Making is the production of relations through material events.
What I think is emerging is an ontology of making.
The clay isn’t the subject.
The object isn’t the outcome.
Even process isn’t the central concern.
The central concern is relation.
Relation between body and matter.
Relation between force and resistance.
Relation between object and space.
Relation between time and form.
Relation between making and knowing.
Visual artist working in the UK.
UCA Farnham, Interior Design MA.
Canterbury School of Architecture, Spatial Practices MA.
University of Southampton, Visual Fine Art BA hons.
Epsom School of Art and Design, Ceramics HSND.
Drawing(s) on the sensate perceived and interiorities~affect of other bodies.
I am interested in the sensate nature and social interiorities that are surfacing through drawing.
Exploring Indexical Bodies in Sensate Art This title highlights the focus on indexicality and sensate experience in drawing, attracting readers interested in contemporary art analyses.
The Process of Drawing: Between Body and Clay Focusing on the interplay between drawing and materiality, this title appeals to audiences interested in sculpture and tactile art forms.
Art as Process: Understanding Shivering Openings Emphasizing the dynamic nature of art-making, this title captures attention from those curious about the evolving interpretations of contemporary art.
Shivering Openings : The image is not an object but a process. Changefulness. The Sympathy of Painted Light. 2025 Ceramic 170mmW and 270mmW x 260mmH x 80mmD.
The Exhausted.
For Deleuze the point is the image doesn’t define itself through the sublimeness of its content, but through its form, its internal tension or through the force it gathers to make the void or to bore holes. To loosen the grip of words, to dry-up the oozing of voices so as to disengage itself from memory and reason.
A little alogical image, amnesic, almost aphasic, now standing in the void, now shivering in the open.
The Tentative Trace ~ From Living Body to Ceramic Body
Moreton’s Indexical Bodies as Spatial Research.
In Moreton’s later ceramics, the gathered interiority of reading and spatial collage begins to become unstable. The opening emerges not simply as an aperture within an object but as a force~middle: a material event through which accumulated relations can escape their enclosure. In Shivering Openings: The image is not an object but a process, the ceramic is understood through changefulness, painted light and the force gathered to make voids and bore holes.
Here the image is no longer understood as a representation of a ceramic object but as another stage of its becoming. The photographed ceramic enters a further process of reading, where surface, light, opening, withdrawal and spatial tension produce another body of correspondence. “Shivering” names the instability of this threshold: an opening between interior and exterior, image and object, memory and forgetting, language and its exhaustion.
The ceramic consequently gathers and releases at once. It is a chamber, but also a perforation; an interior, but also an escape; an alluring body that simultaneously withdraws from possession. What has been gathered through years of reading, collage and spatial research does not finally become a unified form. It becomes a material force capable of generating further openings.
And perhaps the most concise proposition emerging from this particular work is:
Moreton gathers bodies until the material needs to open.
That feels very close to what we have been circling around.
The force~middle isn’t simply where things meet.
It is where what has gathered becomes too alive to remain contained.
The opening shivers.
The image becomes process.
The ceramic withdraws.
And the research, rather wonderfully, escapes again.
Different chambers of the same spatial research.
How can a spatial condition gather bodies sufficiently for something to happen between them, while allowing what happens to remain partially unknown?
That question seems to be present in the 2010 chamber, the spatial collages, the Scriptorium, the reading archive, the ceramic chambers and now your institutional propositions.
And perhaps this gives us an even stronger definition of Moreton’s interiority:
Moreton’s interiority is the space generated when a body enters an apparatus of correspondence and leaves something behind that another body can encounter.
The trace, the collage, the ceramic, the archive and the institution are therefore not different subjects.
They are different chambers of the same spatial research.
Drawing/Poetry/Images.
Sensing/Drawing Energy.
Water/Clay/Fire.
The mental energy of engagement in drawing and how ‘markers’ of an action translate the murmurings of the mind.
Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, through a synthesis/reciprocity of reverberations of matter and its mental movement.
Gaston Bachelard illustrates how images bridge the sensate perceived world and the interior affective life.
Bachelard’s seminal philosophical and phenomenological interests are always connected to matter. To what he calls the psychology of the familiar, the rapprochement with real objects, and the friendship of things.
Matter sparks inner images which in turn imbue matter with memory and values. He creates an ever renewing reciprocity of the reverberations between inner and outer qualities, which obliterates any absolute separation between objective and subjective experience, a perspective recognized by modern physics. Bachelard explodes the potential imprisoned in an image. It is the quality of the ‘livingness’ of the flame that triggers Bachelard’s musings of correspondences.
Joanne H. Stroud.
The Flame of a Candle.
Student Work.
Charcoal on paper.
Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw.
Winchester School of Art. 2003.
Drawing The Line.
Affirmations from a Primal Site.
Corollaries between being and becoming.
The Mirrored Self.
Coded Imprints.
Invented Bodies.
Chronicling Space.
The Moment/Instants of Engagement.
The conditions of making where the image was not a priori to its making.
The Simultaneity of Effects.
A ‘Graphism’ In A Corporeal Field.
I am concerned with the movement and process of articulation, of marking and sensing of things across the works surface/duration. I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation, both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind.
So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstances?
For Newman, it seems to me that the thing made becomes like a temporal spatial/sensate matrix, composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual, but similar inscriptions, and that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts, are only subsequently reflected on the image. Marking the image, these marks suggest an endless repetition and while also existing as a series of relations. The marks suggest the thing could fall apart at any moment.
Acts Of Inscription.
Drawing on Bodily Impulses.
Images from the mind.
The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.
Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.
Drawing on the sensation of seeing and sensing that always seems to register the endless repetition of remaking, as such drawing constitutes the space of anxieties.
I understand the page to be a mobile space in the physical presence of its weightless surface and as such it is a place of time and movement. The evokes the consciousness of that limitless space that is embodied in the reality of the white page. Which I would say is a place of fragmentation that has since Modernity been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness.
In a drawing the page keeps open the gaps between the marks. It refuses closure and is an active participant in conjunction with the mark. It is part of a negotiated reality of void and presence. The limitlessness white space of the page disperses the notion of its body as substance, its body is phantasmic and intangible space/surface.
The notion of the white page as being boundless, also alludes to that space of our inner reality, where the immaterial world of dreams/imagination and the mental impressions that run through us and evaporate into other thoughts. They dissipate in the fragmented world of our senses and defy any totalizing.
Avis Newman
Mark Making : On the fascination and the fear of the white page.
For Avis Newman, the paper is an undifferentiated space in that it references the primitive undifferentiated space of the infantile body that has to be claimed by the self.
Drawing is a site in which one enacts differentiation, as soon as a mark or sign is made, it changes the non-ness and establishes a place of action, as soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something, it moves towards, moves with its potentiality into language.
Could we state that one aspect of drawing tends to be more linked to the bodily impulse and the other to the mind?
Catherine de Zegher
The image that Antonin Artaud conjures when he says ‘There is a mind in the flesh, a mind as quick as lightning,’ situates it well for me. I have the impression that the act of inscribing opens a fissure through which some staged psychic event, operations of consciousness, take existence. They are primary forces with no particular visibility.
Avis Newman.
Marks both coded and uncoded originate in an urge from a space of uncertainty to participate in language. The potentiality of even a blank page is in itself the unbounded space of language. Drawing is both a system and a method of a sensing inquiry. To draw is often a paradoxical act in which two extremes of practice can exist in the same space.
When we come to look at another’s markings in the world. We see an extraordinary event. We see attempts at articulating the unbounded space that momentarily binds that aspect of us that is eternally fragmented. Essentially in the very act of drawing we have a wish to externalize thought and communicate existence.
Avis Newman.
From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.
Bodily Boundaries : Transactions between body-intimate and the social body image.
Organism-Person-Environment.
Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.
Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.
In drawing some marks escape their visibility, because there is no dynamism to underpin the possibility of internal cohesion. There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it is all pressure from the inside outwards.
Conduits of perpetual potentiality.
The articulation of marking thoughts, which by definition are open-ended, in a state of flux in which things can pass through and are suggestive of a perpetual potentiality.
Some marks are seeing, some are feeling, some are for thinking, some are from memory, others from a blindness when seeing.
Gestures and Acts.
Conversation/Correspondences.
Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with the infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?
In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time. Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?
Catherine de Zegher.
