Spatial Practices : Experimental drawing and alternative photography.

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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.

  • Collage : Solar Pavilion/A Philosophy of Solitude/John Cowper Powys : The Hut as a projection of self/Ann Cline

    Collage : Solar Pavilion/A Philosophy of Solitude/John Cowper Powys : The Hut as a projection of self/Ann Cline

    As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

    Ann Cline

    Architecture is not made with the brain.

    The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.

    Architectural Association 2005.

    Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.

    Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.

    Holistic Practices.

    The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.

    Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)

    Transitions between spaces.

    ‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life

    Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

    ‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining.’(Schregenberger,2005:82)

    ‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001

    ‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)

    Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker

    Urban Structuring.

    Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.

    ‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)

    ‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison’2005:98)

    The Everyday.

    Life between buildings.

    The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.

    Heavy Prefabrication: Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.

    John Cowper Powys hopes to create a new level of discourse that will appeal to the common person, that person who desperately needs a philosophy of life, a means of comprehending the world around him or her, while at the same time being a person who is receptive and curious.

    ‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

    (Sergison’2005:97)

    The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

    To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’
    We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker, 2005:85)
    The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.
    Cultural Background.
    Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.
    Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)
    The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.
    John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) created an attractive and congenial meditation in his best non-fiction book: A Philosophy of Solitude.
    Writing in the early 1930’s in his adopted United States, where he was living and working as a free-lance lecturer, a popularizer of intellectual themes barnstorming the country, Powys’ book is prompted by his experiences, his insights, and his disappointments. He sees the United States as a slave of modem technology — of megalopolis, pandemonium, noise, of “the Gargantuan monstrosities and Dantesque horrors of our great modem cities.”
    The situation, he declares, is too far gone for the inspiration of American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with their facile optimism and their confidence in the virtues of an American character now lost in the twentieth century.
    The only thing that can really help us is a much more definite and drastic philosophy … a real, hard, formidable, unrhetorical introspection …”
    And this is the philosophy of solitude that Powys sets out of construct.
    To Powys, solitude is the necessary social, psychological, and intellectual state of the individual. It is social in pulling away from the life and tumult of the crowd (Powys lived for decades in New York City, finally moving to a small town in upper-state New York before returning to Wales a few short years after this book’s publication).
    It is psychological in the sense of identifying and pursuing a frame of mind for the personal pursuit of solitude. And it is intellectual in offering a philosophy calling upon a variety of classic thinkers and using the tools of plain everyman logic.
    Powys sees this simplicity of mind and desire as a key to self-control and understanding. His elementalism is based on the solitude that is evoked by this self-knowledge, which allows a person to make and define a life for themselves based not upon the tempo and rhythms of the crowd and technology but on the unspoken wisdom that wells up from solitude itself.
    The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaningfulness. I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use.
    Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.
    Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.
    Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itself (importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time).’ (Krucker, 2005:87)
    The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).

    The book is an extended essay, not a history, but it does call for a close sense of identity with the subject and with those who have come before. The author dives into the subject of primitive huts, skimming the surface with Po-i and Shu-ch’i, the recluse archetype brothers of Chinese antiquity, with modems like Gaston Blanchard and Thomas Merton, classics like Lao-tzu and Heraclitus, plus the great Japanese hut-dwellers Kamo no Chomei and Hoshida Kenko. The hut, she notes, has always been a projection of the self. When Heraclitus was chided on why he lived in such a small and humble abode, he responded, “Even here, the gods reside.”

    Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)
    ‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways,etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison’2005:97)
    Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership.
    ‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison’2005:98)
    Could it be that where a human settlement seems structureless, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?
    Neutrality and Character.
    ‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.
    The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker, 2005:89)
    ‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker, 2005:90)
    Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson
    With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and “life-style.” The hut, then, may be humankind’s supreme experiment.
    ‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions. ’

    Research Contexts/Materials

    The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.

    What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.

    Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.

    A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project.

    ‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison’2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings.

    A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.

    Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution.

    ‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

    Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project.

    ‘The concept of Ways as a means of organising circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

    A simple organising circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.

    Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.

    By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.

    The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.

