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.
Atemwende, a breathturn : Adam Gopnik and Edmund de Waal
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)
Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Atemwende : A breathturn.
Edmund de Waal.
The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:
About the Art Of Edmund de Waal
Adam Gopnik. 2013.
‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.
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)
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 by De Waal are 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 …
This artwork consists of slab-built ceramic sculptures created by British artist Russell Moreton.
The pieces are part of an exploratory research series themed around architecture and materiality.
They feature a mixed-media surface with white and yellow paint applied over the clay structure.
Wayfaring/Lines and Interior Spaces : Materials of movement and attention.
Processual clay+ceramic constructions that articulate through processes of mark making and intermediaries, surfaces spatial bodies and interiors all entangled in a complex scaffolding of its own making.
“Makers work in a world that does not stand still, Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations” Tim Ingold, 2010.
The Quiet Mind : Silently without resistance. Books/Reliquaries : Working of matters and the exteriority of their relations. Marking/Wayfaring Inscriptions : Clay+Ceramic
(Sound of barking) Do you listen to that dog? Wait, wait. Silently? Listen to it completely silently, which means without any resistance, without any irritation, just listen to it. When you listen quietly there is no resistance, there is no irritation, you do not identify yourself with the dog and the barking of it, your mind is quiet. Krishnamurti.
Meditation The meaning of that word is to measure, basically (for oneself).
Year 2024
Medium Ceramic
Size 170mmL x 240mmH x 60mmW
Exploring Ceramic Art: Movement and Attention This title targets specific keywords like ‘ceramic art’ and ‘movement’, enhancing SEO by attracting audiences interested in art processes.
Meditation and Art: The Quiet Mind in Ceramics Combines popular search terms ‘meditation’ and ‘ceramics’, appealing to those exploring mindfulness in creative practices, increasing search visibility.
Wayfaring Through Clay: Art and Perception Focuses on the unique concept of ‘wayfaring’ linked to clay art, appealing to niche audiences and improving content relevance in search results.
In an era in which architecture is once more learning its potential as a form of inquiry, rather than as a service — as a producer of knowledge, and not merely of ‘projects’.
Brett Steele, Atlas-Tectonics in Barkow Leibininger, Bricoleur Bricolage. AA 2013
Inquiry is essentially the way of learning.
On Learning ‘The Cultivation of a Good Mind’ J. Krishnamurti, Brockwood 1963
THE WAVERLEY INQUIRY
ROOMS AS EXPERIENTIAL OUTPOSTS
Translations from Drawing to Building.
Robin Evans.
Interiors crafted as a palimpsest of augmented realities.
Robin Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages.
The architect is Not a Carpenter:
On Design and Building, a talk by Tim Ingold Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing
Jo Lee, Tim Ingold.
The Perception of the Environment,
Essays on Livelihood, dwelling and Skill, Tim Ingold.
The Aesthetics of Decay
Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the absence of Reason, Dylan Trigg. The Projection Room (the darkened room, camera obscura)
Ruin In Architecture and Cinema, Kiefer, Pallasmaa
Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky
The Artist/’Monk, Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky 1966)
Six Memos for the New Millennium, Italo Calvino Architecture as a stage for the effects of an immersive cinema. Palimpsest
Edward De Waal, Antony Gormley, Studio Spaces designed by Architects. Tony Fretton on Retreats, Creative Centres and Exhibition Spaces. Herzog and De Meuron, Working Models, Surfaces, Images and Materials.
Subversive Libraries, researching between the walls of culture and politics.
A HUT WITHIN THE INFLUENCE AND NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE
The tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental condition
and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow.
Juhani Pallasmaa. Hapticity and Time. Notes on Fragile Architecture. 2000
The Scriptorium Description of Work
The ruined site of the abbey at Waverley, near Farnham has been appropriated as a site and as a place within which to position and develop architectural and sociological inquires. The design processes of interiors have been employed as a tool to both critique and to create how we might further develop the contents of architecture. This Spatiality and its diffractions of differences and similarities, narratives and subjective experiences are what my interior spaces attempt to initiate.
Design as a interactive structure, an interlocutory interior in the making of space and spatial relations.
Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry
The Scriptorium brings together a varied and discursive set of objects, texts and i interior architectures. This work seeks to understand how the virtual changes physical architecture and how this affects the space between people and buildings. The “performativity of research” is presented through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex design led inquiry a “Place Study” staged in a niche-like space. This interior presents itself as both distinct and relational to the other projects in the MA Interiors Show. The interior presents the many manifestations of creative research, structures and even symposia that have been developed through engaging with the site. The visualization of the research and the relational architectures rendered through montage and collage explores digital and analogue technologies. This hybridisation and the use of pinhole photography and film footage further explore interests in the field of performance as an immaterial architecture drawn in the presence of place.
The realisation of my interiors project consists of two separate but relational elements that are presented into a built environment. The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday. The rather hybrid design appropriates a merging of minimalism, modernism and the plastic architecture of a ruined Cistercian Abbey. The construction comes into close contact with its occupant, it is a restricted spatial apparatus that attempts to promote through its awkwardness distinctive experiences. In particular the apparatus of the Scriptorium and its materiality is attempting to promote a sensory intensification that is further underpinned by the cognitive processes of reading and perhaps other social dialogues. The sensory intensification of a hut like space promotes a haptic sensibility, allowing the nearness and intimacies of both the built space and the imaginative, virtual realm to become entangled. Ultimately the Scriptorium is trying to build on unique human subjectivities that are manifested through a kinaesthetic repertoire or script that helps to enact further spatial experiences. It might be useful to think of this constructed space as itself still under construction, a site that acts as its own vessel within the multiplicities of human perception itself. The influence of the Cistercian Order, the site of Waverly Abbey and its pastoral landscape, have all contributed to a sense of the design process, The Scriptorium like the ruins themselves is open to the elements. Waverley Abbey remains as a sensory site between the remains of architecture and its society and the effects of our own global culture in the information age.
In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.
Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own
Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.
The Scriptorium began through a research of both architectural themed texts and documentation of the site, and creative practice involving photography (digital, analogue and film) art practices of collage and drawing. The many visits promoted my own subjectivities to the site and these were also frequently subjected to change by the intervention of others in unexpected ways, these social intrusions by other revealed the very boundaries that the historic site engenders, some playful other malicious. These extremities within the social order of the visitors became problematic in designing for the site itself. An earlier proposal to host a Symposium centred on the Arts and The Humanities, that would use the Abbey and its surrounding ground appeared to be a project of vast diversities and logistics better suited to a cultural project through arts management and funding. As the project developed certain creative methodologies around particularities of the site itself began to appear, the notion of palimpsest being one of them. This promoted the idea of a reading room, as an ephemeral interior space that gathers up the experiential values of ‘ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images. It became apparent that ‘palimpsest’ could be both a visual surface of erasures, earlier markings partially over written by newer ones ‘annotations’ and it could be a scaffold of developing ideas clearly visible merging as adaptations into the very usage of the site.
These re-imaginations through the notion of palimpsest seemed filmic and as such they would able to display a vast amount of diversities and subject matter, a library of recourses that would require users or an audience or both. The referencing of the reading room to the library, and the symposium to the cinema or theatre allowed me to realise that I was dealing with a number of spatial arrangements that needed to develop together, but which could be employed separately. The theatre of research became the vehicle in which to see if this collaboration might be possible.
The use of the image and text in my architectural collages allowed me to visualize associations, to create the possibilities of interior spaces that might be manifested into the built environment. The use of the collage in Architecture is widely acknowledged, architects from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas. The ability of the collage process to juxtaposition fragments, images and texts from irreconcilable origins into an experience, that is visual, tactile and time-based makes it an interesting tool into the realms of architectural design. Collage begins to visualise not only the structure of spaces but also there content and circulation. The theatre of research is interested in how to promote collage and its use as a cognitive and perceptive tool in architecture.
Collage and montage are quintessentially techniques in modern and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity, which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.
Juhani Pallasmaa. The World is a Collage
Jennifer A. H. Shields. Collage and Architecture
Both the Scriptorium and The Theatre Of Research exist only in the form of the exhibition presentation. What they singularly of together propose can only be imagined through their manifested form as static objects placed within a built structure that loosely references architectural concerns and materials. They appear diminished and assigned to the voyeuristic gaze of the visitor that is equally curios and dismissive. These objects and the interior spaces they promoted seem stilled and stalled, as much they appear beyond reach as if the authenticity of their materials and construction have some how been subsumed by their stature and scale. The issues and qualities of which they are attempting to speak of seem reduced by the hegemony of vision, there is little hapicity and time to encounter, only it seems by investing narratives can we begin to re-enact the spatial encounter.
How might the performativity of research be staged, and into what contexts might it be appropriated?
