Spatial Bodies in Architectural and Contemporary Art.
Exploratory Clay/Ceramic Based Inquiry.
The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.
Thinking Poetics : Architecture and Ceramics.
Urns : Immersive Cells of Containment~Dissolution.
Re-entering / 2026 — Clay is no longer simply a material within architectural thinking. It becomes a body through which space, surface, interiority, light and movement are generated.
I think this is a high-value archive post. It sits almost exactly at the point where your earlier architectural research begins to become the ceramic practice you are now articulating.
Archival / Anarchival
I would make this Ceramic Bodies, rather than Research / Working Texts.
This is an important shift from the earlier research material because clay is no longer simply being investigated as a material within architecture; it is becoming the means through which architectural and spatial thinking is materially enacted. The post brings together slab-built ceramics, drawing, piercings, surfaces, volumes, voids, filtered light and “vessels for relationships between movements.”
It is also particularly important because of the phrase “Spatial Bodies in Architectural and Contemporary Art” and the later description of the ceramic forms as bodies divided into spatial interiors, with piercings establishing circulation for light. That feels very close to where your current thinking has arrived: the ceramic body as permeable, internally differentiated and relational, rather than as a closed object.
The Tony Cragg material is useful here too. His idea of the work generating itself through previous work gives you an early vocabulary for what you now call emergence, correspondence and making as an unfolding relation.
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In And Out Of Material. 2007.
Tony Cragg.
All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.
Tony Cragg, 1998.
Cutting Things Up.
Material In Space.
Scale.
Impulses through Drawing.
Working Things.
Generation/Generative/Material.
I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It’s to do with a positive directed initiative to change things.
“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I’m making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.
Even if it’s not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.
Tony Cragg.
The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.
Cragg wanted to give the materials ‘more meaning, mythology and poetry. He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.
European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.
With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.
Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.
Imogen Racz. 2009.
The Ceramics Reader. 2017.
Andrew Livingstone.
Kevin Petrie.
Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.
Why are Ceramics Important?
The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.
Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.
Ceramics and Metaphor.
Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.
Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg’s Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.
Ceramics in Contexts.
Historical Precedents.
Studio Ceramics.
Sculptural Ceramics.
Ceramics and Installation.
Theoretical Perspectives.
Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.
Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey.
Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar
Clay and the Performative ‘Other’, Andrew Livingstone.
Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.
Identity and Ceramics.
Image.
Figuration and the Body.
Ceramics in Education.
Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.
Museum, Site and Display.
Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.
With Fire.
Richard Hirsch.
A Life Between Chance And Design.
Scott Meyer.
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