Russell Moreton : Matter(s) in Correspondence

Spatial and Literal Cartographies.

 Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

The Ways/Movements of Practice.

Ceramics In The Environment.

Clay, is always a working idea, a matter/material process between things, a form of thinking in process.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Crucible Bowls. 2020.

Slab Facades. 2021.

Rutile/Yellow Ochre/Red Iron Oxide/White Raku Slip/Transparent Raw Glaze.

The Moon Tower, Nina Hole. 2000.

The Watchdog, Michel Kuipers. 1990.

Intertwinining Thinking and Making.

Painting in Form of a Bowl.

Quietus, Cinerary Jars.

The Vessel/The Human Body.

Volumes/Voids

Clare Twomey.

Tony Cragg.

Eduardo Chillida.

Paul Soldner.

Julian Stair.

Bryan Newman.

Gordon Baldwin.

Hans Coper.

Lygia Clark.

Richard Hirsch.

Edmund de Waal.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Steven Holl.

Ceramic vessels and surfaces  for a reflective solitude, an architecture of light,silence and innerness.

Spaces between Objects/Things/Making, Giorgio Morandi.

The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.

Volume And Space.

Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, ‘Man Pointing,’ is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.

Paintings of nothing, ceramic, raw material, dry pigment, wax.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.

Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.

Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.

Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.

The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.

Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.

Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold.

Urban Spaces, palimpsest, impressions, traces, ecologies, redundancies.

Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.

The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Affordances of Things.

Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.

Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.

Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.

An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.

Matter and materials are lively and require attention.

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.

Aleatory, by chance, lots of the ‘acts’ of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.

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.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, understood by the physical phenomenon of an energy or force as it flows across an obstacle. Diffraction is the process of ongoing differences, and ass such it can be used as a tool for analysis, as it attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Karen Barad.

Areas Of Presentation and Participation.

Historic and Social Sites, Art Venues and Exhibitions.

Making Theoretical Objects, Installations and Interventions.

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.

Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture.

How to build your own.

Beginning.

Model Making.

We will begin practising by constructing a room and covering it with a simple dome or a vault.

Once a person has constructed a model, within hours, he or she is encouraged to learn and understand more. The knowledge thus gained will trigger quests in building with earth. It is possible to learn the basics of thousands of years of earth architecture within a day if it is taught in the simplest terms, and  if all our senses are involved in the learning process.

Nader Khalili.

Re-imagining learning, workshop session, conducted and initiated a walk across a landscape with clay being actively manipulated by a number of participants as they engaged with the material, their bodies and the landscape.

Beach firing at St. Ninian’s Scotland, experimental kiln and site built reduction pits excavated from the beach. Pots fired and reduced with found materials, then washed in the Irish Sea.

Hans Coper, essay on professional practice, including his architectural ceramics.

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

Sectional Works.

Slab Constructions.

Plasterwork, Pressmoulding.

Working with materials/substances/drawing and traces of making.

Raku, engobes, slips, oxides, templates, spray diffuser, stencils, fabric inclusions, intermediaries, Indentations, found objects, ferric chloride,

Reduction materials, woodland branches through shredder.

Clay body additives, molochites, mica, vermiculite. other material,

Clay Tools : Block Strips and Combs.

Sound Vessels.

Capacitors/Insulators.

Passive, encapsulated layers.

Architectural Slab Works.

Ceramic and gesso/whitewashed/waxed/painted/bound/surfaces and structures.

The Chapel Of St.Ignatius.

House, Black Swan Theory.

Steven Holl.

Nail Collector’s House, New York.

White plaster walls, hickory floors, and cartridge brass siding nailed in pattern over a wood frame, create a tactile weathering for this structure, a poetic reinterpretation of the industrial history of the site and the pre-Civil War architecture of Essex.

The jewel-like Chapel of St. Ignatius contains the essence of Holl’s vision, his interest in the phenomenology of space, his passionate investigations of form and material, and his use of reflected light and colour.

The angst of a concept before spatial definition, interior and exterior are simultaneously explored.

The largest ’tilt-up’ slab weighs 80,000 pounds and is filled with reinforcing steel. Its greatest stress is during the lift.

Working from the specific towards the universal.

The Built and The Unbuilt.

A theory of architecture that is mutable and unpredictable.

The body as a theoretical object doing/architecture (architecting its situatedness, Oren Lieberman)

 Momentum Wheel : Lucie Rie Installation.

Clay/Ceramics as a concept to a way of thinking.

Speculative Tectonics : A Poetic of Construction.

The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.