As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes, we live in a culture of meaning, not in a culture of presence. We constantly produce effects of meaning and multiply them with mass media. This applies not only to the humanities but also to a large degree to our wholly normal everyday lives. And in this respect, our experience of presence is getting drastically lost.
Art works may never completely be explained by theory or meaning. The sensual, material makeup of the work in its presence is not the cinders, slag, and ashes, the undigested remains of theory, but remains of an intensified moment
Peter Lodermeyer.Time, Symposium Amsterdam 2007.
Personal Structures, Time, Space, Existence.
The question I ask is do these objects and their interior spaces cause me to think beyond mere representation and recognition, or rather do they create enough of an encounter to force me to engage with them, even if I or the viewer are un-certain as to their meaning or possible outcome. Deleuze comments that something forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter. Something that challenges us. Have these miniature architectures of objects become relational, do we start to use them in perhaps a heuristic manner, a hands-on approach to learning or inquiring, something that we can discover for ourselves. This heuristic finding-out could be made informative through collective collaborations and exhibition through the theatre of research. Is design stripping us of our qualitative spaces as the digital tooling removes the makers trace.
The model object has served as a thinking place in the development of the idea of the Scriptorium. The materials used and their proportions echo interests in Minimalist Sculpture, the intervals between things in the work of Donald Judd and the architectural languages of memory and tectonics of the craftsman turned architect Peter Zumthor. This open sided hut seems cut away almost anatomical as if we were looking into the internal workings of an environment and resident. The structure would have to be made relational to its surroundings if it were to be placed in the landscape. Adaptations to weather the structure, to make it serviceable for use. The Scriptorium has analogues to the notion of a fire-place and its chimney stack. It is a the heart of a building the place of warmth, of dialogues and under the influence through fire of the imagination. The incompleteness that surrounds the scriptorium creatively asks for further design proposals that are even more site specific. The Solar Pavilion built by the Smithsons utilised the old fire place and chimney from the demolished cottage. Around this central element they developed the beginnings of their Modernist (Brutalism) pavilion, an architecture clad with glass, wood and zinc and contained by a walled garden and situated in the pastoral landscape of Wiltshire. Furthering the themes of being in the landscape the Scriptorium could become an observatory, as place from both to look out from and also to look in. The mobility or need to be re-assembled from site to site could promote innovative design solutions as well as interesting detailing or use of materials and surfaces that would facilitate interactions between visitors.
The notion of the Scriptorium becoming clad by an exterior skin, an ephemeral membrane which would then render the differences between the interior and the exterior into the realms of an almost immaterial architectural experience; in as much as the usual distinction between the unpredictable forces of nature outside and the predictable domestic spaces inside. This prompt further investigation into an architecture that blurs the boundaries of both architecture and nature, this could be further explored through the notion of quixotic gestures, art and performance that can capture the experience and the experiential engagement with the natural elements. The Scriptorium becomes the centred structure of remnant that is surrounded by an architecture that can create imprecise boundaries through inconsistent materials. This spatial arrangement will create its own qualitative responses, dialogues and subsequent movements. Architecture in this context becomes purely a sensorial response.
The body as the vector for active mediation with the world of the spirit. The body is the instrument of a qualitative evaluation, the measure of intensity, which alone is capable of giving space extension and modifying it Space is no objective parameter; it must be ‘excavated’ related to the mobile living parametrics of the body.
Frederic Migayrou. Architectures of the Intensive Body. Yves Klein. Guggenheim. 2005
Mark Prizeman. Intensity. Ephemeral, Portable Architecture.
Time, space and existence are amongst the greatest of themes-so great that we could never be so presumptuous to think we could do them justice, and too close that we could ever escape them, whether with our thoughts or actions, in life or in art.
Peter Lodermeyer. Personal Structures Time. Space. Existence. 2009
My design project has attempted to produce spaces and their interiors together with the apparatus of the Scriptorium that qualitatively seek to inquiry into the world we inhabit. The Theatre of Research attempts to establish some sense of a community that can do field work that invigorates the perception of the environment. My own interests are centred through experientially and mindfully exploring voids, cavities, and spaces between things, together with use of clay, glass and other vernacular materials. As an interior designer/artist I have become experiential to the agency of spaces. The theatre of research becomes a meeting place for furthering my programme initially proposed as a symposium at Waverley Abbey.