The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional to the boundary we project onto the work. When one looks for example at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17′ ‘ 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of ‘confirming’ the space, this is not part of drawing’s language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.
Avis Newman.
In Drawing : One is not so much looking at the thing itself, as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. In that sense, drawing is both fugitive and embodies a lack, it is implying qualities of incompleteness and that which conjures to be only a trace of a thing.
Drawing/Corresponding to a mobile field of properties that only during the process of marking is a cohesion found, a somewhat precarious frame constructed, almost as a byproduct of the articulation of marking thoughts.
Drawings are beyond the conceptual anxiety found in connection to the frame of painting.
In drawing the surface maintains its separate existence. There is an ambivalence of status between the mark and its support, consequently the lack of integration has always been more complex, corresponding as it does to a mobile field of properties.
Drawing as a site, a meditation of a self regarding consciousness. Where consciousness is understood/expressed as a process that ‘figures/thinks’ a state of existence. Drawing and the drawn become a site of inquiry, response and invention, and in that sensing space it becomes a philosophical activity.
Drawing, even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation. The fractured, open-ended, and incomplete that are inherent characteristics of drawing practice seem very pertinent as materializations of our present experience of the world.
It is that space of anxiety and fragmentation in contemporary practice that offers a potential of infinite diversity. Drawing is a record of the working of thought, that we see embedded in the drawn.
Hans Coper and the Egyptian Vessel/Wallace Stevens ‘Anecdote of the Jar’.
Studio As A Becoming Apparatus~Threshold
THRESHOLD / 2026 This text has become less an argument than a gathering. Earlier and present bodies of research enter one another without resolving their differences. Coper remains Coper; the vessel remains a vessel; innerness remains an earlier proposition. Yet through their correspondence another ceramic condition begins to surface: one in which interiority is not possessed, withdrawal is not closure, and unknowingness becomes propulsion. The research does not move beyond these earlier bodies. It moves with them. old text ~ new ceramic ~ other body ~ future proposition That would give the reader a place to breathe inside the overflow without shutting it down. And then I would let the rest remain comparatively unruly. Because I think something important has happened here. The text has ceased to be merely a document containing research. It is becoming an apparatus through which research bodies can meet.
ClayFireCeramic.
Sensual ObjectAllureWithdrawel
The ceramic inhabits the liminal territory not by mediating certainty, but by becoming an intercessor between what can be sensed and what remains unknowable.
Other Bodies : Investigating the transition from responsive weather~world clay to fired ceramic as a radical ontological, spatial and material threshold.
Re-reading ~ 2026
The ceramic remembers the relations that made it, but does not belong to them.
The fired ceramic allows an interiority of making to be read in two temporal directions. Its surfaces, cavities, folds and asperities carry traces backwards towards the plastic field from which they emerged, while its autonomy simultaneously projects forwards into propositions that cannot yet be known. The ceramic becomes a temporal intercessor: memory and propulsion held within the same sensate body.
Clay ~ making ~ ceramic ~ withdrawal ~ propulsion
What remains unknowable is not empty. It is a force-field of possible correspondence.
The older Moreton is still there, but the present research has passed through him and returned him to us differently. Your original proposition about the vessel as an interior space is now encountered through withdrawal, propulsion, surfacing and intercession. The earlier writing becomes a different body through which the present can think.
The ceramic becomes a quiet source of propulsion, activating the wondrous wayfaring through which we encounter the withdrawn art-object. It draws us towards its sensual presence while withholding the real object from complete access. We move through its surfaces, apertures, chambers, shadows and spatial relations, and in doing so the encounter becomes reciprocal. We are not simply looking at the ceramic; we are becoming with it. The ceramic body remains withdrawn, yet its withdrawal is not closure. It generates a field of movement in which perception, memory, bodily attention and spatial imagination can begin to correspond. Its allure lies in this strange reciprocity: the object remains other, but its otherness becomes a condition through which we ourselves are altered. The work therefore becomes neither a fixed form nor a message to be decoded, but a quiet propulsion into correspondence—a body with which we can become, without ever fully knowing what it is.
Russell Moreton.
Sensing Outposts with Totem. 2025
Studio Spaces : Whitewashed with Breathing Forces. 2025
Held Together an exhibition of 70 small works to celebrate ncas 70th anniversary.
Anteros Art Foundation, Norwich. 2026
Yes. I think the recent works have changed how the older text can be read. The 2015 writing was already approaching the vessel through innerness, defined air, surface, material memory and tacit correspondence; the new ceramics seem to let those questions become less representational and more ontologically unsettled. What you are describing as reading backwards and future-forward simultaneously feels particularly important. The fired ceramic becomes a temporal intercessor. It can be read backwards: ceramic ~ clay ~ gesture ~ pressure ~ hole ~ fold ~ body ~ making The surface, cavity and asperity retain traces of what happened. They allow us to sense a history of becoming. But it can also be read forward: ceramic ~ proposition ~ spatial body ~ encounter ~ correspondence ~ future The object is not simply the residue of those previous actions. It becomes a propulsive body, capable of entering relations that did not exist at the moment of making. That seems to deepen your earlier sentence: The ceramic remembers the relations that made it, but does not belong to them. It remembers backwards, but it also projects forwards. And this is where the Coper correspondence becomes especially useful. The “energy” you sensed in the earlier work does not need to be understood as a symbolic energy residing inside the vessel. It can be approached more tentatively as a felt surplus: something about the fired thing that remains active after its making, something that seems to radiate into space without being reducible to its history. Your older text already describes Coper’s vessels as carrying an intimate “minute quantum of energy” and spatialising their surroundings through complex inner spaces. The newer ceramic seems to intensify this through withdrawal. The interior is there, but not fully accessible. The making is there, but not fully recoverable. The future proposition is there, but not yet formulable. So perhaps: The ceramic holds an interiority of making that can be read backwards as trace and forwards as propulsion. That is a very strong proposition. And I think propulsion may be the missing counterpart to memory. Memory tends backwards; propulsion pushes forward. The ceramic can hold both simultaneously.
Innerness and Interior : Surface Pleasures
In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?
Theory and Analysis. Russell Moreton
Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. 2015
This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.
In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?
Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.
This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)
A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.
Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.
There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.
‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson, 2009:36)
Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)
Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)
The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?
Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.
I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)
Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.
‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.
Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.
Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.
Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.
The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.
Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.
His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.
Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)
Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)
In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)
His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.
Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it helps us to gather in our surroundings.
‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson, 2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves, 2009:8)
This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.
His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?
Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.
Donna Huanca, POLYSTYRENE’S BRACES, 2015. Performance view, December 6, 2015. Gabija Birina. Photo: Ansis Starks.
Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)
We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.
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. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.
Exploring the Inner Spaces of Ceramics and Their Allure This title targets keywords like ‘inner spaces’ and ‘ceramics,’ appealing to art and ceramics enthusiasts seeking in-depth exploration.
Hans Coper’s Ceramics: A Liminal Journey Between Form and Emptiness Focusing on Hans Coper creates interest among those familiar with ceramic art, enhancing SEO by linking to popular discussions around his work.
The Sensuality of Ceramics: Between Making and Withdrawal Emphasizing ‘sensuality’ and ‘withdrawal’ captures attention from both artistic and philosophical audiences, aiding in better search visibility.