     

    As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their…

    Source: Collage : Solar Pavilion/A Philosophy of Solitude/John Cowper Powys : The Hut as a projection of self/Ann Cline

  • Hans Coper : The Shape of Time/Working Notes/Diagrams

    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
    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,
    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…

    Source: Hans Coper : The Shape of Time/Working Notes/Diagrams

  • Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #3

    Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #3

    Collage and drawing with cyanotypes, photographs, negatives and painted surfaces.

    The Laboratory , Canterbury 2009

    Tim Ingold
    MAKING 2013
    Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

    Practical Geometry
    The Architect and The Carpenter
    The Cathedral and The Laboratory
    Templates and Geometry
    The Return to Alchemy

    Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.

    UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.

    DSC_0876 : Figure/Field/Research

    TRANSPARENT MEDIA : Form,structure, space, enchantment
    Double Take
    15 APR – 3 JUL 2016

    A two-venue exhibition exploring the relationship between drawing and photography, taking place at Drawing Room and The Photographer’s Gallery, London.

    Drawing and photography are each considered the most direct, ‘transparent’ media with which to engage with the world.  They share fascinating parallels:  the relationship to the indexical, the blank sheet of paper or surface, graphite and silver, pencil weight and aperture, the sense of an invisible ‘apparatus’ (the camera and pencil), the engagement with surface, light, negative and positive and the trace. Double Take seeks to explore the multifarious ways photography and drawing have been combined and mirrored to extend both practices into new arenas in modern and contemporary practices.

    “… a freehand sketch diagram that was at the tangent between idea and imagination…if the parti – the first critical diagram – is not made well, it will be difficult for architecture to follow.  If there is no parti, there will be no architecture, only (at best) little more than the utility of construction.  Buried within their early sketches is the germ of a narrative or language.  The early diagrams are reflective conversations with the language of architecture.”

    –  Alan Phillips, Brighton, UK

    Marking Stick : Leylines, Directions and Sites. #11

    Sequential Photograph : In the space around the “spatial turn” (539)
    Art as Spatial Practice.
    Space folds : Containing “Spatialities around historicality and sociality”

    “All that is solid melts into air”

    Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
    (Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

    Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

     

    Collage and drawing with cyanotypes, photographs, negatives and painted surfaces. The Laboratory , Canterbury 2009 Tim Ingold MAKING 20…

    Source: Mapping Relationships : Contexts and Locations #3

  • Working Collage : Marking the Line/Art, Architecture and Craft Narratives.

    Working Collage : Marking the Line/Art, Architecture and Craft Narratives.

    Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity.
    Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.
    Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?
    — Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005
    Jana Sterbak
    Remote Control 1989
    A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, “find” or “discover”), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.
    A Hut of One’s Own, Ann Cline
    Texts,Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines,
    Ecosophy : Social ecology, mental ecology, environmental ecology.
    “Concerning the continuous development of its practice as much as its theoretical scaffolding.”
    The Three Ecologies, Guattari

     

    Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity. Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.  Is there still an aesthet…

    Source: Working Collage : Marking the Line/Art, Architecture and Craft Narratives.

  • Opening Collages : Ambiguous Borders

    Opening Collages : Ambiguous Borders

    Curatorial Practices
    The Alchemy of Building
    Collages/Inclusions : Creative Ecologies

    Yvonne Buchheim
    Wish you were here to trip up memory lane. Belfast 2000
    http://www.acid.uwe.ac.uk/buchheim/belfast1.htm

    Alberto Perez-Gomez
    POLYPHILO
    or The Dark forest Revisited
    An Erotic Epiphany of Architecture

    Robert Mangold

    Sarah Purvey
    Landscape Series, Rhythm. 2012
    Crank vessel with slips

    Robert Macfarlane
    The Old Ways
    A Journey On Foot

    Kengo Kuma
    Transparent Pavilion

     

    Curatorial Practices The Alchemy of Building Collages/Inclusions : Creative Ecologies Yvonne Buchheim Wish you were here to trip up mem…

    Source: Opening Collages : Ambiguous Borders

  • Anachronistic Grisaille/Space and Architecture : Cyanotype/Diaphanous And Indexical Negatives

    Anachronistic Grisaille/Space and Architecture : Cyanotype/Diaphanous And Indexical Negatives

    Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.
    Duration, Steven Holl
    Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.
    The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.
    The time of one’s being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.
    SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional
    Concrete/Abstract Painting : Areas of Grisaille. Outpost Studios, Norwich.
    We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but a vector of subjectivation.
    Guattari, 1995 :25
    Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide.
    The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure in 1842.[1] Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints.[2] It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection.[3] Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.[4]
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Blue Spaces Of Everyday Enchantments : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal
    The Enchantment of Modern Life.
    Attachments, Crossing and Ethics
    The performativity of social representations
    When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.
    Jane Bennett

    Tracing Light : Petworth House, West Sussex 2000
    David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

    Light And The Genius Loci
    For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in ‘a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun in the system of perception’.

