Lived Experience~A Situated Ecology

Lived Experience

A Situated Ecology.

Tentative and Open Spatial Bodies, Ceramics. 2026

Correspondences of Bodies — the gathering

Wayfaring — the movement

Archive → Anarchive — the transformation~

This practice has not developed through a linear progression of ideas, but through a shifting ecology of encounters.

Ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching, spatial research and collaborative making have remained in correspondence across different periods of the work. Some propositions have receded; others have returned years later in altered material conditions. Earlier works continue to participate in the present, not as resolved historical stages but as active traces within an ongoing search.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its formation has taken place through materials, places, bodies, architectures, organisms, images, texts, tools and other people. Each enters differently, producing correspondences that can alter the direction of the work. Knowledge is not simply gathered and applied, but emerges through these encounters.

The studio becomes a site of this activity: a place where research can remain provisional, where material processes can think alongside theoretical propositions, and where visual and spatial material can hold different ontological positions without requiring them to settle into a single explanation.

Clay has become an increasingly important participant in this ecology. Through making, the material receives traces of pressure, resistance, repetition, weathering, drilling and repair. Surfaces become histories of encounters; cavities become interiors produced by action; minor gestures accumulate into larger spatial conditions.

What appears in the present is therefore never entirely new.

It is a surfacing.

Earlier concerns with the body, absence and trace correspond with current questions of perforation, ecological agency and material interiority. Architectural research returns through the vessel and the cavity. Interiority becomes porous. Repetition becomes difference. A minor gesture can move an entire ecology.

I understand this as a spatial practice of learning to make.

The practice remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research is a gathering of correspondences rather than a search for a final position: a situated ecology in which materials, histories, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures can continue to enter, disturb and transform one another.

The work does not simply record where the practice has been.

It creates conditions for where it might go next.

Correspondences of Bodies

Wayfaring from Archive to Anarchive.

The archive is not proving the present practice.

It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

Readings, images, drawings, places, architectures, materials and remembered encounters gather as bodies of inquiry. They do not form a history so much as a spatial field—bodies becoming perceptible through their proximity to one another.

Clay enters this gathering differently.

It touches what has been read, remembered and imagined, becoming another body through which these propositions can move. Hand, matter, force, resistance, surface, interior, aperture and atmosphere begin to gather. Fire changes their proposition again, carrying them into ceramic bodies that persist, withdraw and encounter other bodies.

The archive begins to loosen.

Old propositions find new surfaces.

Images find other interiors.

Readings enter matter.

Matter returns the reading differently.

Archive~clay~body~fire~ceramic~space~atmosphere~wayfaring~correspondence.

What emerges is not a method or a sequence, but a spatial body of inquiry: a wayfaring among bodies already in movement.

The anarchive is this movement.

A gathering that does not contain, but opens.

A correspondence that does not conclude, but continues.

What is gathered is never simply contained. It reverberates.

Spatial~Agencements : What is gathered is never simply contained~it reverberates~

Spatial~Agencements

A Research Ecology of Making.

A practice begins somewhere between things.

A reading encounters an image.

An image recalls a place.

A place produces a movement.

A movement gathers a material.

A material resists the hand.

The resistance changes the making.

Nothing quite remains where it began.

Spatial Agencements describes this movement through a practice that gathers bodies without finally containing them. Clay, ceramic, drawing, architecture, landscape, photography, memory, reading and walking enter into provisional correspondence. Some relations become visible; others remain latent, waiting for another encounter.

The wayfarer gathers.

But gathering is not accumulation. It is a temporary bringing-into-relation.

A fragment may become a drawing.

A drawing may become a spatial proposition.

A spatial proposition may enter clay.

Clay may become ceramic.

The ceramic may enter another room, another atmosphere, another body.

The practice moves through these transformations without requiring them to resolve into a single narrative.

Here, the archive becomes mobile.

Old images, forgotten texts, abandoned propositions and previous material encounters can be returned to and disturbed by the present. What was once documentation can become material again. What appeared peripheral can become central. What seemed finished can reopen.

Archive → anarchive.

The studio consequently becomes less a place where things are produced than a situation in which bodies encounter one another.

Clay is one such body.

It receives, resists, absorbs, fractures, records and transforms. Fire changes the conditions again. What was provisional becomes persistent, but persistence does not mean closure. The ceramic withdraws from the immediacy of making while remaining available to light, atmosphere, architecture, movement and other bodies.

The work becomes a spatial body.

Not because it represents space.

Because it participates in relations that produce space.

Keywords.

spatial agencements, research ecology, wayfaring, gathering, correspondence, spatial bodies, bodying, material reciprocity, speculative learning, situated ecology, making, clay~ceramic, archive~anarchive, walking, landscape, interiority, permeability, threshold, futurity, In~~Touching,

Russell Moreton's current practice operates as a spatial ecology of making in which ceramics, drawing, photography, architecture, landscape, interiority, teaching, reading and remembered experience remain in active correspondence.