Through experiencing familiar images, smells, sounds, and textures, but also through making certain familiar movements and gestures, we achieve a certain symbolic stability. Disrupt that familiar world, and our psychic equilibrium is disturbed. From this we can surmise that home, and the operations performed at home, are linked intimately with human identity. Architecture, it would seem, plays a vital role in the forging of personal identities.
Neil Leach. Camouflage
Analysing the desire to blend-in with our surroundings
Beyond the limits of academic levels of discourse and learning
Building/Working with Theoretical Objects in Architecture
The Scriptorium would need to collect up and question considerable more qualitative data. Some sort of portable shelter, lightweight and offering some protection from the elements; would have allowed longer periods of stay and the possibility of experiencing different times of day. The activity of walking to the site, of having to incorporate it into a journey would help to create a stronger sense of place and routine. I am interested in the ‘thingness’ of this place, its influence and how its influence might be transposed into a methodology of reading, theorising and making. I am reminded of the Peter Brook who deliberately demolished his avant-garde theatre building Bouffes du Nord in Paris so as he could create a more emotionally responsive space for theatre. It is this under the influence of the Abbey, which I wish to explore as a creative catalyst, a tool that picks up on its differences as qualitative readings. The ruin by its very nature has re-defined its own architecture from one of form into that of experience, this sense of liminality or immateriality that constitutes itself as the architectural experience.
A good space cannot be neutral, for an impersonal sterility gives no food to the imagination. The Bouffes has the magic and poetry of a ruin, and anyone who allowed themselves to be invaded by the atmosphere of a ruin knows strongly how the imagination is let loose.
Peter Brook. The Open Circle
Andrew Todd. Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments. 2003
Trace drawings on paper with organic and material from the built environment.
Drawing/Making Processes.
Architectural Body : Organism, Person, Environment. Arakawa and Gins.
“[…] the body […] continually transforms itself and is already not, at the moment when I speak of it, what it was a few seconds ago.” (Laplantine, 2015:13)
Laplantine, F. 2015 [2005]. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.
Through the choreographing of our learning processes we create the conditions for engagement/entanglement and production/transformation, which are all modalities of movement and action. So we see pedagogical, architectural and professional practices as potential practices of transformation and co-learning. Dance – somehow both connected to and different than choreography – brings with it a whole set of values which we consider significant for the architectural pedagogy we enact.
Lepeki lists the ‘constitutive qualities’ of dance as
“ephemerality, corporeality, precariousness, scoring and performativity” (Lepecki 2012:15)
He goes on to say that “[t]hese qualities are responsible for dance’s capacity to harness and activate critical and compositional elements crucial to the fusion of politics and aesthetics …”(Lepecki 2012:16)
His ‘compositional’ and ‘critical’ elements echo the event/discourse relationships within our pedagogy and in our use of choreography as dance/writing. These qualities allude to specific modes of engagement and making, and state particular values. We will use them to underscore our pedagogical modes, and develop them as necessary in a teaching practice which desires students’ engagement, empowerment, and caring.
In that sense, ephemerality can be related to immediacy and an engagement with the here- and-now which cares about effects and duration. Corporeality speaks of a body, but if we ask whose body or what body, then we can expand it to be any-body, in order to speak of matter or, more precisely, of mattering and bodying. Other names for precariousness can be fragility or vulnerability, somehow always already a condition of our impossibly immediate interventions. Scoring, which can be both a ‘writing’ and an unfolding, creates spaces and times and modes for and of improvisation. And performativity always returns us anew to movement, multiplicity, effects and life.
Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care: Choreographing Values
OREN LIEBERMAN
ALBERTO ALTÉS
Abstract
Thinking through choreography as dance/writing – both the doing and the score for that doing, the event and the discourse – we propose to shift the focus of architectural practices and pedagogies from an emphasis in the attainment of competencies and static knowledge, to a privileging of processes and modalities of learning that nurture the values of engagement, empowerment and caring responsibility. Choreography situates our work in the realm of performative action and transformation, and it does so with and through our bodies; also, it helps us frame the power of our intraventions, which aim at transforming the world through immediate, responsible and often fragile acts of engagement with matter, movement and life.
Keywords:
Intravention, matters of care, choreography, architectural pedagogies, modalities of learning.
More on ’intraventions’ can be found in:
Altés, A. and Lieberman, O. 2013. Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes
of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures. Baunach: Spurbuch Verlag.
Choreography and Architectural Engagement: A Transformative Approach This title directly addresses key themes in the post, improving relevance for search queries related to architecture and choreography, which can attract targeted traffic.