    Mutations Of Light
    Petworth Window, 6 July 1999

    Light’s Windows And Rooms
    Passing towards the Invisible.
    The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent  theme in William Henry Fox Talbot’s early speculations.

    BROUGHT TO LIGHT
    PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900

    Sight Unseen
    Picturing The Universe
    Corey Keller
    Invisible objects, penciled by nature’s own hand.
    In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the ‘world itself’.

    The Social
    Photographic Eye
    Jennifer Tucker
    Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.
    An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand.

    Invisible Worlds
    Visible Media
    Tom Gunning
    William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6×22.5 cm.

    Techniques Of The Observer
    On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century
    Jonathan Crary

    The Camera Obscura and its Subject
    Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold contents of the now ‘exterior’ world.

    UNDER THE SUN
    By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

    Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.
    An Epiphany Of Light
    David Alan Mellor

     

    Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl Time is only understood in relation to a process …

    Source: Anachronistic Grisaille/Space and Architecture : Cyanotype/Diaphanous And Indexical Negatives

  • A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment : Assemblages/Relationscapes/Things exist rooted in the flesh (R. S. Thomas)

    A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment : Assemblages/Relationscapes/Things exist rooted in the flesh (R. S. Thomas)

    Blueprints,Texts and Materials/Building on Concerns
    Toward a New Interior.

    Relationscapes
    Movement, Art, Philosophy. Erin Manning. 2009

    What Moves as a Body Returns as a Movement of Thought

    Heidegger’s Topology
    Things exist rooted in the flesh (R. S. Thomas)
    Being, Place, World
    Jeff Malpas. 2008
    David Smith : Sprays, The Absent Object. Peter Stevens
    Eidetic Image, Nearness/Proximity/Atmosphere
    Temporal Structures,
    Unthinking Eurocentrism
    The Political Writing of Adam Kuper and Tim Ingold
    Justin Kenrick. 2011
    Pottery, The mindfulness of making social
    Anthropological Notebooks 17
    The War of Dreams
    Exercises in Ethno-Fiction.
    Marc Auge
    The Culture of The New Capitalism
    Richard Sennett.
    VISITORS
    a film by Godfrey Reggio
    The World of The Anthropologist
    Marc Auge, Jean-Paul Colleyn. 2006
    The Field
    The basic methodology of anthropology is ethnography. This is the famous ‘fieldwork’ in which the researcher shares the daily life of a different culture (remote or close), observes, records, tries to grasp the ‘indigenous point of view’ and writes.
    Objects of Anthropology
    Politics is also the art of administrating and producing subjects, citizens.
    The Woman in The Dunes
    Kobo Abe
    Site-Specific Art
    Performance, Place and Documentation.
    Nick Kaye
    Heidegger For Architects
    Adam Sharr
    Poetically Man Dwells
    The Perception of The Environment
    Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
    Tim Ingold
    Hans Coper
    Sensations in the Vessel/Innerness
    Clay and The Engagements of Mind and Body
    Peter Zumthor
    Thinking Architecture/ A Way of Looking at Things
    Zumthor mirrors Heidegger’s celebration of experience and emotion as measuring tools.
    The physicality of materials can involve an individual with the world.
    The Visual Poetics of Jannis Kounellis
    Suzanne Cotter and Andrew Nainre
    He translates the painterly relationship of figure and ground into the space of real situations
    Kounellis’s engagement with the social and historical content and with the material fabric of a given space is critical to his art.
    The Castelvecchio in the Opus of Carlo Scarpa
    Possibly until very recently Scarpa’s work was still judged as anachronistic, small scale and craft intensive.
    An Attitude to History, The Drawings, Formal Language,
    Technical Specifications of Materials.
    What is the relationship between the visual arts and ‘performativity’?
    Site-Specific Art. Nick Kaye
    Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius
    The work of art/aesthetics/ethics seen ‘under the form of eternity’
    Schopenhauer discusses, in a remarkably similar way, a form of contemplation in which we relinquish ‘the ordinary way of considering things’, and ‘no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply the what’.
    Spatial Practices : Thinking Sociologically
    ‘What does it do’?
    Oren Lieberman
    Visual/Spatial Tool, Flickr

     

    Blueprints,Texts and Materials/Building on Concerns Toward a New Interior. Relationscapes Movement, Art, Philosophy. Erin Manning. 2009 …

    Source: A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment : Assemblages/Relationscapes/Things exist rooted in the flesh (R. S. Thomas)

  • Studio Practice : Social Sensing/Innerness

    Studio Practice : Social Sensing/Innerness

    Studio Practice

    Theory and Analysis

    Craft and Design/Interior Design

    Building, Dwelling, Thinking

    Scripting Rooms/Spaces and Events

    The pot promotes an architecture of the soul, of an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination.
    Building human presence, to dwell shaped by ‘the vocational’ (physical and human topography)
    Everyday Aesthetics

    The Arts/ : As A Form Of Experimental Psychology
    The Play Of Affect/Space and Politics
    Apparatuses and Architectures

    Rethinking Materiality/At The Potters Wheel
    How Things Shape The Mind
    Colin Renfrew
    Making
    Tim Ingold

    The Essential Vessel
    Natasha Daintry
    I think that part of our problem is that it is not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being? They’re not concepts as such neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhibit them more amorphous, like clay.

    One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.

    Heidegger, Coper, Baldwin, De Waal, Zumthor

    The Potter/The Pot
    Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate
    Lambros Malafouris

     

    Studio Practice Theory and Analysis Craft and Design/Interior Design Building, Dwelling, Thinking Scripting Rooms/Spaces and Events …

    Source: Studio Practice : Social Sensing/Innerness

  • Visual Journals : Artist’s Books

    Visual Journals : Artist’s Books

    Spatial,Visual Coordinates

    Leylines : Architectural Designs
    Reflective Journal/Spatial Practices
    Alternative Photography, Collage, Handwritten, Annotated, Media, Materials

     

    Spatial,Visual Coordinates Leylines : Architectural Designs Reflective Journal/Spatial Practices Alternative Photography, Collage, Handw…

    Source: Visual Journals : Artist’s Books

  • Brian Clarke : Properties of Matter and Imagination (Working Text)

    Brian Clarke : Properties of Matter and Imagination (Working Text)

    Brian Clarke
    The Art of Light/Paul Greenhalgh,2018.
    Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
    Architecture and Material Practice, Katie Lloyd Thomas.
    Water and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard.
    Properties of Matter and Imagination
    FUSION OF PHYSICAL/METAPHYSICAL
    Working Title : An Inquiry with a Material Practice
    The poetics of glass as a super-cooled liquid.
    Molten Fluidity.
    An organic flux frozen for an instant.
    Chaos and order, flow and turbulence, pooling and shifting translucence.
    Chemistry becomes alchemy, the banality of the raw materials – sand, metal and minerals – turn into a magical universe of the imagination. Perhaps this is the key to Brian Clarke’s stained glass; it embodies the fusion of two things that normally don’t mingle; the physical and metaphysical.
    Botanical
    Cosmological
    Biographical
    The screens are an intense site of innovation and artistic consolidation. Some of the screens are principally about the organic flow of forms derived from nature; some of them deal with ideas that push into universal concepts and have a symbolist, otherworldly ambiance; and some yet their driving force incidents, memories and emotions that shaped the artist’s life.
    The Modern World (the artist’s attitudes to)
    Life
    Violence
    Mortality
    Many of the screens are highly specific to an incident or influence, the titles give us a clue to the complex symbology at work and the intertwining of the artist’s personal response with wider perceptions about place.
    Contrapuntal/Counterpoint music introduces multiple melodies that are equally important.
    Polyphony describes the use of overlapping melodies.
    For Clarke the concept of a screen as a vehicle of artistic expression is not a new concept, rather it clearly resonates back through his life, becoming part of his artistic consciousness virtually from the start of his work in glass.
    Literal and Phenomenal Transparency
    Layering of Planes/Layering of Spaces
    Rowe and Slutzky 1982
    What exactly is a screen and what does it mean in the context of modernity?
    A screen is simultaneously a physical object and a complex conceptual metaphor. We use screens to divide and to mask things off from each other, and as boundaries/barriers to hide behind. At the same time, the screen provides ways of looking at things/displaying; we screen films and we screen people. We look through them, and they can act as a catalyst that changes our vision of whatever is on the other side. In its usage in art, a screen is automatically a series of images – a diptych, triptych or polyptych – a sequence of free standing panels that allows the artist to develop a narrative and aesthetic theme.
    Screens divide up space and make it function differently.
    Alabaster windows before glass. (contemporary windows by both Soulages/Sigmar Polke/Iglesias
    The Glass House
    The screen as emblematic of modernity.
    Conceptually, the sensibility at work in many early Modern buildings was one of space divided by screen walls and windows. In this sense, the giant windows at either end of Norman Foster’s seminal Sainsbury Centre building for example are light-screens.
    The nature of Brian Clarke’s architectural practice, in which his core practice is painting.
    It is through painting that I understand how to view architecture. It is through painting that I can appreciate the rhythm of the poem. It is through painting that I can appreciate and draw pleasure from the structure of a well-composed sentence. And it is through painting that the complexity of music makes itself understood to me. It is through painting, in fact, that I am.
    Brian Clarke, 1989.
    I do not identify mostly with painting, but I identify mostly with all other things because of painting.
    Brian Clarke, 2018.
    Clarke is gripped by the technology and engineering of how a building is made, but also by the psychological function and its emotional impact, he refers to himself as an architectural artist.
    The medium of glass in its modern form will only be seen when people have been sufficiently exposed to it.
    During the 20th century – the age of specialisation – theorists and historians were obsessed with separating out the arts disciplines, positioning them in specific groups or classes, and then subjecting them to philosophical discourse as to why they belonged there. In short, the Anglo-Saxon world in particular artificially created the categories of art, design and craft, and then intellectually policed them. Stained glass was inevitably positioned as a craft, with all the confused cultural and economic consequences of this class allocation.
    Clarke with the complexity of his practice and interests has led to embrace the concept of gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art). A concept first championed by Richard Wagner, who perceived opera as a means of combining all of the arts, including music, and literature, in order to completely surround the spectator. In the visual arts, it is essentially about generating a complete art environment, in which all elements are orchestrated into an aesthetic whole.
    Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, designers of the De Stijl movement.
    Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor
    I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a ‘duality’ or ‘contradiction’ existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.
    Brian Clarke, 2018.
    The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material
    Neo Baroque, Postmodern rendered/computer generated surfaces.
    New Forms of Media Aesthetics, Peter Greenaway
    Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.
    The Interrupted Grid/Motifs
    Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies
    The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena
    Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.
    The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.
    Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome.
    Grisaille
    Pointillism
    Divisionism
    Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thorn Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends)
    The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.
    Mesh Topologies
    Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.
    Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.
    An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making.
    The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead – a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline – into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.
    All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else – the poetry, ideas, emotions – emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.
    Night Orchids
    Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together.
    The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke’s recent work; mortality.
    The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.
    There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one’s eyes – Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.
    Robert Storr.
    Francis Bacon
    The Logic of Sensation
    Gilles Deleuze
    Memento Mori
    The inevitability of things.
    The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.
    Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.
    Brian Clarke, 2018.
    Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke’s work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modern art.
    The use of memory as a conceptual tool.
    ‘Every instant has a thousand memories’. Henri Bergson.
    Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that ‘the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level’.
    Memory is a means by which the artist’s subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.
    Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.
    Objective and subjective visions of life – and death – come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.
    Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.
    A Valediction of Weeping.
    Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.
    Liminality
    Numinous
    Spiritual
    Transendental
    A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.
    Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.
    Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal.
    The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.
    I don’t want to do anything that isn’t at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being.
    Brian Clarke, 2018.
    UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.
    Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana.
    Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.
    The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body.
    Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.
    Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.
    Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.
    Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. ( the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)
    Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.

     

    Brian Clarke The Art of Light/Paul Greenhalgh,2018. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts Architecture and Material Practice, Katie Llo…

    Source: Brian Clarke : Properties of Matter and Imagination (Working Text)