence and cartography already bring together several things you are now calling body, trace, chamber, correspondence and futurity. The cyanotype is particularly important because the material does not simply stay within the traced body: it seeps across its boundary.

Spatial Bodies of Practice~Gathering/Multiplicity/Lightness/Synthesis

Spatiality is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

What begins as lightness becomes density. Images, ruins, fragments, colour, readings and places gather without settling into a single structure. The work moves between material transformation and the impossibility of containing everything that has been encountered. Chora appears as trace, mark, map and body: a spatial condition where things can occupy one another without becoming the same. Read through the current practice, synthesis becomes less a resolution than a gathering of differences. The spatial body begins to form through multiplicity—through what touches, overlaps, withdraws and remains unresolved.

Speculative inquiry 190926

I think this post opens an important question for gathering:

Can gathering remain multiple without becoming synthesis?

This is significant because your current Permeable Chamber is almost the opposite of a synthetic container.

It gathers, but does not resolve.

It holds, but does not contain.

It allows correspondence without requiring agreement.

So perhaps something has shifted:

synthesis → multiplicity → gathering → permeability

The old post is therefore not simply about “synthesis”. It contains a tension that the current practice can activate: the desire to gather without closing the gathered material into a resolved whole.

That is very close to your recent formulation:

The Permeable Chamber is where gathering becomes a troubling reverberation.

Outpost 190822

LIGHTNESS

QUICKNESS

EXACTITUDE

VISIBILITY

MULTIPLICITY

Six Memos for The Next Millennium.

Italo Calvino, 1992.

The difference between the first versions I read and the final ones lies in structure, not content. 

Calvino wanted to call the sixth lecture 'consistency' and he planned to write it in Cambridge. 

I found the others, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.

Esther Calvino.

The Drought.

J.G. Ballard.

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin on the origin of German Tragic Drama.

Photographic ruins an amalgam/agency of what remains.

Brown and Blue.

A Field in England.

Cyanotype material on canvas with iron pigment.

Developing a spatial serenity/synthesis/synergy.

This amalgam of colour with various substances demonstrates the change and transformation of the material world, which can be interpreted as essentially an alchemistic procedure.

The goal of such procedures is ultimately to resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Yves Klein.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Magdalena Broska.

Air and Dreams.

An essay on the imagination of movement.

Gaston Bachelard.

Shotesham, site based inquiry,studio practice.

Spatial registers around the corporeal and the transcendental.

Ruin its relation to time.

Fragment as ruin and on melancholia as an attitude of retrospective contemplation.

Dialectics at a standstill, a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired, allowing allegory to be understood, felt as a contemplative calm, an equilibrium in the becoming and wrapping nowness of the self/situation.

Dialectical thinking involves the clarification of ideas through discussion and contradiction.

What remains after the process of dialectical thinking?

An initial thesis is opposed by an antithesis, then resolved through a synthesis of the two terms, which can in turn become a new thesis.

Objects/inclusions for painting with/layered transitions and movements.

Holga 120WPC, f135.

Ilford Delta 100/8 exposures 92x55mm.

The Gaze of Orpheus.

Maurice Blanchot.

The Essential Solitude

In the solitude of the work, we see a more essential solitude, a self communion.

MULTIPLICITY

The work grew denser and denser from the inside through its own organic vitality.

For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality, while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos.

Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands.

The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits.

The network that links all things is also Proust's theme, but in him this net is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of the dimensions of space and time.

The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility. In this sense a typical experience of knowledge is the jealousy felt by the narrator for Albertine.

It is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy.

But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

Remembrance of Things Past : The Captive.

 

Infra-ordinary.

Species of Spaces

We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.

But where is our life?

Where is our body?

Where is our space?

Georges Perec.

CHORA : trace/mark/map/body

The drama of encountering space.

Recombinant Poetics via Interventions.

Thinking about temporal issues through visual, material and spatial registers.

Concerned with artworks and architectural projects that reconfigure the temporality of sites, repositioning the relationship of the past and the present in a number of different ways.

Allegory, Montage, Dialectical Image.

Between Art and Architecture.

Jane Rendell.

Performativity/Drama of Residency

Transient readings and encounters.

Other Enactments,Dialogues,Relationalities. 

Sites of evidence/knowledge and understanding.

The scheme should incorporate both careful repair of existing fabric and a significant element of new construction in a contemporary design.

SPAB, design competition.

We are not calling for a new disordered architecture to match the disorder of culture; this would only affirm the chaotic. 

Rather, we propose experiments in search of new orders, projections of new relationships.

We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method.

The energy inherent in opening up relationships presents us with a continuity of ordering that compels refection.

Steven Holl. 

Correlational Programming, Parallax.

This one has enormous potential for the current practice.

It gathers Calvino, Benjamin, cyanotype, ruins, Bachelard, Shotesham, material transformation, multiplicity, Proust, Perec, chora, montage, temporality and the refusal to turn the investigation into a fixed system. The particularly important phrase for me is the post's own recognition that “We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method” and its interest in opening relationships.

That is remarkably close to where your current practice has arrived.

The deeper speculative proposition

What I think is emerging from these four posts is that the current spatial practice may not simply be about making ceramic bodies spatial.