Clay Works — In and Out of material : Clay plays the stone, the stone plays the clay

Tony Cragg

IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL

Demonstration

Tony Cragg : I basically mean the effectiveness of the object, of the material. But because the metaphysical and physical association are already occupied, I’m interested in somehow establishing some relationship with the materials and the things around me without using any preconceived notions of an already occupied language. It is a bit like taking away a Christian name and depersonalising something. What I mean is that it’s an attempt on my side to restart the relationship with the material, which I think sculptors have to do anyway.

Jon Wood : Thinking of the increased awareness that this side of your work tries to capture and harness in the viewer, can you say a bit about the kind of sensitivities that you would like to be heightened? What would you see your work as demonstrations of and for? Your sculptures are triggers for what kind of thinking?

Tony Cragg : Well there is an attitude to looking at things and to looking at objects and materials which is based on a meditative tradition of contemplation : the universe in a grain of sand idea, or maybe even religious ideas where you actually get in contact on some level with the material world, on a deeper level than the one you obviously are capable of reaching in an everyday situation, so on an extraordinary level, outside of your own experiences.

I am not saying that that’s not interesting or important. But I also think that this leaves the battleground for the everyday life to be governed by non-contemplative thought and non-meditative thought. And this may sound like a mixture of terms, but I think that there is a job to be done even on an everyday, “second for second” level of life—on the experiential level of life. I think there is a job to be done here improving the quality of contemplation about an awareness of the material world—the material world seen as an immediate extension of the communal social effort, the cultural effort that you are part of.

Jon Wood : How does it move from being an individual contemplative experience to being one that has a communal relevance?

Tony Cragg : In the main part it only has communal relevance. All you can do for yourself is formulate your sentences, cook yourself a meal that suits you, get dressed in a fashion that suits you, and everything else you have to put up with as having been made by other people for you. But obviously, even if they didn’t ask your permission, there’s something consensual about that, isn’t there? Even though you don’t like it, it doesn’t look like you’re making an effort to change it. And maybe there’s some active thing there. My idea is that even if I don’t like it, I wouldn’t be able to change a great deal of it, but I could sow the seed for some change in the direction that I would feel would be important. It’s a measure of how much responsibility one takes for the change. Looking for more in the visual world around me and looking for more language, in a sense, is one way of heightening sensibilities and expanding a vocabulary and then expanding the responses to a vocabulary is a way of heightening sensibilities. I’m not a politician, but I think we still live in a world that is greatly dominated by mesmerism and mystical models, which are very distracting because they actually stop us from really trying to face reality.

Realist Magic

Objects, Ontology,

Causality

Timothy Morton

Clay Work : Visceral Practices

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft.

Longshore drift is a geographical process that consists of the transportation of sediments (clay, silt, sand and shingle) along a coast at an angle to the shoreline, which is dependent on prevailing wind direction, swash and backwash.

This process occurs in the littoral zone, and in or close to the surf zone.

Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

Visualising Environmental Agency.

 

“Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to “cause” something “in the vicinity” or “in the mileau” to happen ( Gell 1998)” 

“These latter artefacts are described with the term “index”, to remove the appellation “art” and to imply that they are indexes of agency.”

Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.

Tectonics in architecture is defined as “the science or art of construction, both in relation to use and artistic design.” It refers not just to the “activity of making the materially requisite construction that answers certain needs, but rather to the activity that raises this construction to an art form.” It is concerned with the modeling of material to bring the material into presence: from the physical into the meta-physical world.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78804

Situate them in such a way that useful space for life may form itself amidst them.

Kazimar Malevich 1924

Zaha Hadid on Malevich • BBC CH/4

Template and Form 2010.The Yard,Winchester.

Modern information theory claims that both the clay and the mould are engaged with matter and form. The clay is in a metastable state that possesses potential energy, unevenly distributed, but capable of effecting a metamorphosis. This quality of the clay is the source of its form. The mould places a limit on the expanding form of the molecular organisation of the clay as it fills the mould. The mould does not form the clay passively, but communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that alters the clay’s molecular organisation.

Postcard : used as index for recorded disc., a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Verso
A for Andromeda, BBC4 27.03.06 90 minutes
1973 Romantic Poets
Disc Full

Fragment of a map, part of a process of inquiry, a testing of visual properties, or just an accumulator for all these things, quietly appropriated into the working practice.

Art Education : Brockwood Art Barn Exhibition AS/A2

  Aerial/Generative Drawing.

Social Mappings. Winchester Cathedral :

Space for Peace 2011.

Cyanotype from performative drawing.