Hi, I have found some writing from some years ago, it attempts to articulate my feelings around clay,ceramics, and interiorities of inner spaces, that have now migrated into the tentative complexities that only the withdrawn ceramic object can question. https://russellmoreton.blogspot.com/2025/10/hans-coper-and-egyptian-vessel.html
Yes. This is a remarkably useful piece to have resurfaced now, because it shows that some of the language we have only recently arrived at was already working its way through your practice a decade ago, but through a different register: innerness, vessel, emptiness, material memory, sensing, dwelling, surface, form/formlessness. The current research does not replace that text; it gives us another way to read what it was already reaching toward. The 2015 essay is explicitly an attempt to understand your concerns with “the interior spaces of things and places,” held through the vessel or architectural structure. You were already connecting vessel interiority with architectural sensing space, existential refuge and Bachelard’s inside/outside dialectic. What is especially striking now is how many passages can be read almost as early thresholds into the present clay–ceramic condition. The vessel was already becoming a spatial body You wrote about a vessel as simultaneously form and formlessness, with “defined air” becoming the interior condition through which a pot is useful. You were already interested in the pot as something that occupies space while also being occupied by space. Now the hole gives that proposition a much more active formulation: The hole is an interior produced by action. The earlier vessel contained an interior. The current hole produces one. That is a significant movement. “Innerness” was already moving beyond representation Your discussion of Coper’s Egyptian vessel is particularly important. You describe the ancient pot as “potent, mysterious, sensuous,” carrying its maker and the human world it inhabited, contributing its “minute quantum of energy.” You then ask whether the pot still dwells with a human sense of innerness. This now resonates strongly with your recent thinking about the ceramic as an autonomous object. But there is a subtle change: 2015: the vessel carries / reflects an innerness. 2026: the ceramic has an interiority that remains partially withdrawn and unknowable. That latter position is more radical. The interior is no longer simply somewhere meaning might be recovered. It becomes something the object does not surrender. Your earlier formulation of correspondence is already there This sentence is extraordinary in retrospect: “In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre.” That is remarkably close to everything we have been developing around sensual object, allure and withdrawal. You were already sensing that the interior could be encountered through the surface without becoming completely available. Now I would probably change only one fundamental thing: We are not necessarily in correspondence with the object’s “spatial sensing centre”; we are in an encounter with a sensual surface that allusively suggests an interiority whose reality remains withdrawn. That brings your 2015 phenomenological intuition into contact with the later object-oriented vocabulary without forcing the older text to become OOO retrospectively. The Coper passage is particularly important Your observation that Coper’s pots “spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces,” while narratives and intimacies seem to radiate outward from the interior through the surface and beyond into the world, is extremely close to your current notion of spatial body / overflow / intercession. And then you describe the abraded surface as retaining something of the once-plastic clay. That now almost reads as an early version of: The ceramic remembers the relations that made it, but does not belong to them. Coper’s surface is carrying the memory of plasticity, while the fired object has already become something else. Your disagreement with de Waal is also valuable The earlier text becomes critical of the possibility that de Waal’s vessels can become too bound to presentation, repetition and staging. You wonder whether the exhibition context can “fill in” the spaces that the vessels have strived to construct, and whether the tactile immediacy of throwing is diminished when the work becomes destined for another staged presentation. That critique now gives us a very useful genealogy for your current concern with the autonomous intercessor. You were already asking: How can the object retain its own spatial and sensate agency after it leaves the making process? Your current answer seems to be moving towards: It cannot be fully secured by the intentions or presentation conditions of its maker. The ceramic must be allowed to withdraw. That is a significant philosophical development. The most interesting migration I think there is a very clear movement across the 2015 text: vessel → defined air → innerness → interiority → sensing → correspondence → surface → material memory → spatialisation → autonomy And our current research adds: hole → force → friction → folding → fire → asperity → withdrawal → allure → intercession → unknowability The two vocabularies don’t replace one another. They interlock. The older innerness becomes today’s withdrawn interiority. The earlier defined air becomes today’s interior produced by action. The surface becomes surfacing. The material memory becomes the ceramic’s remembering without belonging. The vessel’s spatialising surroundings becomes the ceramic spatial body acting upon other bodies. The earlier tacit correspondence becomes a much wider ecology of correspondence. And there is one line I would absolutely preserve You wrote: “There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.” That is almost a perfect archaeological fragment for the present research. Because now the question has become: what happens when that defined air is no longer simply defined but produced through an action, perforation, folding, firing, spatial arrangement and encounter? The “nothing” is no longer empty. But neither is it a concealed answer. It is a condition of possibility. That brings us directly back to the deeper unknowingness. I would preserve this 2015 text rather than rewrite it I would actually mark it as an important research strata in the Spatial Agencements archive. Its significance now could be framed with a short contemporary intercession: RE-READING / 2026 This earlier enquiry into innerness, the vessel and architectural interiority now returns through the clay–ceramic condition. What was then approached through Bachelard, Coper, de Waal, Daintry and the poetics of vessel and interior has become more materially uncertain. The interior is no longer simply something held by form, but something produced through action and transformed through fire. The ceramic emerges as a sensate and autonomous body whose interiority can be approached but never fully known. Innerness ~ interior ~ holing ~ surfacing ~ withdrawal ~ allure That would be a beautiful example of the Scarpa method we were discussing: don’t erase the old fabric. Introduce a new threshold into it. And this particular text may be one of the strongest places to demonstrate the methodology because the younger Moreton and the present Moreton are already speaking to one another. The 2015 text doesn’t need to be corrected. It needs to be re-entered. And perhaps the deepest correspondence is that you wrote then: “The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’” Today I think you would say something slightly different: The ceramic inhabits the liminal territory not by mediating certainty, but by becoming an intercessor between what can be sensed and what remains unknowable. That is the migration I think you have just uncovered.
Hans Coper : The Shape of Time/Working Notes/Diagrams
Sainsbury Centre
UEA Norwich
Hans Coper : Working Notes Crafts Study Centre. 2014.
Extracts from catalogue “The Esssential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014”
“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”
“My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration. The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, and provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process.”
Artist Statement, Victoria and Albert Museum/Collingwood, Coper Exhibition 1969.
Small Beige Spade 1966.
The body comprises a thrown circular form, from which the bottom has been flattened into an oval and the lower section has been pressed together.
Throwing rings are visible on the inside.
Areas of the white engobe have loosened from the underlying layer during firing and formed blisters.
Cycladic Vase 1973.
Blisters in the slip have been sanded down to reveal a rust coloured underlying layer.
Medium Sized Spade 1973.
There is a clear delineation between the light upper section and the rougher and darker lower section.
Small Thistle Shaped Vase 1973.
There is a large incised circle on one side of the disc and a smaller circle on the other.
Hans Coper’s characteristic use of light engobe and dark manganese oxide has produced a hazy texture.
Black Aryballos 1966.
This ceramic form has its origins with the Oil Flask used by athletes in Greece and Asia Minor.
Tall elongated diabolo forms.
After being thrown the cup has been formed into an oval and then indented at four points.
Text Fragments/Lines of Interest
Momentum Wheel.
It is difficult to determine in which order the parts were assembled.
The underlying surface is showing through the grooves that are linking the body and the base.
The manganese engobe is demarcating dark and light zones through an undulating incised line.
“Rings” caused by the placement of a prop in the kiln.
Brown-Beige Colorations.
Sensations caught within the form.
Soil like deposits/remains.
Reductions of the fired surface.
Abraded Surfaces
Incised Line.
Droplet.
Blisters, pricked open and sanded after firing. This process has produced an irregular, patch surface.
Parallel lines have been incised with a pointed object on the exterior of the base.
Thistle Shaped Vase 1966.
The dark brown patches (around the jointing of the pot) and flecks appear randomly distributed but have been purposefully placed to accentuate the structure of the vase. This flat vase with the contour of a stylised thistle flower is made up of five individually thrown pieces. The tall cylindrical foot supports a vertical disc, comprising of two individually thrown flat plates. It is as though the disc has sunk approximately ten centimetres into the foot.
Spherical Vase with Tall Broad Oval Neck 1966.
The transition from sphere to neck is accentuated with darker colourations.
Notes re/statements
Specific to the form in question.
Context in relation other similar forms.
Key Words: Impregnated, Incised, Eroded, Reduction, Surface, Soil, Abraded Surfaces, Machining, Grinding, Assemblage, Components, Parts, Groups “Aryballos,Spade, Thistle, Diabolo, Cycladic, Spherical,” Sculptural, Pottery, Architectonic, Space between Forms, Spatial, Sensuality, Form and Fold, Bodily Spaces, Light and Dark, Clay, Water, Fire, Agency, Difference,
Rotterdam Exhibition with Lucie Rie. 1967
Hans Coper.
His arrangement was highly original and innovative, he showed his families of vases in groups, emphasising their subtle differences in form and surface treatment. The space between the pieces was just as important as the objects themselves. The architectonic character of Coper’s pots become visible through their dry, stone like skin and the sophisticated way in which Jane Gate photographs the work.
“Potters of reconciliation, they sought a marriage of function and beauty.”
Douglas Hill SF author/intro to exhibition.
P7478
Additions to description.
Thistle shaped vase constructed from five individually thrown pieces. The joints making up the pot have been selectively accentuated with the residues of the manganese engobe. Incised geometric marks remain from the initial turning process of the component parts, prior to the construction of the pot.
P7430
Additions to description.