It may be about something more particular:

Spatiality is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

The earlier work repeatedly approaches this through different media:

cyanotype allows material to seep beyond the traced body;

collage and montage allow fragments to occupy a shared field;

diagram allows temporal and spatial relations to remain in movement;

the vessel allows surface and interior to sense one another;

walking allows place and body to continually alter one another.

Clay now becomes a particularly intense site for all of these propositions because it can receive, resist, absorb, register, perforate, enclose, open and transform.

Then firing changes the proposition again.

Collage as Apparatus — Constructs~Transports~Anarchive of Material Movements

Wayfaring~Spatial Stories~Space~Time~Social Body~

The collage gathers the force~feeling of reading into a propositional spatial atmosphere, its wayfaring body a hospitality of difference that troubles the clay. Images, fragments, architectures, bodies, texts and memories are not brought together to resolve their differences, but to allow their differences to remain active—to touch, interfere, displace and resonate.

The collage becomes a construct~transport: a temporary spatial body through which matter(s) move in and through one another. What it gathers is not simply transferred to the clay. It troubles it.

Clay receives these propositions differently. It resists, absorbs, folds, pierces, collapses and holds them. The spatial atmosphere of the collage becomes materially unsettled. Reading becomes pressure; image becomes surface; architecture becomes chamber; difference becomes permeability.

The clay is not illustrating the collage. It is being troubled by it.

And in this troubling, another body begins to emerge.

The image does not contain the research. It gives the research somewhere to move.

These are not simply “research material” assembled to support the Scriptorium project. The collage itself is a spatial body of reading.

The library borrowing slip, architectural fragments, diagrammatic marks, figure, photographs, blueprints, scraps of text and handwritten interventions are all occupying the same provisional field. They are not subordinated to a central image or argument. They have been placed into relation.

The first collage in particular seems almost like a room of propositions: the figure enters the architectural image; the ochre field interrupts the monochrome material; handwritten marks cross between things; the library receipt makes the act of reading physically present.

The second becomes even more architectural. Plans, photographic material, text fragments, a blue image, diagrammatic marks and annotations overlap. The collage is simultaneously map, reading, memory, construction and spatial proposition.

That gives us something important for Correspondences of Bodies.

The collage is actually an early anarchive in material form. I see them as constructs~transports to allow matter(s) to move in or through the same spatial atmosphere, they are operative spatial propositions searching out forces of correspondence rather than forms of enclosure.

Collage as Construct~Transport

The collage is an early anarchive in material form: a construct~transport through which matter(s) can move in and through a shared spatial atmosphere.

Fragments of image, architecture, text, drawing, memory and place are not assembled towards a resolved composition. They are placed into provisional proximity, allowing differences, tensions and affinities to remain active.

The collage becomes an operative spatial proposition—not a form of enclosure, but a searching out of forces of correspondence.

Matter(s) move across surfaces, between images, through fragments of text, around bodies and into other spaces of thought.

It constructs a place for movement without determining where the movement must go.

In this sense the collage is already wayfaring.

It gathers, transports and releases.

The collage constructs a temporary condition in which otherwise disparate matter(s) can occupy a shared atmosphere. It doesn't resolve their difference; it transports them into proximity.

Wayfaring was already a practice of making a spatial reading

Wayfaring~Spatial Stories~Space~Time~Social Body

Reading becomes a way of moving through bodies.

These collages were made during the Scriptorium project as spatial acts of reading: fragments of architecture, drawings, photographs, texts, diagrams, borrowed books, bodies and remembered places brought into provisional correspondence.

Nothing is simply illustrated. Things are placed beside, across, within and through one another.

The collage becomes a small spatial body—part map, part room, part archive, part proposition.

A wayfaring through materials begins here.

Reading~gathering~placing~touching~making.

The image does not contain the research. It gives the research somewhere to move.

Because it connects directly to what we have just established about the archive/anarchive.

The collage is actually an early anarchive in material form.

It takes things that belonged elsewhere—the book, the library, architectural history, photographic image, spatial notation, the body—and releases them from their original organisational systems. They become available for another correspondence.

Collage — the body that allows things to remain different

This could sit alongside Ingold, Bachelard, Barad, Manning, Kovar, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock and fire.

But unlike those theoretical correspondents, collage is a practice already performed by you.

It is the apparatus through which the archive first starts to become anarchive.

Reading → gathering → collage → spatial body → clay → fire → ceramic body → wayfaring

And I think the images show that clay didn't suddenly become spatial.

There was already a spatial intelligence operating in the collages.

The later ceramic work may be understood as the materialisation of a reading practice that was already spatial.

Or, more tentatively:

The collage was already teaching the archive how to become spatial. Clay later became another body through which that spatial reading could continue.

That feels important because it stops us making the current ceramic practice appear retrospectively inevitable. The collage isn't evidence that you were “always going to arrive at ceramics.” Rather, it is another body in the correspondence.

And perhaps this is exactly what Correspondences of Bodies : Wayfaring from Archive to Anarchive needs to do: not establish a genealogy, but reveal the different bodies through which the practice has learned to move.