The more civilised we are, the fewer moral choices we have to make. But the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality, the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics.
Super Cannes, J G Ballard. 2000

Speculative Fields/Spatial Agents

La Jetée “a fusion of science fiction, a psychological fable”

The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen.

The Drowned World, JG Ballard.

DSC_0149 Light/Darkroom

Cinema, Mizmaze St Catherine’s Hill.

Amorphous Photography : Star Trails
Prints from an Archive of Negatives

“He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear – evidently his sleep had  benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yeilding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. Above his arm- and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow – was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this bed was placed in a case of greenish-coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum  and minimum thermometer was recognizable.”

H. G. Wells : The Sleeper Awakes. 1899/1910

Spatiality : The Spatial Turn, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects : Apparatuses, Things and People in the Making of the City and the World. Alberto Altes Arlandis, Oren Lieberman. 2013

Preface (1921) ” The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare of Capitalism triumphant, a nightmare that was dreamt a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil may be in store for mankind, but to this immense, grim organization of servitude, our race will never come” H.G. Wells. EastonGlebe, Dunmow,1921.

Veiled Melancholy/Book Narratives : Film Collages

Discursive and practical apparatuses, both drawing on the other in the act of agency.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

Spinoza : Practical Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze

Bento’s Sketchbook : John Berger

Beams and Netting: Negotiations in the chamber, Hyde Abbey Gatehouse, Winchester.

Clay, hessian, drawings and transparencies, drawing frame, antique glass, lead and nylon lines.

‘Leylines’ has been appropriated and employed as both a practical and as a conceptual strategy to inquiry into places and localities. Site visits and sensitive dialogues with the other artists at a number of locations have further brought materials and processes into the creative realm. The spatial practice of setting-up this work has produced a social narrative of its own invention.

This intervention into a listed building has become a temporary refuge for a work in progress. The work attempts to show a creative agency as it encounters a host of installed hierarchies and conditions. The architectural motif on the drawings has been derived directly from the open apertures of the chamber.

Artist’s Book: white and coloured pages

A hand-bound book comprising of five signatures each with four folios. This book contains a collection of postcards made from contact prints and photograms from Tidbury Ring using the cyanotype process.

 A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

We have all the choice in the world in terms of products, but very little choice in terms of the kind of economy within which those things are made, accessed and used

Whose Economy Reframing the Debate After Neoliberalism Doreen Massey

Other ‘material interventions’ and the revaluation of making through strategies of repair and maintenance

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

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

Making is central to who we are as individuals, what we make as part of everyday practice forms our identities and place in the world

The mundane experience of making, and thus of labour, is resolutely political, a geographical imperative, and a critical means of operating a meaningful relationship with this material life The Quarry as Sculpture : The Place of Making

D A Paton 2013

The making of a building does not stop when the building work is (temporarily) finished. But only really begins upon occupation, when the work commences of maintaining the buildings integrity against an onslaught of willfully destructive elements, insects, rodents, fungal infestations, corrosion, damp, harsh sun, water, wind

Evocative Thoughts on Building, Alvaro Siza

The social life of making

Making good is about maintaining continuity with the past, in the face of efforts to rupture that continuity

The need for repair is a remorseless and necessary process that keeps society ticking over

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities.

Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us.

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

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

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve

Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically Geographies of Making

ReThinking Materials and Skills for Volatile Futures

The skill to sustain the life of something through repair and reappropriation

Collecting is an example or a pre-emptive activity that people who are skilled with their hands commonly share

Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things Jane Bennett 2010

Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010

New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay

The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object

Materials are substances in becoming Karen Barad

Towards an Ecology of Materials Tim Ingold 2012

From the ‘objectness’ of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

Materials-Centered Perspective Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects Tim Ingold 2010

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies

Textures of Light : Vision and Touch in Irigarey, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty : Cathryn Vasseleu.

Bento’s Sketchbooks : John Berger. 2015

Spinoza, practical philosophy : Gilles Deleuze. 2001

A concise and illuminating book about the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.

Spinoza’s theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza’s main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science.

Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and this reading of Spinoza by Gilles Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, “Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence.”

Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, “Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch’s broom that he makes one mount.”

Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes.

Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781474450720

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity
Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth’s art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth’s practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth’s sculptures from the early 1980’s are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme. To affirm Mallarme’s emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as “frozen breath”. The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

“He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored.”
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

White Noise : Nocturnes of Silence

Behind Appearance
A Study of the relations between painting and the natural sciences in this century
C. H. Waddington

Adam Fuss
Home and the World

Strange Loops
Art, Science and Consciousness
An Exploration of Mind, Matter and Form through the Work of Susan Derges
Stephen Gaughan

The Music of Waves
The Poetry of Particles
Thoughts on Implicate Order for Susan Derges
Martin Kemp

Adam Fuss
Eugenia Perry