Rather than developing through a linear progression of ideas, the practice moves through encounters. Materials, images, texts, places, bodies and previous works are gathered, displaced and returned to in altered circumstances. Earlier propositions do not become resolved stages within a history of development; they remain available as active bodies within the present.

The practice is therefore situated rather than sequential.

Its spatiality does not reside simply in the production of objects with architectural or sculptural characteristics. Space emerges through the relations that form between bodies: between material and gesture, surface and interior, object and atmosphere, architecture and movement, reading and making.

The studio becomes an expanded environment in which these relations can be tested.

Making is not understood as the execution of a pre-existing idea. It is a mode of inquiry through which thought becomes distributed across material, body and situation. Clay participates in this process through its resistance, plasticity, weight, fragility and capacity for transformation. Pressure becomes trace; cutting becomes aperture; excavation becomes interior; repetition becomes difference. The ceramic body emerges through these material events rather than simply receiving a predetermined form. This emphasis on making as an active mode of knowing is already central to Moreton's recent formulation of the studio as a site of continuous exchange. 

Gathering

A recurring figure within the practice is the wayfarer.

The wayfarer gathers.

Readings, images, fragments, materials, spatial memories, drawings, architectural propositions and encounters are collected not as information to be accumulated, but as bodies that might enter into correspondence.

The gathering remains provisional.

Something is carried.

Something is placed beside something else.

A relation appears.

The bodies may then disperse, only to return through another material or situation.

Gather ~ carry ~ encounter ~ release ~ return ~ gather again.

This movement is central to the practice's relationship with the archive.

The archive is not treated as a stable repository of completed knowledge. Through collage, drawing, rereading and making, archival material becomes mobile. The old text encounters the new ceramic; the image encounters another body; a forgotten proposition becomes perceptible through a changed material condition.

The archive begins to become an anarchive.

Not because its contents are discarded, but because they begin to move again.

The archive is not proving the present practice. It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

This is why the practice can be understood as a research ecology rather than a research method. It does not establish a fixed procedure through which knowledge is extracted. It creates conditions in which different bodies of material can encounter, trouble and transform one another.

Wayfaring

Wayfaring provides a corresponding spatial logic.

The practice moves through environments rather than simply representing them. Walking, looking, gathering and making become ways of attending to the relations already present within a place.

The wayfarer does not simply move across a landscape.

The landscape participates in the movement.

This extends into the studio. Materials, tools, surfaces, texts and images become part of a field through which the practice navigates. The resulting work is less a destination than a temporary constellation: a gathering of forces that remains open to further movement.

The spatial body is therefore not a body that contains movement.

It is a body that becomes through movement.

Correspondent bodies

Theoretical and artistic references enter this ecology not simply as sources of authority but as correspondent bodies.

Tim Ingold's thinking around correspondence and wayfaring, Karen Barad's account of intra-action and diffraction, Erin Manning's attention to movement and the anarchive, Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of interiority, and the architectural propositions of Arakawa and Gins and Zuzana Kovar all become possible bodies with which the practice can think.

They are not applied to the work as explanatory frameworks.

They enter the work.

They alter its vocabulary.

The material encounters them in turn.

A reading can become pressure.

A theoretical proposition can become an aperture.

An architectural question can become a chamber.

A spatial memory can become surface.

The relation is reciprocal.

The ceramic body

Within this ecology, clay has become an increasingly significant participant.

The clay body gathers what has passed through the practice, but it does not simply contain it. It troubles what has been gathered through its own material resistance.

This is where the practice moves towards the idea of the Permeable Chamber.

The ceramic body is neither simply vessel nor sculpture, container nor architectural fragment. Its apertures, surfaces, cavities and thresholds produce relations between interior and exterior, enclosure and permeability, withdrawal and correspondence.

The body becomes through what passes through it.

Fire changes this proposition again.

What was provisional in clay becomes materially persistent in ceramic. The fired body withdraws from the immediate responsiveness of making, but the relations of making continue through its surfaces, apertures, weight, atmosphere and spatial presence.

The ceramic is withdrawn from making, but not withdrawn from correspondence.

It enters another temporality.

Light touches it.

Air passes around it.

Shadow inhabits it.

Architecture situates it.

Another body encounters it.

The ceramic becomes a spatial body not because spatial characteristics have been added to it, but because it continues to participate in spatial relations.

Interiority as movement

Interiority consequently becomes less a place than a movement between bodies.

It may occur within a cavity, across a surface, between an aperture and light, within the atmospheric field of an installation, or within the encounter between a viewer and a withdrawn ceramic body.

The interior is not necessarily what is contained.

It can be what emerges between.

This allows Moreton's earlier concerns with architecture, interiority, landscape, teaching and spatial research to remain active within the present practice without being reduced to historical influences. The current ceramic work becomes another site through which those concerns can be materially re-entered.

The practice is therefore less concerned with defining what a ceramic object is than with asking what relations a ceramic body can make possible.

In~~Touching

This movement brings the practice towards In~~Touching.

Touch is understood here not simply as physical contact but as a distributed condition of correspondence. Bodies can touch across distance, through light, atmosphere, memory, surface, material resistance and spatial relation.