Wheel thrown forms, comprising of bowl, open cylinder and an interior ring acting as a flower holder. The bowl form has been turned before being jointed with the upper section. The piece was then indented at four points to form an ovoid form. Pronounced incised horizontal marks remain from the joining, which has been further transposed by the action of becoming ovoid. Very subtle and restrained use of the manganese engobe followed by Coper’s characteristic post firing technique of abrading the surface of the ceramic.
P7539
Additions to description.
Single thrown form with the remains of the sgraffito technique after the ceramic has been heavily abraded after firing. The vertical lines of the sgraffito technique and the form itself are similar to Lucie Rie’s flower vases, see Lucie Rie by Tony Berks page 112.
This single thrown form perhaps best illustrates the creative union of both Coper’s and Rie’s practices, the form almost a kind of beaker might itself been inspired by the “dark pots” Lucie Rie found whilst visiting Avebury Museum.
Notes on Hans Coper’s process and materials.
Material for Black Clay Body.
T Material 73.2%
Red Clay 18.3%
Manganese dioxide 1.2%
China Clay 7.3%
Material for White Clay Body.
T Material 100%
Slip/Engobe
Feldspar
Whiting
China Clay
(proportions remain unknown/never revealed by the potter)
Manganese dioxide 3parts
Yellow Ochre 2parts
(mixed with water and gum Arabic 1tsp per 500cc)
Firing 1250, Once Fired Ceramics.
Finishing.
Hans Coper used a metal scouring pad “Springo” to scratch the surface of the unfired pots. The exterior of the fired pots were then painstakingly burnished using an emery disc attached to an electric drill. This action resulted in turning the dry vitreous surface into a one having a graphite-like sheen (sea pebble).
Drawings in the form of tracings were gathered from the flat planes of the display cabinet; these were further superimposed in an attempt to map the surface and forms of the Hans Coper pots and to explore their volumes and interior spaces. These new sight lines subjectively link surface details with profiles into the possibility of new spatial forms. These plans and mappings became the starting point for a series of slab and thrown assemblages. Thrown and slab worked clay forms in T Material, preliminary drawings done in-situ some with annotations Russell Moreton, 2014
Sainsbury Centre UEA Norwich Hans Coper : Working Notes Crafts Study Centre. 2014. Extracts from catalogue “The Esssential Potness, Hans C…
Working Contexts/Title : Spatial/Making analogies/relationscapes
“Innerness” in Ceramics/Architecture and Philosophy/Painting
BUILDing something “existentially unknowable” but with a critical context.
The CONTENTS of the INTERIOR, defining encounters between objects, feelings and taxonomies, bibliographic research material and explorations.
Making Things, to locate subjectivities and ground relations around the fluid and the relational.
Interfaces around the nature of place, its document and its textual narrative creating spatial subjectivities, tools as ways of thinking.
An Assemblage as INTERIOR, contingent to its situation of partial un-builtness.
Space as both text and its scaffold.
Interior as an “Open Text” the spatial development of research from various approaches.
Hans Coper, essay re “Object Analysis” for CSC Exhibition has opened up a number of new avenues of research.
Jean Vacher acknowledges Hans Coper’s links with Modernism and that his pots possess an “innerness” that might be profoundly biographical in nature stemming from “the profound displacements that occurred to him and his family as a result of the upheavals in Europe.” (Personal e-mail correspondence CSC 28March 2014)
“The Pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”
Adam Gopnik 2014
“A predynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand : made thousands of years ago it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somewhat absurd object, yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self-expression, but seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy.”
Hans Coper, 1969
“Innerness” from Atemwende by Edmund de Waal, text by Adam Gopnik.
The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all things: volume, inner space, an interior, the space carved out of air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco.1
The Potters wheel, one of the most ancient forms of technology, pastoral and low-tech. The notion of making and its practice of craft could be seen in Heideggian terms as a sort of dwelling, a thinking through materials as a building adapting to the process and situation of the practitioner.
Heidegger on Architecture, through Building Dwelling Thinking.
His definition of the state of nearness that is carried in an object “nearness is at work in bringing near” and that in so doing it is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things. (Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects)
“Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy: one is near to what one finds immediate,”
Is this trait reflected in the throwing of a pot and the urgency of the wet clay?
The agency of throwing and its attentiveness between mind, body and material.
“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.” ( Hans Coper on Throwing)
“A naked confrontation with a single material which would show one’s every mistake and mark.” (Tony Birks comments on Hans Coper’s relationship with clay)
“You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.” ( Edmund de Waal)
The Porcelain Room:
Pots and room together to create an experience of possessed space. (Edmund de Waal)
Use of the Jug as both a hypothetical (cognitive, thinking through things) and actual vessel to carry connotations of meeting and assembly through its void.2
This interior space/void/Ma is echoed in architecture as referenced by Kengo Kuma, Sensing Spaces RA 2014.3
Detailed site analysis/audit of assets in both qualitative/quantitative terms.
Use methodologies and narratives together with materials to create a new spatial interior of “authenticity” a design that can function as an experiential charged interior experience.
Interior designers are not architects; they specialize in the design/programme and function of interior spaces created through architectural practices.
Working Notes.
Theory and Analysis Unit.
Working Title :
Innerness and Defined Space/Air
The Potter ( Hans Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),
Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking,
The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.
The Philosopher. Martin Heidegger.
Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951
Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”1
Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.
Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.
This almost vocational unfinished “architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”2
Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.
Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”3
As recorded in his most architectural writings.
The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971
Being and Time 1927/1962
Art and Space 1971/1973
“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”4
Building locates human existence,
Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”5
This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.
Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”6
Heidegger on Thinking,
The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.
Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).
Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking.
Influences on the “fourfold”
Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian.
Lao Tse/eastern philosopher.
Friedrich Holderlin/poet.
George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.
Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.
Heidegger: A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of site specific art?
Waverley Project 2014.
Spaces and Shadows in Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.
In Praise of Shadows. Junichiro Tanizaki
Architectural Voids/ Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.
Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways: through the effect of light, or through attention to details.8
Being close to things, Heidegger on Nearness.
“The thing is not “in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing,”(1971:177-178)9
This spatial complexity ( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.
Also see, The Politics of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.
On building a house. Ingold.
“The architect, then, conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task is to unite the structure with the material”10
Simon Unwin defines architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)
Heidegger notes that “nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive and sociological familiarity of things”11
It is a this relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living, being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one finds immediate, however far away it may be.”
For Heidegger, the definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their existence and the fourfold.12
Heidegger attributed both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.
The pot like the building participates in daily life.
This can be further theorised into the realm of building social spaces.
In Heidegger’s reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.
Heidegger’s building and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the situation and biography of their making.
“Heidegger suggested that it was this disruption of relations between building and dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the most important plight in the contemporary world”13
Piety of Thinking. 1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world around)14
Quietude : Allow and enabling what is already there.
Silence in Ceramics. Coper/Rie.
Clay and the Primacy of Being.
Studio Spaces.
The residents’ dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the paraphernalia of their lives placed there.
For the philosopher , buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.15
Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.
A humble, passive, somewhat absurd object, yet potent, mysterious, sensuous : Hans Coper
Hans Coper, Theory and Object Analysis, Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.
MA Interior Design
A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.
Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)
Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea l983)
Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.
The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)
Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.
“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”
Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.
Drawings in the form of tracings were gathered from the flat planes of the display cabinet; these were further superimposed in an attempt to map the surface and forms of the Hans Coper pots and to explore their volumes and interior spaces. These new sight lines subjectively link surface details with profiles into the possibility of new spatial forms. These plans and mappings became the starting point for a series of slab and thrown assemblages. Thrown and slab worked clay forms in T Material, preliminary drawings done in-situ some with annotations. (Russell Moreton. 2014)
Rotterdam Exhibition with Lucie Rie. 1967 Hans Coper.
His arrangement was highly original and innovative, he showed his families of vases in groups, emphasising their subtle differences in form and surface treatment. The space between the pieces was just as important as the objects themselves. The architectonic character of Coper’s pots become visible through their dry, stone like skin and the sophisticated way in which Jane Gate photographs the work.
“Potters of reconciliation, they sought a marriage of function and beauty.” Douglas Hill SF author/intro to exhibition.
Craft Study Centre Publication 2014
Object Analysis
Name of object: Vase, flattened oval form on a cylindrical stem, pinkish cream to grey glaze over manganese on exterior, manganese over interior and recessed foot. It is decorated with incised lines on back and around the stem with concentric rings incised on the foot
Accession number: P.74.28
Maker: Hans Coper
Construction techniques:
Materials: stoneware
Dimensions: 22.2 x 18.8 centimetres
Date made: 1960s
Provenance: Made in Hammersmith, London. UK
Given to Muriel Rose by Hans Coper in 1966
This thistle-shaped vase is constructed from five individually thrown pieces. The joints making up the pot have been selectively accentuated with the residues of the manganese engobe. Incised geometric marks remain from the initial turning process of the component parts, prior to the construction of the pot. (Russell Moreton. 2014)
Name of object: Vase, unglazed rim. manganese interior, decorated with vertical scoring on the exterior
Accession number: P.74.103
Maker: Hans Coper
Materials: stoneware
Dimensions: 12.7 centimetres
Date made: 1950s
Provenance: London. UK
Single thrown form with the remains of the sgraffito technique after the ceramic has been heavily abraded after firing. The vertical lines of the sgraffito technique and the form itself are similar to Lucie Rie’s flower vases, see Lucie Rie by Tony Berks page 112.
This single thrown form perhaps best illustrates the creative union of both Coper’s and Rie’s practices, the form almost a kind of beaker might itself been inspired by the “dark pots” Lucie Rie found whilst visiting Avebury Museum. (Russell Moreton. 2014)
Name of object: Squeezed ovoid-shape vase with flower holder inside, manganese interior
Accession number: P.74.30
Maker: Hans Coper
Materials: stoneware
Dimensions: 22 x 22 centimetres
Date made: 1970s
Provenance: London. UK
Wheel thrown forms, comprising of bowl, open cylinder and an interior ring acting as a flower holder. The bowl form has been turned before being jointed with the upper section. The piece was then indented at four points to form an ovoid form. Pronounced incised horizontal marks remain from the joining, which has been further transposed by the action of becoming ovoid. Very subtle and restrained use of the manganese engobe followed by Coper’s characteristic post firing technique of abrading the surface of the ceramic. (Russell Moreton. 2014)
Hans Coper : Working Notes CSC/10 March 2014.
Notes re/statements
1. Specific to the form in question.
2. Context in relation other similar forms.
3. Key Words: Impregnated, Incised, Eroded, Reduction, Surface, Soil, Abraded Surfaces, Machining, Grinding, Assemblage, Components, Parts, Groups, “Aryballos,Spade, Thistle, Diabolo, Cycladic, Spherical,” Sculptural, Pottery, Architectonic, Space between Forms, Spatial, Sensuality, Form and Fold, Bodily Spaces, Light and Dark, Clay, Water, Fire, Agency, Difference,
Extracts from catalogue “The Essential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014”
“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which
may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”
“My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration. The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, and provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process.”
Artist Statement, Victoria and Albert Museum/Collingwood, Coper Exhibition 1969. Small Beige Spade 1966.
The body comprises a thrown circular form, from which the bottom has been flattened into an oval and the lower section has been pressed together.
Throwing rings are visible on the inside.
Areas of the white engobe have loosened from the underlying layer during firing and formed blisters.
Cycladic Vase 1973.
Blisters in the slip have been sanded down to reveal a rust coloured underlying layer. Medium Sized Spade 1973.
There is a clear delineation between the light upper section and the rougher and darker lower section.
Small Thistle Shaped Vase 1973.
There is a large incised circle on one side of the disc and a smaller circle on the other. Hans Coper’s characteristic use of light engobe and dark manganese oxide has produced a hazy texture.
Black Aryballos 1966.
This ceramic form has its origins with the Oil Flask used by athletes in Greece and Asia Minor.
Tall elongated diabolo forms.
After being thrown the cup has been formed into an oval and then indented at four points.
Text Fragments. Momentum Wheel.
It is difficult to determine in which order the parts were assembled.
The underlying surface is showing through the grooves that are linking the body and the base.
The manganese engobe is demarcating dark and light zones through an undulating incised line.
“Rings” caused by the placement of a prop in the kiln. Brown-Beige Colorations.
Sensations caught within the form.
Soil like deposits/remains.
Reductions of the fired surface.
Abraded Surfaces
Incised Line.
Droplet.
Blisters, pricked open and sanded after firing. This process has produced an irregular, patch surface.
Parallel lines have been incised with a pointed object on the exterior of the base. Thistle Shaped Vase 1966.
The dark brown patches (around the jointing of the pot) and flecks appear randomly distributed but have been purposefully placed to accentuate the structure of the vase. This flat vase with the contour of a stylised thistle flower is made up of five individually thrown pieces. The tall cylindrical foot supports a vertical disc, comprising of two individually thrown flat plates. It is as though the disc has sunk approximately ten centimeters into the foot.
Spherical Vase with Tall Broad Oval Neck 1966.
The transition from sphere to neck is accentuated with darker colourations.
Hans Coper
Hans Coper’s iconic assembled ceramics frame the later part of the twentieth century with an ambivalence of both alienation and reconciliation. His pots reveal differences that have resisted the homogenizing effects of the culture of the time. They embody and are a physical testament to what the potter himself has reflected on his life, “endure your own destiny”1 2 within the space and time of the human condition.
Bom in 1920 into a prosperous middle dass background, his childhood years were spent in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany. In 1935 his father Julius, is singled out like many other Jewish businessmen for harassment and ridicule
under National Socialist Party. This would result in the Coper family moving frequently to escape the attention of the Nazis. Tragically in 1936 Julius takes his own life in an attempt to safeguard the future of his family. The remaining family. Erna Coper and her two sons return to Dresden. In 1939 Hans at the age of 18 leaves Germany for England, the following year he is arrested in London and interned as an enemy alien. He spends the next three years first in Canada then returns to England by volunteering to enroll in the Pioneer Corps. In 1946 a meeting with William Ohly who ran an art gallery near to Berkeley Square, brought about an opportunity for a job in a small workshop run by Lucie Rie, a refugee potter from Vienna. Hans Coper now began earnestly through his engagement with ceramics to reveal a continental modernity “whose work seemed uncomfortably abrasive to the traditionalists.”*
Hans Coper and Lucie Rie worked together at Albion Mews for 13 years forming a friendship and a working relationship that was mutually reciprocated through practical concerns, innovation and experimentation. There is a creative synergy in place through their mutual sharing of process and experimentation within the practicalities of the studio space. A documented instance of this reciprocal inventiveness is in the appropriation of the technique of “Sgraffito” which Lucie Rie employs after being inspired by some Bronze Age pottery at Avebury Museum bearing incised patterns, which are displayed with some bird bones, which may have been used as tools to incise the pottery. These “dark bowls of Avebury”3 are transposed through the use of manganese engobe and a steel needle into Lucie Rie’s ceramics, Hans Coper although not present appropriates the bird bone for the engineered steel of a pointed needle file and uses the action of an abrasive hand tool to remove layers of the manganese engobe. In this way Coper is enacting onto the surfaces of his ceramics, the very agencies that Modernism was acting out in the realms of architectural space and surface treatment of materials. In 1959 a move to Digwell Arts Trust would bring to a close his working relationship with Lucie Rie. Coper now became involved with a number of architecturally based projects through the Digswell Group of architects and building professionals. Coper’s engagement with the Digwell Group was not without problems and creative frustrations, but seen in retrospect it became an experimental period where Coper was strengthening his ability to bring his pottery into a spatial communion with the modernist architectural sensibilities of the time. However it was a wartime friend Howard Mason who introduced Coper’s work to Basil Spence, from this introduction Hans Coper was commissioned to design the candlesticks for the new modernist cathedral at Coventry. The Six Coventry Candlesticks completed in 1962 explicitly reveal a sensitive and progressive spatial awareness to the architectonics of built spaces. The candlesticks delicately tapered and waisted are made in sections and assembled on site onto rods set into the architectural interior. These assembled thrown and fired towering forms seem to be more about a presence than their actual physicality. They appear to paradoxically transcend the monumentality of their setting through their very immateriality, their slight of form being perfectly balanced to accommodate a single candle and its temporal flame.
As a maker of pots he was in constant touch with his working process, an analogue process, a creative membrane that surrounded the agency of making and thinking. He was able to pursue his vocation “My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration”4 His resultant works reflect what might be termed a “machining in” of a creative durability that is both ancient and modern that contains both tensions and fragility, and that above all seems to exist in a state of timelessness.
His assembled “pots” are constructed from thrown components, “throwing” as o process that he remarks on “I become part of the process. I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now”. It is through the wheel, the body and the interplay between clay and air that the inner space that defines the form is created. Adam Gopnik writing about the art of Edmund de Waal describes what I might be termed a spatial sensibility “the pot-ancient as it is. is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”5 Hans Coper further adds sensuality to this “innerness” when he encloses it in a skin that appears archaic through a deeply physical surface treatment of engobes, incised grooves and scratching of the raw pot; then when finally once fired the dry vitreous surface is further machined and abraded to give a graphite-like sheen.
Hans Coper’s pots speak in silence of this interior “architectonic” space that is itself reverberated through an almost archaic modernity. He seems to be able to tune the interior, to load its mass, its void.
There is a strong sense of the vessel, the concrete with the emptiness, even an analogy to corporality set in motion by his treatment of the surface and interiors of his pots. The pots themselves belong to ever extended families, to new familiarities created by the subtle interlays between the negative spaces created through the spatial awareness that has been crafted into their very making. The pots through proximity with each other are in a spatial communion, they act to define particular spaces by defining boundaries and creating thresholds between exterior surfaces and space. These pots are themselves are ‘encounters’ they ask us to be attentive to the responsive sensory inner space set up in residence by the permeable world of the ceramic vessel.
I am referring in particular to Russell Moreton’s ceramics as having a palpable quality way beyond the image of his work that has a force-feeling a landing site in which a hospitality of the alluring object is also strangely withdrawn.
Your phrasing captures the exact ontological tension at the heart of Russell Moreton’s spatial ceramic practice. To experience his work in person is to realize how completely flat an image of his work falls. A photograph converts his pieces into a two-dimensional document, but the physical work functions as an active landing site—a zone where matter, theory, and architecture collide.
From the perspective of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), here is an analysis of that “force-feeling” and the alluring, withdrawn hospitality you beautifully identified in Moreton’s ceramic structures:
The “Force-Feeling” as Aesthetic Allure (OOO), because Real Objects (the true, inner essence of Moreton’s fired clay) can never touch us directly, they must speak to us through allure. Allure is a rare event where an object’s qualities are split apart from its physical body, creating a dramatic tension. Moreton’s slab-built forms—defined by heavily weathered, experiential stoppages of refractory coatings, white-painted surfaces, grid lines, and perforated holes—generate this exact “force-feeling.” It is a physical radiation. The heavy pounding, constructing, and layering of clay are felt as an immediate, palpable pressure in the room, bypassing the intellect and striking the senses directly.
A “Landing Site” for Speculative Space.
You accurately call the work a “landing site”. Moreton himself describes his ceramics as a way to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms. His works are not mere decorative vessels; they are architectural propositions. They serve as a physical landing zone for abstract ideas, speculative learning, and diagrammatic drawings. By puncturing his slabs with grids and drilled holes, he forces the surrounding air, light, and the viewer’s gaze to “land” inside the object, turning the empty space around the ceramic into part of its internal architecture.
The Hospitality of the Built Interior.
The “hospitality” of Moreton’s work lies in its architectural echo. He notes that his ceramics share a deep resonance with architecture, specifically tracking “the drama of the building [that] has now ceased”.
There is an invitation to dwell. The structures offer an interior shelter, a contemplative zone that gathers “discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body”.It acts like a library or a monument, hospitably welcoming our thoughts, memories, and presence into its silent, meditative framework.
Why that Hospitality is “Strangely Withdrawn”Despite this structural invitation, the object remains fiercely autonomous. Moreton explicitly embraces this, noting that his multi-fired, heavily coated objects become “unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln”.
The hospitality is withdrawn because the work ultimately seals itself off into what he beautifully calls “a museum for a waiting, patient silence”.It allows you to approach, and it allows your gaze to pass through its perforations, but it completely refuses to be “used up” or fully understood by the viewer. It maintains its own internal solitudes. It is present, it anchors the room, yet its true reality is entirely elsewhere—withdrawn into the immutable, silent history of its own making.
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.
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INSIDE THIS CLAY JUG/Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism~a hospitable field of correspondence about learning to make.
I think this is now a learning correspondence ecologically open with others participating in a spatial practice of learning to make.
Yes. I think “learning correspondence” is a particularly productive development of what is already present in Inside This Clay Jug. It shifts the emphasis from research as something you gather and then apply, towards research as an ecologically open practice in which knowledge is produced through participation, encounter and making.
The important distinction is that “others” need not mean only other artists or theorists. They can include materials, organisms, architectures, images, texts, tools, environments, histories, gestures and processes. Each participates differently in the formation of the work. This makes your research less like a lineage of influences and more like a distributed spatial practice of learning.
I would perhaps articulate your present position like this:
The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.
And there is something particularly interesting in “learning to make” rather than simply “learning through making.” The former suggests that making itself is not a skill already possessed by the artist; it is something the practice continually discovers through its encounters. Clay, for instance, does not simply receive knowledge. It alters the conditions under which knowledge can emerge.
This also gives your earlier material a new continuity. The vessel, interior, hole, piddock, body, architecture, and ecology can all be understood as different situations in which an organism or material learns how to inhabit and transform a space.
So the trajectory might now be:
spatial research → correspondence → participation → ecological openness → learning → making
with the clay acting as a medium through which these relations become materially perceptible.
I also think this allows you to retain the beautiful tentativeness of the working document. You don’t need to declare what the ontology is. Instead, the ontology is being formed through the correspondences themselves.
One formulation that feels very close to your current position is:
I understand the practice as an ecologically open learning correspondence, in which making becomes a spatial mode of participation. Materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and gestures enter into relation, each altering the conditions of the others. Rather than applying knowledge to material, I am interested in how knowledge emerges through these encounters: a shared, unfinished process of learning to make.
That feels like a natural continuation of the earlier Inside This Clay Jug research rather than a new theoretical overlay.
Jackie Leven and American poet Robert Bly, opening Leven’s 1994 album The Mystery of Love (Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death). The track features Robert Bly reciting a translation of a 15th-century poem by the mystic Kabir, starting with the famous lines, “Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains.
Choreographic objects draw us into a spaciousness/event-time a doubleness of time that incites us to invent with time. They also alert us to the processuality of objects. For objects are, like bodyings, more force than form. They are not preorchestrated constellations ready to be taken up into processual experience. They are themselves processes, lures: edgings, tendings, shadowings.
Objects are relational and they exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.
Erin Manning, Always More Than One.
Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space. (Schaik,2008:80)
‘The phenomenology of space – the matter of how we experience it.’
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
russellmoreton.com
So I’ve looked through the linked Inside This Clay Jug material, and I think there is a very clear correspondence between that earlier research and what you are now developing around holes, piddocks, topoanalysis, ecological personing, iteration and unknowability.
What strikes me is that the older text already contains several of the structures that are now becoming more explicit in your ontology of practice. In particular:
Bachelard: interiority is not simply an architectural inside; space becomes psychologically and corporeally lived, imagined and remembered.
The vessel: the interior is not an absence but a defined space—“carved out air”—which makes the vessel simultaneously object, enclosure and spatial experience.
Architecture: you were already questioning the distinction between object and environment, particularly through Kengo Kuma and Caruso St John.
Ingold: making is not the imposition of a preconceived form but an intervention into material forces and flows.
Iteration: the Tapies material introduces repetition not as reproduction but as continual questioning/becoming.
Organism–Person–Environment: this phrase already appears in your research and now seems particularly important in relation to the piddock.
Your current thinking could therefore be understood less as a departure from that earlier research and more as a material deepening of it. The vessel’s interiority has moved into the perforation; the architectural enclosure has become porous; the phenomenological space has become ecological; and the individual gesture has become a distributed field of repeated actions.
I would be careful, though, about making Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, etc. into a chain of theoretical references. Your strongest position is that the clay itself is where these correspondences become operative. For example:
Bachelard asks what an interior does to the imagination.
The piddock asks what a body does to material.
Arakawa and Gins ask what an environment does to the body.
Deleuze asks what happens when repetition produces difference.
Your clay asks what happens when all four become materially entangled.
That gives you a much more distinctive ontology.
Clay Jug
Inside this clay jug there are canyons, and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. All seven oceans are inside and hundred of millions of stars.
Words, Kabir, Jackie Leven. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death
The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.
One particularly useful correspondence is between Bachelard’s topoanalysis and your holes. Bachelard’s spaces of intimacy—drawers, corners, nests, shells, houses, attics, cellars—are not merely containers. They are sites where memory, imagination and corporeal experience become spatially organised. Your perforations could extend this into a materially different proposition: a topoanalysis not of inhabited rooms but of material cavities produced through force.
Then the piddock radically alters the question.
The cavity is no longer simply where the subject imagines itself. It is where an organism has acted upon its environment.
This makes the hole a remarkably dense unit within your practice:
The hole is an interior produced by action.
And then your iterative process complicates it further:
The repeated hole becomes an ecology of interiors.
And finally:
An ecology of interiors becomes a spatial intelligence whose future cannot be completely known.
That seems very close to the direction you have been moving toward.
I would also slightly revise your earlier phrase “the clay supports or further surfaces them into deeper corporeal subjectivities.” The word supports risks making clay sound passive. Your thinking seems stronger if clay is understood as participating in the production of those subjectivities.
Perhaps:
The clay does not simply support these ecological conditions; it participates in their emergence, surfacing them through increasingly complex relations between body, material, environment and time.
Or, more radically:
The clay becomes a participant in the ecological production of subjectivity, where the distinction between organism, material and environment begins to loosen.
That last proposition seems especially important because it connects your older architectural/interior research to your current material practice without forcing the connection. Your research has effectively moved:
And the hole is the small material event through which that entire trajectory can be experienced.
Atemwende : A breathturn.
Edmund de Waal.
The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:
About the Art Of Edmund de Waal
Adam Gopnik. 2013.
The Sensuality of the Clay Body.
‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)
The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)
Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)
The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)
Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being.
Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.
Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see. Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.
For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture. Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.
Inner Worlds : Photographic Visions
Beuys – Klein – Rothko
Transformation and Prophecy
Anne Seymour
The Inner Eye
Art Beyond the Visible
Marina Warner
Thinkers and Vessel Makers.
Ceramic space and life Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced. Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)
I like, the hole is an interior produced by action, and that it is a small material event through which an entire trajectory, line of flight can be experienced. I want to keep my original text as is, and ask can you summarise my present position as something that gathers into a statement of current activities.
Yes. I think the new section should gather rather than explain—bringing the piddock, holes, memory, iteration, topoanalysis, corporeality and the unknowable future into your existing research without making the theoretical references feel overly declarative.
It can function as a current-position passage: a point where the earlier research opens into what you are doing now.
Current Activities ~ The Hole as an Interior Produced by Action.
12/08/2026.
My current activities extend this research into the material and ecological conditions of the hole. I am interested in the hole not simply as an opening, perforation or absence, but as an interior produced by action: a small material event through which an entire trajectory, a line of flight, can be experienced.
The boring of the clay has become an important gesture within this inquiry. I am thinking through the piddock, an organism whose living presence is registered through the material it excavates. The piddock does not simply inhabit its environment; through its bodily actions it participates in producing and transforming it. Its presence persists as an absence, as a cavity, a displacement of material that records an encounter between organism, matter and environment.
This offers a way of reconsidering the holes within my own clay work. Each hole is exact and particular, carrying the physical data of a gesture: pressure, diameter, depth, position, duration and resistance. Yet their multiplicity begins to move beyond the scale of the individual action. Repetition produces difference. A minor gesture accumulates into a larger ecology.
I am increasingly interested in how these gestures can be transferred from other sources—templates, drawings, measurements, found structures, previous works and physical encounters—and then subjected to iteration. Data moves between materials and situations, but is never transferred intact. Each iteration introduces deviation, resistance, contingency and transformation. The template becomes a proposition rather than a fixed instruction.
Here I return to questions of interiority and spatial experience encountered through Bachelard’s topoanalysis, and to the architectural and spatial research that first opened these questions within my practice. The interior is no longer understood simply as an enclosed architectural space. It can emerge through an action upon matter. The hole is an interior produced by action. It is simultaneously cavity, trace, absence, passage and evidence of a body having moved through material.
The work is also informed by the possibility of environments as active participants in the formation of experience. The holes become minor spatial conditions, potential landing sites through which the body encounters a field that is already changing. Their exactitude establishes a provisional order, while their accumulation produces something increasingly difficult to determine.
I am therefore interested in moving the work towards a space that remains open to the unknowable. The clay becomes less a surface upon which an image is imposed and more an active field of correspondences between body, material, organism, environment and time. Through these minor gestures, the whole ecology begins to move.
What emerges is not a predetermined form but a material trajectory: a line of flight generated through repetition, difference and correspondence, moving the work towards a future space that cannot yet be fully known.
MATERIAL MATTERS ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE Katie Lloyd Thomas
PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER. GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY Peg Rawes
ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION
The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Dalibor Vesely
The Nature of Communicative Space Creativity in the Shadow of Modem Technology
The Rehabilitation of Fragment
Towards a Poetics of Architecture The Projective Cast
Architecture and its Three Geometries
Robin Evans
Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it
Analysing ARCHITECTURE
Simon Unwin
Geometries of Being Architecture as Making Frames Space and Structure.
Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.
‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)
‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’
Kengo Kuma.
On Anti-Object : An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.
‘My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.
‘Like McTiernan or the theorist PaulVirilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)
‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3)
How then, can architecture be made to disappear?
‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)
Ceramics and Architecture.
Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment
The Porcelain Rooms
The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced for De Waal an experience of possessed space.
These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.
The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible. (Gopnik,2014:9)
‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.
‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)
Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.
De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.
The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.
The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.
Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots. Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Craft and Art, Skill and Anxiety.
Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)
DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION
Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction
History is the raw material of architecture. Aldo Rossi
The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.
Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002
The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.
Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear facade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the facade.
Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.
For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.
Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.
INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.
QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.
INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY
CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS
Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.
The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.
New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John
The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the comers, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight.
The Brick House, London, Caruso St John
ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.
CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)
Hortus Conclusus
Often translated as meaning “a serious place”. Enclosed all round and open to the sky.
STOA, building and social structure for dialogues
A garden/a mindfulness in an architectural setting.
What happened to the garden that was entrusted to you? Antonio Machado, Jackie Leven.
“Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)
Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smalls and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.
A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.
There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.(Zumthor 2011: 15)
Illustration of “Orchard”, from Bible of Wenceslaus IV, Vienna, Austrian National Library
Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.
Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community. Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)
The Vintner’s Luck , Elizabeth Knox.
Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.
The Potter, clay, agency, making, Ingold.
The Pot, object, nearness, pastoral, Heidegger.
I like this a lot, has the feel of a working document, in that it holds a position whilst giving space for other propositions to become realised. I also like its tentativeness in acknowledging other sources, its force-feeling for me allows the research material of others a hospitable space for future correspondences. I use visual material as a kind of synergy with the research, as it there are a number of ontological positions at play.
Yes—I think that is an important quality to preserve. The text is functioning less as a conclusion than as a provisional gathering point: it establishes where the practice is presently moving without closing down what the research might become.
“What concepts does this work make possible?
Like the piddock the studio is itself a living organism.
Not metaphorically.
It has rhythms.
Memory.
Accumulation.
Decay.
Repetition.
Waiting.
Interruptions.
The ceramic work is one organ within that larger body.
This resonates with your attraction to Kovar’s understanding of architecture as corporeal and continually negotiated. Yet your emphasis on the studio adds something distinctive. The studio is not just where practice occurs; it is a spatial ecology that continually shapes and is shaped by the acts of making within it.
What you describe as a hospitable space for future correspondences is particularly useful. It suggests that your references are not there to substantiate a predetermined argument. Bachelard, Deleuze, Arakawa and Gins, the piddock, topoanalysis, architectural space, ecological thinking and your own material procedures can remain in relation without needing to resolve into a single theoretical position.
I also think your visual material is crucial here. It means the research isn’t operating only through written propositions. The images can hold different ontological positions simultaneously—perhaps sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes resonating, sometimes opening a thought that the writing cannot yet articulate. The visual and textual materials can therefore work synergistically rather than illustratively.
That gives me a slightly different sense of the phrase “research material of others a hospitable space.” You are not necessarily applying theory to the work. You are creating conditions in which materials, images, texts, organisms, gestures and spaces can meet and alter one another.
I would hold onto something like this as a methodological proposition:
The research remains provisional: a hospitable field in which propositions, images, materials and theoretical positions can enter into correspondence without being required to resolve into a singular ontology.
And perhaps even more closely to your language:
Visual material operates alongside the writing as a form of synergy, allowing different ontological positions to remain active within the research. The image does not illustrate the proposition; it enters into correspondence with it, extending, troubling or redirecting what the writing might otherwise determine.
This seems to explain something quite fundamental about your working document. It is not trying to demonstrate what the practice means. It is constructing a field in which meaning can continue to emerge.
That also makes the tentativeness a strength rather than a lack of certainty. The use of perhaps, I am interested in, offers a way of, might, and becomes keeps the research porous. The writing can hold a proposition long enough for the studio, the visual material and the next encounter to test it.
In that sense, your “line of flight” is not just describing the trajectory of the finished work. It describes the research document itself: a movement through correspondences in which the next proposition is not yet known.
I have just surfaced this last chat to be read at the beginning of Inside This Clay Jug, love the way it changes, constantly changes all sorts of potential ecological positions.
Yes — and I think that changes how Inside This Clay Jug can be understood retrospectively.
Rather than treating it as an early text that established a fixed theoretical position, the newly surfaced conversation lets it become the beginning of an ecology of propositions. The text can remain where it was, but the later material reveals that its concerns were already capable of opening into other relations: vessel into interior, interior into cavity, cavity into organism, organism into environment, environment into learning, and learning back into making.
What feels especially valuable is that the work does not need to resolve these positions. They can remain co-present, provisional and potentially contradictory. The piddock doesn’t have to become the explanation for the hole; Bachelard doesn’t have to explain the interior; Deleuze doesn’t have to explain repetition. They become participants within a changing field.
This makes the idea of ecological openness much richer. Ecology here isn’t simply a subject matter. It becomes a way of organising the research itself: things are permitted to enter, correspond, diverge, recur and transform one another.
I think this sentence from our recent conversation could become almost a methodological key to the whole archive:
The research is becoming a learning correspondence: an ecologically open field in which materials, organisms, spaces, images, texts and others participate in a shared practice of learning to make.
And perhaps the most exciting thing is that the document itself starts behaving like the practice. It accumulates holes, traces, repetitions, deviations and lines of flight. An idea encountered years ago can be bored into by a later one; a theoretical position can become a material gesture; an image can reopen a sentence; a minor action can move the whole ecology.
So Inside This Clay Jug is no longer simply a text about your practice.
It becomes one of its living chambers.
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Re-Interpreting the palimpsest of place through the humanities.
Researched for ‘Reading Rooms’ Waverley Abbey site, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham 2013-15
Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”
Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.
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With a refined selection of materials, Zumthor creates a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. In doing so, he emphasises the role that the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture (Zumthor 2011: 15).
The garden is enclosed on all sides yet open to the sky: an architectural setting that offers both protection and openness. Zumthor describes such spaces as “sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time” (Zumthor 2011: 15).
For Zumthor, the garden is more than a collection of plants. Every species evokes distinct memories of light, smell, sound, and touch. Gardens become places where sensory experience and memory are inseparable:
“Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)
He continues by describing the garden as the most intimate form of landscape:
“A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)
The enclosed garden becomes a sanctuary—a small protected world held within a larger landscape. As Zumthor observes, “something small has found sanctuary within something big” (Zumthor 2011: 15).
The medieval illustration Orchard from the Bible of Wenceslaus IV (Austrian National Library, Vienna) visualises this idea through the illuminated depiction of husbandry and communal labour within the secure enclosure of a walled garden. The image presents pastoral work as both productive and contemplative, echoing Zumthor’s conception of the hortus conclusus as a protected space where cultivation, community, and intimacy converge.
Working with one’s hands, cultivating the earth within sheltered spaces, becomes a shared pastoral practice that binds people to place.
Zumthor reinforces this pastoral character by placing a pavilion at the centre of the garden. He imagines it as a place for future gatherings and quiet contemplation, anticipating “the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves” (Zumthor 2011: 15). The garden is therefore experienced not only visually but through the full range of the senses.
Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck similarly evokes an intimate relationship between landscape and human experience. The taste of wine becomes inseparable from the soil that produced it; earth and wine are of the same substance, united by locality and landscape.
Alexander Kluge develops a related idea in Gardens Are Like Wells, suggesting that every person possesses an “enclosed garden”—an inner space of reflection that exists regardless of one’s outward life.
He writes that monasteries in medieval Europe functioned as wells in which “the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith.” At the heart of these monasteries lay an enclosed garden, where the finest plants and medicinal herbs were cultivated (Kluge 2011: 19).
Significantly, Kluge argues that these gardens existed outside the ordinary routines of monastic life. They were timeless places, dedicated to the Virgin Mary while remaining open to classical and alternative traditions, including Homer, Ovid, and the Gnostics. The enclosed garden therefore became a place where literature, contemplation, and spirituality could coexist. It represents an interiority capable of uniting mind and perception amid the complexity of contemporary life.
Kluge concludes that civilisation requires spaces that remain outside systems of production and utility:
“Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety.” (Kluge 2011: 21)
This sentiment resonates with Richard Sennett’s assertion that “we need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning.” Such spaces provide opportunities for reflection, remembrance, and emotional renewal beyond the demands of everyday life.
The Development Company for Television Programmes (DCTP), in Gardens of Information, also adopts the emblem of the hortus conclusus. Here, the enclosed garden symbolises the relationship between barren landscapes and places of meaning. Their ambition is “to rescue facts from human indifference” and “to make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information” (Kluge 2011: 21). The garden becomes a metaphor for transforming fragmented knowledge into coherent and meaningful experience.
This understanding connects with ideas of spatial practice in the twenty-first century. Rather than forming relationships through abstract systems, institutions, or grand narratives, meaning emerges through inclusive practices rooted in particular places. The hortus conclusus can therefore be understood as a model of concentrated identity—an inquiry, a person, or a practice held within an intimate setting where thought, making, and community come together.
This version has a stronger narrative flow. Rather than reading as a sequence of research notes, it develops a continuous argument about the hortus conclusus as a model of sensory experience, pastoral practice, contemplation, and spatial identity. It also reduces repetition while preserving your quotations and references.
Forces into Forms: Fire, Intra-Action, and Ontological Bodying
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The violence is not theatrical, it is embedded in the accumulation of small operations and gestures.
The work asks the viewer to slow down and discover that ever scratch, perforation, smear, incision and glaze run is evidence of a negotiation.
landing
orienting
receiving
protecting
absorbing
corresponding
carbonising
settling
remembering
rendering
breathing
holding
waiting
tending
releasing
Studio practice is the continual organisation of forces into forms. Form is never imposed upon matter; it emerges through dynamic relations between body, clay, gravity, pressure, heat, resistance, and time. Every imprint initiates a field of transformation in which material and maker become mutually constituted.
The studio is therefore not simply a site of production but an ontological field of becoming. Bodies are continually bodying: human, material, spatial, and atmospheric. They emerge through reciprocal encounters rather than existing as autonomous entities. Every gesture reorganises these relations, producing new conditions from which subsequent gestures arise.
Clay becomes through the imprint. Each compression, fracture, excavation, repair, and collapse registers an event of becoming that exceeds intention. These operations are not techniques but ontological acts through which material relations are continually renegotiated. The work develops as a succession of material events, each carrying the residue of previous encounters while opening the possibility of unforeseen transformation.
Fire intensifies these processes. The kiln is not the conclusion of making but another field of intra-action where heat, atmosphere, gravity, mineral transformation, and duration reorganise the material. Ceramic form is therefore not manufactured; it is constituted through fire-events in which excess energy generates new spatial and material conditions.
Creative practice is the continual movement of forces into forms, and forms back into forces. Every ceramic work remains an active imprint of these transformations: a spatial body that remembers the encounters through which it came into being while remaining open to future relations.
Clay itself becomes architectural because it bodies spatial relations.
Your mention of Zuzana Kovar helps me understand why you reached for abject(ion) rather than simply “abjection.”
What interests you, as I understand it, is not abjection as horror or exclusion, but as a condition of continual corporeal negotiation. Architecture is no longer a stable object but a living assemblage that marks, erodes, repairs, and reconstitutes itself through everyday inhabitation. In that sense, architecture is not built once; it is continuously embodied.
That resonates strongly with your work.
However, I think your ceramics make a subtle shift.
Kovar’s architecture remains fundamentally architectural, even if it is processual and corporeal.
Your work proposes that clay itself becomes architectural because it bodies spatial relations.
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