Exploring Ephemerality and Corporeality in Architectural Practices By highlighting ‘ephemerality’ and ‘corporeality’, this title integrates crucial concepts, enhancing visibility in searches focused on contemporary architectural discourse.
Intravention and Care: Redefining Architectural Pedagogy This title emphasizes ‘intravention’ and ‘care’, making it appealing for users searching for innovative educational practices in architecture, thus fostering user engagement.
Independent research for Studio Practice Theory and Analysis.
UCA Farnham, MA Interiors. 2014.
Why does Edmund de Waal make architectural interventions through the arrangement of porcelain pots?
To what extent, if any is this Ceramist interested in the ability of the single pot to engender meaning?
How is the “innerness” of pots that he talks about so eloquently actually manifested in his architecturally staged installations and exhibitions?
Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramic Galleries 2009.
During his career Edmund de Waal has moved from that of being a domestic potter to that of an installation artist.
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. This site specific installation is located at the heart of the galleries. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.
Central to Edmund de Waal’s practice is the concern to offer a ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, preservation and display of ceramics.’ (Graves,2009:8)
He has further explored the use of installations and vitrines in the pursuit of framing and underpinning these intellectual concerns. The use of purpose made structures, shelves and boxes adds the aesthetics of a tightly control clean minimalist style of presentation to his assembled collection of pots.
Interpretation and display are now central to these ‘grouped works’ that have become presented as ‘cargoes of pots’ that now seem at home in the collecting environment of the museum.
‘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)
De Waal working with specific settings has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves,2009:10)
‘By altering the character of a known space, by intruding on areas within it that might not usually be associated with the display of art, the viewer’s awareness of both the changes and the space are heightened.’ (Graves,2009:10)
This methodology of display ultimately disappears as if it were never actually present, leaving the underlying fabric of the interior space as it were untouched, the impermanence of the work now resides only in its memory.
What remains of these sensing spaces (interiors) through spectacle, event and place? Proposal for the ceramics department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Site specific work in the new contemporary ceramics gallery that responded to the architecture of the space, and that could remain in place for years. An installation or feature that could remain in place and yet allow the gallery to function as a location for frequently changing displays and exhibitions.
De Waal’s response is Signs and Wonders ‘a lacquer red metal channel tracking the circumference of the dome and housing more than 400 of his pots; is an act both of daring and of breathtaking elegance and simplicity, a magisterial achievement on a scale surpassing anything he has previously undertaken.’ (Graves,2009:10)
Signs and Wonders is in reality a major contemporary architectural adaptation into the very fabric of the historical building. Its very reality creates a physical link between the past and the present, and it represents a long term commitment that began with the redevelopment of the ceramic galleries into the new Contemporary Ceramics Gallery.
Edmund de Waal’s Signs and Wonders is an iconic statement of intent for the Contemporary Ceramics Gallery, it underpins a new platform for the expanding territory of creative practice in ceramics. Signs and Wonders actively seeks to simulate new ways of seeing ceramics.
Architectural feature that comprises of some 425 thrown pots made of porcelain by Edmund de Waal and installed under the oculus of the great dome situated directly above the main entrance hall.
Edmund de Waal reflects on the vitrines that used to be found in the old ceramic galleries (room 137) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1970s.
‘Most of the vitrines were firmly policed into taxonomies of kiln or modeller or religion, less ’pseudo-scientific’ than a slightly desperate attempt to control the vastness of the collection. Some of the vitrines had the work of a single potter. All the pots by Hans Coper used to be in one mahogany case, huge early textured vessels shadowing the fine later Cycladic forms. They barely fitted.’(De Waal,2009:16)
De Waal’s memories of the old galleries in the 1970s was that they were an attempt to compare pots from different galleries, of the strangeness of seeing through one great case into another; the tops of a row of bottles cresting a line of dishes and the layering of one series of forms or colours onto another. And of course the fact that there were very few people.
Signs and Wonders; Edmund de Waal.
‘I have made an installation of pots for Gallery l41. There are 425 vessels made out of porcelain and they are placed on a red metal shelf that floats high up in the dome. You can just see it from the entrance hall through the square aperture in the coffered ceiling if you stand in one of the mosaic circles on the floor. It is called Signs and Wonders.’
I want to make this installation part of the fabric of the V&A. (De Waal,2009:20)
‘It began with the combination of a gesture of a pen and the plans to this austere bit of Edwardian architecture.’ (De Waal,2009:22)
The porcelain vessels are on a red shelf, the colour of lacquer.
The integrity of the shelf is upheld by being made from a proper material so as to form an accord with the historical architecture.
De Waal has experimented with placing porcelain on steel shelves and by having pots placed within lead lined boxes. He is aware of how these materials can form provocative combinations from their inherent densities.
The controlling presence of the vitrine is an intervention itself of its own display, (decommissioned mahogany vitrines from the V&A, illustrate the phenomenal weight of these enclosures)
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 Modem era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists.
‘This is not a simple linear relationship, but part of a flow around into Modernism and back again. It is a perpetual rediscovery.’ (De Waal,2009:26)
On Pots Behind Glass:
The shadows of the stacked pots.
On the memory of objects, the afterimage, its distillation, and the blindness of looking away that gives it its form. What is left to be adapted or to be pared down through volume and angle into these new reflective forms?
Derrida on drawing from ‘blindness’.
‘I wanted to work with objects that have been part of my life for 30 years, and to make sense of my memories of how pots lived in the galleries.’ (De Waal,2009:26)
‘Other sections, one run of bottles that are in different celadons for instance, are a memory of vessels from disparate parts of the ceramics collections brought into a taxonomic focus. This is the use of memory and the after-image as the intense holding of a form on the retina.’ (De Waal,2009:26)
In Heidegger’s work ‘not least in his use of etymologies, his writings are imbued with a sense of historicity; a sense of the passage of time, of destiny, and of the past as a reservoir of thinking available to contemporary life.’ (Sharr,2009:99)
The Architecture of Place :
Architects that were sensitive to site, dwelling, inhabitation and place. Form Making as a Response to Site and Inhabitation.
In The Ethical Function of Architecture 1997, Karsten Harries seeks to reclaim a sense of meaning in architecture that he feels has been lost to a scientific rationality. He sees ornament as being able to convey meaning by linking and reflecting stories and in so doing it gives us an appreciation of nature. This type of ornament has a poetic function in that it helps to locate people with their place and community.
Dalidor Vesely believes that architecture can manifest the attitudes of its builders, and that this can describe through the very fabric of the building the very thinking of the society that implemented its construction.
Vesely ‘explored what he considered to be the tensions between instrumental and communicative, or technological and creative, roles of architecture. He argued that these roles have become divided; a split which is recorded in the respective roles of architects and engineers. Vesely traces the historical origin of this division to that of mediaeval optics and the development of perspective; to the first attempts to privilege a scientific description of light over immediate experiences of the qualities of vision. This division is a crisis of representation, that that is displacing meaning in architecture from human experience to the visual qualities of surface and appearance.’ (Sharr,2009:103)
For Vesely, creativity remains the antidote to technology.
Zumthor shares with Heidegger in that he believes in architecture’s potential to evoke associations and invite meaning.
Regionalism, a critical dialogue with the site, a rapport between place and building as if it had always been there.
‘Stone and water are more than materials or phenomena for Zumthor; they’re also intellectual notions, traditions of thought with a long history.’ (Sharr,2009:104)
Critical Regionalism, see Kenneth Frampton, ‘Zumthor aligns himself with Frampton when he writes about a critical dialogue between his designs and their sites, unafraid to claim meaning from locality.’ (Sharr,2009:105)
Choreographing Experience.
Zumthor ‘I need time to create an atmosphere, I have to be careful about things otherwise I won’t have this atmosphere and the whole objective of my work somehow would be gone. That’s the way I work.’(Spier,2001:19)
‘Much of the installation uses memory in a different way to produce the blurred after image.’ (De Waal,2009:28)
De Waal cites the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto as being a revelatory influence on this notion of memory and the blurred after-image. In particular the series
‘Architecture’ which features blurred photographs of Modernist architecture. These images seemed to have the ability to take ‘you back to a particular moment standing in front of a particular building. It was that they seemed to be simultaneously images of a memory of place.’
Sugimoto ‘Architecture’ The German Pavilion from Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe. ‘A graduated run of whites into greys is a memory, for me, of the archive photographs of Bauhaus ceramics with their regimented attempt at teaching pottery by breaking forms down to component parts.’
(De Waal,2009:30)
Hans Coper builds up spatial interiors in his pots by using component parts thrown on the wheel.
The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.
‘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)
The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer 2009
Procession, the choreography of light for the moving eye.
Iconic works of space in motion: The Perceptual Flow.
‘Related concepts relevant to architecture are found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom cinematic flow is a living rather than linear experience, achieved when film is stretched and lengthened by human memory and by images that evoke something significant beyond what we see before us, allowing time to flow out of the edges of a frame. ’(Tarkovsky, 1986:117)
Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vais.
Donald Judd’s Untitled 1980.
Jean Nouvel’s Culture and Congress Centre 1999.
‘More important still to de Waal’s project is the way that Judd’s stacks use interval. These cantilevered boxes are literally, one thing after another; but they do not touch. Rather the positive steel and plastic elements are separated by negative spaces that are their exact equal in volume. The works operate according to a binary, on/off logic, suggesting temporal as well as spatial extension.’(Adamson,2009:40) see also
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews: Chicago, 1967/1998.
Fried recognizes the durational aspect or dimension of minimalist sculpture, but condemned it for its “quasi-theatrical presence” that by occupying the time of the viewer this sculpture became mundane and everyday rather than transcendent.
Stacking is a way for de Waal to engage with the history of sculpture. It can be thought of as a compositional tool that suggests the storeroom, the kiln or a way of just putting pots together. Stacking produces a visual syntax through ‘exploring the formal and implicitly psychological relationships that pots can have with one another. ’(Adamson,2009:38)
Simultaneous Temporal Structures: Windows or Objects in Sequence.
‘Pictures in motion have long been exploited by Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, who describes his buildings as “scenographic” with routes composed along a series of camera angles and apertures.’ (Plummer,2009:56)
‘Another technique Tarkovsky employs to loosen time from any rigid progression is the directorial power to endow not only the entire film, but also its segments and even separate frames, with simultaneous temporal structures that are not unlike William’s “ice in March” or Viola’s “parallel times”.’ (Plummer,2009:56)
Steven Holl ‘movements are threaded rather than linear, pulled vaguely along by what Holl calls sequences of shifting and overlapping perspectives. Beckoning light draws the visitor onward step by step, and image by image, through a fragmentary rather than comprehensive narrative. (Plummer,2009:56)
Gianni Vattimo, Italian Philosopher.
The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. 1991.
Weak Ontology/Fragile Thought.
A latent learning under the safe light of the darkroom. The red pages of the signs and wonders catalogue links a narrative with spatial object of his installation by its colour, but it might also reflect the inner space of the photographic darkroom.
‘Light neither centres nor aligns space, as in the past, but appears in the periphery as a vague and marginal background event.’(Vattimo, 1991:85)
‘Filled with intricate constellations’: (Adamson,2009:34) Looking/seen from the oculus of the dome.
‘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)
“When they are so high up they become blurred”
Rather than the object stranded on the plinth attempting to flag you down, if you place it elsewhere there is a feeling of possibility and latent discovery, similar to the feeling that you get if you are lucky enough to see the stores of the museum.
(De Waal,2009:30)
In between spaces/stores and other latent spaces, re Mike Nelson, photographic darkroom between rooms. London 2007.
Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919) Heidegger, The Jug, “gathering vessel”
“What is de Waal charting in these looping circles within circles?”
De Waal acknowledges the influence of Wallace Steven’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”. Glenn Adamson remarks how the special qualities of the round perhaps thrown pot is itself both an object, brought into the being by the world and encircled by it. (Adamson,2009:34)
In so “being” the vessel brings its own order, a subjectivity that acts and takes dominion everywhere. This communion (spatial relation) between the vessel and its environment is further echoed in the lines of the poem “the wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild”(Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar. (1919)
Signs and Wonders is about seeing 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/we gather our surroundings. 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.
‘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 sherd, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson,2009:44)
Temporal Zones/Re-Imagined Social Landscapes: Archaeology/Making : Pot Shard/Pottery.
See Tim Ingold the four A’s, Anthropology/Archaeology/Art and Architecture.
Working Notes : 26 February 2014
Theory and Analysis/Tutorial with Simon Olding CSC.
COMPONENTS :
Essay 2000-3000 words and a research journal that informs the essay/texts. Interested in using this research to inform my “Object Analysis” and its exploratory essay.
The Object:
Ceramic Vessel made by Hans Coper.
A Level Ceramics at Farnham Sixth Form College. Workshop experience locally at the Hop Kiln Pottery, Farnham and at Grayshott Pottery.
HND in Ceramics, Epsom School of Art and Design.
Self employed and freelance as a ceramist until 1992.
Currently working with clay in a contemporary practice that includes Architecture, Fine Art and Performance.
Research Questions.
What “anthropological traces” remain within the vessel of the “Pot”
What is its Symbol-Function-History.
How much of the artist’s social biography is caught up in its making.
Does the object in question underscore a deeper humanity/ a visionary present. How does the craft of making affect the perceptions of our surroundings.
The worn vessel/telluric values and the sensuality of humans.
Making: The Contemporary Craft Praxis. Research Texts.
Making, Tim Ingold.
The Perception of The Environment (Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill) Tim Ingold.
Heideggar for Architects, Adam Sharr. A Potters Book, Bernard Leach,
Hans Coper, Tony Birks/Contemporary Potters/Ceramic Review. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard.
Rethinking Materiality, Colin Renfrew. (At The Potters Wheel)
How Things Shape The Mind/A Theory of Material Engagement, Colin Renfrew.
A movement of thought (Bergson) becomes active and in this activity a new register begins to take shape. This new register is neither art per se nor philosophy, it is study, it is practice, it is speculation.
The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning.
Exploring Bergson’s Active Thought Movement This title includes key terms like ‘Bergson’ and ‘Active Thought’, which are likely to attract readers interested in philosophy and promote better search visibility.
The Intersection of Art, Philosophy, and Practice By highlighting the intersection of diverse fields, this title draws in a wider audience searching for connections between art, philosophy, and practical applications.
Understanding Manning’s Minor Gesture Concept Focusing on Erin Manning and ‘Minor Gesture’ targets specific readers looking for insights into contemporary philosophical concepts, enhancing search relevance.
Architectural structure meets visual fine art, as a sculptural assemblage, a resting place created on-site; promoting an inquiry into making~inhabiting and feflexivity amongst a social event and the natural garden landscape.
Evaluation
IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES
MAKING IN THE LANDSCAPE
SCULPTURE TRAIL 2018
The House-sheds : Camping
There’s more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don’t need permission for them. There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.
This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.
Theatre for Research. MAKING PLACE Speculative/Performative Learning Space.
They will be schools no longer, they will be popular academies, in which neither pupils nor masters will be known, where the people will come freely to get, if they need it, free instruction, and in which, rich in their own experience, they will teach in turn many things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack. This then will be a mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity. Michael Bakunin, 1870. Freedom in Education.
Anarchism, Colin Ward 2004.
Evaluation WORKING NOTES
Possible Outcomes.
Developing relations on the specificity of a landscape and the weather.
Construction site, towards an alchemy of thinking and making space and the instants of the wonderous.
Some ways of thinking.
Crafting Solitude~Philosophy : Interested in an interiority that confounds visual readings.
Processes enabling situations through strange constructions.
Diffractive apparatus of components, materials and filtered light.
Explorative, site specific and performative.
A fictive space articulated through the alchemy of light and water.
Sensing space, seating for a site of speculative inquiry.
Material Matters : Architectural/Perceptual/Sensing Phenomena. Correspondences, Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies. Reflections/Movements/Environments/Landscapes
Using site as a research instrument, a compounded object of self assembly, and crafted components, materials and substances. A sculptural intervention, event based merging the poetic with the tectonic.
Apparatus/Device/Model.
Sensing composition, situating a site for speculative inquiry.
An exploratory and site specific installation that can open up our interior world to the proximity of both the situation of a natural environment and the experience of a conceptually made object/space that facilitates a sense of wonder, resulting in an alchemy between these two realms of experience.
Art works constantly to brokers these relations within us.
Influenced in part by John Piper (Ruined Cottages) and the materiality, of old stained stonework, lime wash, carlite plaster and yellow ochre.
On Materiality~Ruination Architectural Ceramics Of Scepticism.
Ceramic substances/coatings and the layering of markings, instances and gestures into a spatial decay.
These are ceramic sculptures, specifically exploratory, architectural-themed works by artist Russell Moreton. The artist uses clay as a primary medium to explore themes of architecture and space. The works are processual in nature, focusing on the imprint of the artist and the material itself. The raw, distressed finish with white paint and visible cracks reflects the artist’s interest in the material’s vocabulary and the “drama” of a building when its use has ceased. The pieces are categorized as contemporary craft and design or fine art sculpture.
Year 2024
Medium Ceramic
Size 130mmW x 230H x 60mmD, 150mmW x 200mmH x 60mmD, 75mmW x 50mmH x 50mmW.
russellmoreton.com 