To touch is to be altered.

To become in touch is to become responsive to what another body is doing.

The practice consequently attends to the world's patternings and murmurings: forces, traces, residues, atmospheres and movements that pass between bodies without necessarily becoming fully visible.

The ceramic body carries these murmurings forward.

But they are never its possession.

They continue elsewhere.

A spatial ecology of making

Moreton's present spatial practice can therefore be understood as a research ecology of making: a field in which gathering, wayfaring, correspondence, material encounter and transformation remain continually entangled.

Its movement might be traced as:

gathering → wayfaring → correspondence → troubling → making → firing → withdrawal → reverberation → gathering again

This is not a method.

It is a condition of practice.

The work remains open to what it has not yet understood. Its research does not seek a final position but creates temporary conditions in which different bodies can encounter one another and become otherwise.

The spatial emerges through this movement.

The ceramic body becomes spatial through correspondence.

The archive becomes anarchive through movement.

Making becomes a way of learning.

And the practice continues to wayfare.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates. 

 Phase 1: Syllabus Module / Masterclass Workshop Plan

This syllabus outlines a high-level masterclass module for Postgraduate (MA/PhD) Fine Art, Architecture, or Craft Materiality courses.

Module Title: The Anarchival Object: Material Outliers and Spatial Poetics in Contemporary Clay

• Level: Level 7 / Master of Arts (MA) & Doctoral Research
• Duration: 4-Week Intensive Studio-Seminar Block
• Module Description: This module explores the interface between process philosophy, radical archival theory, and three-dimensional spatial practice. Taking artist-researcher Russell Moreton’s practice as a central case study, students will re-evaluate studio waste, failures, and shards ("material outliers") as live, feed-forward projectiles for generative form. Through seminars on Bachelardian spatial dynamics and hands-on studio tasks, participants will construct porous physical installations that deconstruct traditional structural boundaries.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                      WEEK-BY-WEEK WORKFLOW                             │
├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ WEEK 1: Harvesting the Anarchive Pool (The Outlier Stage)             │
│ WEEK 2: Diagrams of Hospitality (The Mixed-Media Collage Stage)        │
│ WEEK 3: Studio Phronesis & Material Troubling (The Clay/Process Stage) │
│ WEEK 4: Firing the Chamber: Dwellings & Silence (The Curatorial Stage) │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Weekly Breakdown:

• Week 1: Harvesting the Anarchive Pool.
  • Seminar: Erin Manning’s feed-forward traces vs. the static repository.
  • Studio Brief: Students must systematically catalog their last 6 months of "failed" experiments, unresolvable sketches, and structural fragments.
• Week 2: Diagrams of Hospitality.
  • Seminar: Flat speculative architectures, notations, and non-hierarchical spaces.
  • Studio Brief: Constructing massive, mixed-media collages incorporating the Week 1 remnants, treating the composition as a loose spatial map.
• Week 3: Studio Phronesis & Material Troubling.
  • Seminar: New Materialism, weight, gravity, and the negotiation of flesh and clay.
  • Studio Brief: Pushing flat collage ideas into heavy clay slabs. Tears, fissures, and structural failures must be left raw to build an Ecology of Asperities.
• Week 4: Firing the Chamber: Dwellings & Silence.
  • Seminar: Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, the kiln fire threshold, and the dialectic of inside and outside.
  • Studio Brief: Firing, finishing with high-contrast matte white media, and curating the final perforated chambers alongside the archival fragments that generated them.

Seminar & Workshop Discussion Prompts

These prompts are designed to spark critical debate in postgraduate seminars, studio crits, or research workshops focused on fine art, craft theory, and contemporary methodology.

Theme 1: Archival Theory vs. Studio Residues

1. Manning defines the anarchive as a 'feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process,' rather than a graveyard of documentation. How can fine art practices outside of ceramics implement this to ensure their past 'failures' actively dictate future works?
2. If we accept the 'anarchive loop' as a valid research methodology, at what point does a studio residue transition from being mere clutter/waste to a functional 'speculative spatial body'? Who or what determines this threshold?

Theme 2: Material Agency and Phronesis

3. Moreton’s concept of 'material troubling' involves a direct bodily negotiation (phronesis) with a highly resistant medium (clay). In an increasingly digital and AI-driven creative landscape, how does this physical, friction-heavy dialogue change our understanding of 'generative' art?
4. How does the New Materialist approach to the 'Ecology of Asperities' (valuing cracks, tears, and structural collapses) subvert or challenge the traditional Western craft standards of technical perfection and utility?

Theme 3: The Phenomenology of the Vessel

5. Bachelard argues that the geometric division of inside and outside creates a rigid binary that blinds us. How do Moreton's 'Permeable Chambers' physically achieve what Bachelard calls 'intimate immensity,' and how does allowing light and air to cross these boundaries alter the viewer's psychological relationship to the vessel?
6. Consider the role of elemental fire as a radical editing tool in this methodology. Does the permanence brought on by the kiln fire contradict the anarchival premise of endless change, or does it serve as the necessary event that locks in variation?

---

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: