Russell Moreton : Matter(s) in Correspondence

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour
This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but improvisational act.

Land : Antony Gormley, Clare Richardson, Jeanette Winterson.

Temporary is human. We don’t live long. Our ancestors lived less long. Graveyards and ruins remind us of the atom and jot of our span. Against the reality of temporary, humans stage heroic battles for permanence : Archives, museums, endowments, societies.

Wandering is “not purposeful”. A lot of art is made while wandering about either in your mind or on foot, Its a necessary aimlessness.
Jeanette Winterson

Anarchism : A Very Short Introduction, Colin Ward.

It is possible to discern four principles that would shape an anarchist theory of organisations: that they should be voluntary, functional, temporary and small.

The Rings of Saturn : W.G.Sebald.

I pressed on to towards Dunwich, which seemed so far in the distance as to be quite beyond my reach. It was as if I had been walking for hours before the tiled roofs of houses and the crest of a wooded hill gradually became defined.

Inside Phenomena/Catching The Light
Layered drawing : Sensuality, Drawing and Astronomical Space.
Locality/Social Complexity- Works on Paper
An ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse : The Book of Tea/A Hut of Ones Own
Reading Into the Visual : Exploratory Images
Littoral Zone

Concept of the Body : Merleau-Ponty

Fundamental assumption that the body was not an object, the body is the condition and context through which I am able to have relations with objects.

The mind in its insertion in (creating/becoming) corporeality creates the ambiguous relation with our body, and correlatively with perceived things/superimpositions/entanglements.

Understanding the material/body image in discursive terms

The body generates and presumes interpretations, perspectives which serve its needs in the world, its will to power and its drive towards self expansion/self overcoming, the movement of becoming, vigorous, free, joyful activity. (Nietzsche)

Francesca Woodman explores the spatial relationship of the body in space and time.

These performative images and her relationship to the pictorial space, her body traces, are witnessed and further manipulated/annotated by drawn lines enclosing and creating other spaces.

Barad: Thinking with intra-action

There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot hilly be claimed as human  practices,  not simply  because we use nonhuman  elements in  our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain  knowledge by  standing  outside the world; we know because we are of the world.  We are part of the world  in  its differential becoming.  The separation  of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inher­ent difference between  human  and  nonhuman,  subject and  object,  mind  and  body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being— is probably a better way to think about the kind of understanding that we need to come to terms with how specific interactions matter.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 141.

Antony Gormley, states, that one of his central concerns has been to recover a sense of being in the conditions of today’s increasingly materialist and mediated social environment. He uses sculpture, via the intimate process of the body cast, to construct surrogate forms, derived from an almost sacrificial process. A rehearsal of death of an absent body, recorded as an enclosed volume of air, entombed in a lead sarcophagus of fragmented body sections, soldered to reconstruct a new wholeness. He creates, within this sculptural volume, an “infinity of space within the body.” His works are embodiments of the body. They are literally body cases. The use of lead with its own alchemical and historical contexts and its particular non­ aesthetic further adds to the tomb like qualities of the work.

Each sculpture invites occupation; it is complete when the imagination or the mind inhabits them.

Gormley’s body cases are almost orphans, cast adrift from their symbolic maternal mother. They have become shells; empty humanoid spaces, awaiting an identity in the mind of the post-modern witness. In return their identification identifies the witness. The experience of metaphysical inhabiting this surrogate human space might allow us to lose all sense of the present and our identity with ourselves. Gormley’s sculptures, with this lack of identity or questioning of identity with the space they are placed in, prompt a different mode of questioning the purpose of their presence. The viewer becomes more interrogatory, more concerned, almost asking the sculpture to confirm its placement, not its actual identity. We see in them something of ourselves, externalised for scrutiny, a dialogue of intervention caused by a bodily proximity to something unknown, which can compound meaning, or conversely it can fragment it.

An investigation into a disembodied physicality, inducing elements of fetishism and narcissism, with the search for an identification of the feminine, within the confines of spaces, loaded with tactility, dust, dilapidation and decay?

Some of  Francesca Woodman’s work involves herself and female characters in staged film, feminised melodrama. Stills with an unknown and possibly convoluted narrative, together with ambiguous relationships amongst the characters. The images are shot as straight documentary stills and seem to be searching for the identity of the partially hidden women, as seen through the response and body language of the other characters facing us. These works are full of conceptual ambiguities.

Photographs are indexical; they point to something else; a mirror with a memory; a stage for an inquiry.

Francesca Woodman’s use of the camera’s ability to witness and document, is subverted into a personal language of aggressive tactility and the notion of the body’s identification being partially hidden or even lost; just its trace remains recorded in the latency of the camera’s recorded time.

Her work seems to have an inherent almost codified, femininity, probably due the semiotics and symbolism of early surrealist influences. She performs, re-enacts and exposes her body for the witnessing of the camera. She seems to, fleetingly, seduce and then disappear, just leaving a trace of her being, her sexuality and its actions, entrusted to the fragility of the light sensitive gelatin. (extracts from The Body, Francesca Woodman and Antony Gormley, WSA Russell Moreton 2006)

Reading The Landscape

This Enchanted Isle : Peter Woodcock 2000

Radio On by Chris Petit.

The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear.

What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism (Woodcock,2000:55)

England Dreaming : Primordial Memory/Dreaming

The darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement. (Daniel Libeskind)

The Drought : J G Ballard

The Tempest : Alchemy, Prospero.

The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries.

‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’

Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)

‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)

Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with  them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog. Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place.

(Woodcock,2000:31)

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.

Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society. Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston, Psychoanalysis of fire, New York, Beacon press 1964

Benjamin, George, Antony Gormley: critical mass, London, Royal Academy of the Arts 1998

Curtis, Penelope, Sculpture in 20th Century Britain, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute 2003

Deneuve, Catherine, Bettina Rheims, Munchen, Schirmer-mosel, 1989

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, London, Ark Paperbacks, 1984

Gormley, Antony, European Field, Museum of Modem Art, 1994

Greenaway, Peter, The Physical self, Rotterdam, Museum-Boymans, 1992

Israel, Deborah Turbeville: Wallflower, London, Quartet, 1978

Karabelnik, Marianne, Stripped Bare, London, Merrell, 2004

Krauss, Rosalind, L ’Amour fou, New York, Abbeyville, 1985

Moszynska, Anna, Antony Gormley Drawing, London, British Museum, 2002

Sollers, Philippe, Francesca Woodman, Paris, Foundation Cartier, 1998

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Francesca Woodman, Photographic work, New York, Hunter College, 1996

Thewelt, Kllaus, Antony Gormley, Germany, Kerber Verlag, 1999

Articles

Riches, Harriet, A disappearing Act; Francesca Woodman’s portrait of a reputation, Oxford Art Journal, 27.1 2004 95-113, Oxford university press

Rus, Eva, Surrealism and self-representation in the photography of Francesca Woodman, http://www.palazzoesposizioni.it/schede/woodman, 2004

ROLAND BARTHES MYTHICAL SPEECH, LANGUAGE-OBJECT:

PLINY THE ELDER: NATURAL HISTORY, translation H. Rackham 1952. BOOK 35

Origins of Painting (XXXV, 5).

The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece—which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way, but the second stage when a more elaborate method had been invented was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day.

Plastic art. Early stages. Butades and others. (XXXV, 43).

Enough and more has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.

Roland Barthes states in his text titled Myth Today in Mythologies that “myth is a system of communication that is a message.” And that it “allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea.1” Put simply it is as Barthes confirms” a mode of signification, a form.” The interesting thing about myths is the fact that this “mode of signification” is then assigned to a form. It is onto this form that further conditions are then placed and the form then becomes loaded with historical values, and conditions of use that will reintroduce it back into society.

Barthes acknowledges that “mythology can only have a historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the “nature” of things.2” Myths therefore have particular qualities as Barthes assigns them as being created from a “semiological chain which existed before it.” Their historical situation is such that it forms their first contextual space which is simultaneously placed in the present. This creates a sense of a portal or window into a mythological space of reflection, whilst at the same time acknowledging our immediate surroundings. The myth appears like a projection from these historical origins and has the ability to illuminating itself and the moment into a contemporary mythical experience. Barthes illustrates the myths ability to attach itself to any material that can arbitrarily become endowed with significance by stating.

It can consist of modes of writing or of representations; not only written Or representations; not only written discourse, but also photography, Cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as a support To mythical speech. Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its Material.3

Barthes denotes myths as having three components, the signifier, the signified, and the sign. Myth having been created by used materials has “a second-order semiological system.” Barthes clarifies this by stating” that which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system (signifier and signified becomes sign) becomes a mere signifier in the second.4” The raw materials that make up mythical speech, its very language, rituals and objects are all “reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth.5” The myths ability is that it is able to project language as an language-object that can be reconstituted by our contemporary sensibilities into mythical language .

Barthes again notes that the important issue here is that myth wants to see these “raw materials” only as “a sum of signs, a global sign, and the final term of a first semiological chain. “ Barthes further states that it is this “final term” that will become the “first term of a greater system.” Myth is stationed in a historical situation yet their reappropriated content is able to be projected into the anthropological situation that surrounds us. Barthes recognizes that “myth shifts the formal system of the first significations sideways.” It is this almost lateral shift that gives myths their complexities within what appear to be concise simplifications. They appear to be able to just inhabit the very surface of things, creating associations that can arise almost indiscriminately.

Barthes states that myths are derived from a speech chosen by history. Mythical speech appears both like a notification and like a statement of fact. Barthes quotes “Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth presuppose a signifying consciousness, which one can reason about them while discounting their substance.6”

Myth has something of an imperative message woven around its character which can exist in any space or time; it also has an inherent contingency that allows its message expediency. This notion that myths exist on a material that presupposes a signifying consciousness gives them their complexities when we re-examine the material which the myth adheres to.

Barthes philosophical perceptions surrounding myths could seem to have an affinity with the notion of the photographic negative. Both share a sense of a historical situation, onto which other signs of signification can be placed on their representation. They both have the ability of projection or rather the ability to be used to project language-object narratives. All of which makes them synonymous with bringing the past into the present. Myths and negatives seem to surround their reinterpretation with a feeling that they are auguries brought from another time to confirm or question values. Strangely the projected values of the negative have something of a mythical resonance, the evidence however of the negatives materiality a known origin casts exactitude of death. Myths don’t have and don’t require this witnessing origin. The notion of a photographic projection that marks a material surface in the situation of an installation is perhaps as far as photography can aspire to the sense of myth.

Barthes in Camera Lucida comments on what he terms “flat death” whilst contemplating pictures of his mother shortly after her death.

The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love Most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate with out ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The only “thought” I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony, to speak of the “nothing to say.7”

Barthes comment on his inability to transform the exactitude of his mother’s image with its sense of “an asymbolic death” perhaps illustrates the differences between the mythic language and photography? Does the exactitude in the representation of the photographic image petrify and simultaneously create an imperious sign of a future death? The mythical sense of some semblance left in some old photographs seems to be in fact, that some mythical language has not been totally terminated by the exactitude and witness of the photographic process. Myths on the other hand as noted by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the New Millennium, possess “concise exactitudes of details yet creative reception in their telling.” This “creative reception in their telling” is what sets them far apart from the petrifying gaze of photography, they are in fact more gesture and act, and myths are re-drawn as living experiences. This further quote by Calvino sums up the magical quality inherent in mythological language.

I know that any interpretation impoverishes the myth and suffocates it. With Myths one should not be in a hurry. It is better to let them settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail, to reflect on the without losing Touch with their language of images. The lesson we learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.8

1  .Roland Barthes, Myth Today, A Roland Barthes Reader (Reading: Vintage, 1993), page 93.

2  .Ibid., page 94.

3  .Ibid., page 94.

4  .Ibid., page 99.

5  .Ibid., page 99.

6  .Ibid., page 95.

7  .Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Reading: Vintage, 2000), page 93.

8  .Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), page 4.

Moreton, Russell. The Daughter of Butades. Winchester School of Art 2008

Susan Sontag, on photography

Photographs are, of course, artefacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects, unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. There are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information.

Susan Sontag examines photography’s relationship to art via conscience and knowledge. Her analysis done before the advent of digital photography embraces the notion of the negative, the witnessing document. The picture may be distorted but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist.

Her probing phenomenology into photographic practice and the way it influences our perceptions are based on monochromatic film images. She reads the photographic image as an image taken from reality, but recognizes the attitude and sensibilities of the photographer, in the portrayal of that reality. She recognizes the camera’s ability to democratize all experiences, by translating them into images. She recognizes that photographers are haunted by tacit imperatives of both taste and conscience. They produce undiscriminating, promiscuous and self-effacing interpretations of the world.

Sontag recognizes the aggression of the photographers capture, and its ability to subvert by freezing time segments and replaying them dislocated from their original experience. Sontag also notes that taking photographs has setup a chronic voyeuristic relationship to the world, which levels the meanings of all events through the camera.

Photographs can also refuse experience simply by the limited nature of looking for the photogenic image. The camera has become a compelling interface between ourselves and what we encounter.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.

The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society.

Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.

A photographic contemplation dislocated from its original moment of reality, and as such allows thought not tied by cause and effect of that moment.

Tarkovsky, Sculpting in time/The architecture of the image

The architecture of image explores both architecture and cinema through the notion of existential. Cinema projects experientially images true to life, whereas architecture attempts to frame both human existence and the human condition as it inhabits space. The poetics of image Andrei Tarkovsky illustrates this director’s ability to use architectural settings to evoke and maintain a specific mental state in the viewer. They illustrate the poetic potential of space and light. Tarkovsky is able through images of space matter light and time to evoke the experience of being reflected by the metaphysical nature of the poetic situation. Tarkovsky emphasizes the importance of the singularity of experience, because of this perhaps his images resist interpretation, a sort of poetic riddle to distance them from any conventional reading, yet maintain their sense of flight. His images derive from a sense of a poetic logic/filmic phenomenology interwoven into a situation out of equilibrium.

He creates a constellation of associations and possible meanings and utilizes space for emotional impact. There is a sense of imprinting, acknowledging the unseen space, he achieves this by giving the viewer a sense of spatial awareness of the situation not of visual realization, and he creates a mental sensation of the environment.

Tarkovsky uses to four pre Socratic elements, fire , air, water and earth, together with their various mixtures and dissolutions, smoke, rust, clay, mud, slime and dust. He also records time by its action on things its erosion, and its scars. Tarkovsky affirms ruins are buildings which have lost their function and have turned into instruments for measuring time.

Ruins have a special hold on our emotions because they challenge us to imagine their forgotten faith

THE BODY AS A TERRITORY IN RAW CLAY

Developing Formative Histories/Indexical and Involuntary Markings

Observational essay/account whilst work is resident in the Yard,

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft

Temporality. The state of existing within or having some relationship with time. A clay form with its pre-performative drawing used as a template.

These distinctively different yet closely related works are arranged with the clay piece on its custom made trolley with its calico material that acts as a sheet on which the clay work rests. The drawing is placed behind it fastened to a wall with the drawings bottom edge just making contact with the floor adjacent to the castors that grant the clays supportive trolley mobility. The clay work has a direct relation to this adjacent drawing, the drawing is revealing the traced female that is just discernable on the surface of the clay. On closer inspection of the drawing it is just possible to see a rubbing taken from the periphery of the clay form. Both the paper and the clay seem to be in some reflective mode of mutual intimacy, marks transferred between one another during the manufacture of both are subtly replicated on the form of one and the surface of another. The pierced clay slab (vessel) is the first visible casualty of the entropic process of shrinkage. A significant crack separates the clay vessel into two separate but unique entities that share the same defect as if they were still whole. This division through the continent of the body has been subtly marked by the raised furrow of silica deposited when the clay bodies were in closer proximity. The calico has also rendered a new visual territory around the entire periphery of the form, created by the deposited silica sand and the resultant shrinkage that is taking place. There is the sense of this form moving in two dimensions, creating an extended footprint of previously covered territory whilst continuing to shrink bodily within the details and markings on its surface. This phenomena seems to give the piece a strange complexity of both temporality and a duration on which that temporality is directly charted, the calico is instrumental in registering this perception. The agencies of both the silica sand and the calico sheet between them regulate and guide our understanding of the observation of the clays infinitesimal shrinkage. The compression of the clays structure due to its shrinkage increases its density and visually alters the arrangement of the piercing that are mapped over its surface, the concise circles and holes cut through the clay have now blended into the overall tension imparted by shrinkage, there is a sense that precision of the marks, their machined appearance which contrasted to the locality to the clay around them has been lost, reclaimed by the inner natural torsions taking control of the piece as a whole. The clays surface with its sandy granular deposits whose particle size has become visually larger at the expense of its hosts shrinkage now auger for a territory, a land mass devoid of water, the sense of this territory becoming anhydrous, giving rise to thoughts of thirst and fragility, even the once precise holes give the impression of barren watering places isolated within a landscape in a state of drought. The once visible markings are now obscured by the action of the shrinking territory and its granular coating as it now gains in its ability to obscure features. The traced and drawn female form is still harboured somewhere under this obscuring sand. Yet she now resides as a brittle uncompromising inscription of her former self, the plasticity that once gave her a sensuality into the yielding and pliable surface has succumbed to the unstoppable internal shrinkage of the clay particles starved of moisture. The clay is acknowledging the atmosphere of its given surroundings, our environment.

The Draught, J G Ballard

The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

The Disposition of the Body, Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract)

The clay suffers, dehydrates as its moisture is absorbed by the surrounding atmosphere, giving up its plasticity and its almost inhuman sensuality and tactility. Presented amongst us, it is rendered into a state of its own homogeneity Conversely the working drawing which has evolved from being a simple template to aid the registration of celestial information within the territory of the body. Has itself become involved in its own creation as an art object. On completing its initial purpose, the task of transferring details onto the surface of the embryonic clay form. It has now become embroiled and entangled as it were with the creative issues of the clay form; “they” have become members of the same intuitions the same creative flux, sisters. The drawn “sister” contains the origin of their shared inscription, the originating female trace. The gesture and act still remains, visible only by physical impression of transference; which is left proud, raised and projecting passed the original flatness of the paper. These material read together render insights into superimposed temporalities shared by the art object, they question and reveal the reverse side of origins, of the work or its working drawing, they all underline the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary art practice.

The Drawing strangely or ironically displays values in a state of stasis, now lost with its sister. The cyanotype “sea” with its fluidity bleeding into the porosity of the news print. The “ streams” of residues washed from other areas are now deposited into the interior space where they have collected finally to evaporate leaving their watery remains. Only the clarity of the “permanent” marker pen remains untouched by any entropic activity. Objectively the drawing materials has slowed down to the point when one might grant it a measure of completeness. Its particular temporalities now exist within the interactions it can manifest from others, other things, other situations that are drawn into its proximity, its particular field of intuitive reverberations, its unique dwelling place.

The clay form seems to have gathered up its history of temporal acts that culminate in its present form. This presented object, with temporalities marked on site has become a vehicle, a vessel for its own entropic voyage, another temporality that itself adds a spatial dimension. This object for me appears to be totally contingent yet relational to aspects of space and time, it exists uniquely “once” in the present, presence it creates with its observer. The result of this contingent object is that “we through it” are constantly travelling away from its point of origin, we as a result feel the passage of the entropic value of time through the human condition. Whereas the drawing does refer to a now and a past, an elsewhere ,it seems locked between these two comprehensions.

The clay form has clearly an entropic element which seems to give rise to phenomenologically driven inquiry which in turn helps to creates our sense of a spatiality. Uniquely formed between observation and our own movement, we are in effect made to sense that the object heralds our own becoming.

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 ( Art and Agency, Alfred 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.

Drawing intervention and speculative sculptural environment.

Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School.

Teacher Education Manual

Insight-Bohm-Krishnamurti. 1979

David Bohm, Are we saying that insight is an energy which illuminates the activity of the brain, and that in this illumination the brain itself begins to act differently?

Krishnamurti, You are quite right. That’s all-that is what takes place. That is -this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set.

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

 Making : Tim Ingold

The Materials Of Life

Re-Shaping Learning

You read the paper FROM IMAGE TO INTERACTION: MEANING AND AGENCY IN THE ARTS. A related paper is available on Academia. Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, Ann-Sophie Lehmann (eds), Hiding Making, Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, Amsterdam: AUP 2013  Ann-Sophie Lehmann 2013 832 Views View PDF ▸ Download PDF ⬇ Your recent reading history: MEANWHILE/BECOMING: A POSTPHENOMENOLOGICAL POSITION EXPLORING VISION AND VISUALITY IN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY – Jan Fyfe FROM IMAGE TO INTERACTION: MEANING AND AGENCY IN THE ARTS – Arjen Mulder Scripting the City: J. G. Ballard among the Architects – Duncan Bell Rough Poetry: Patio and Pavilion Revisited – Ben Highmore J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered – Chris Beckett Memories of Catastrophes Yet to Come: New Brutalism and Thing-Memory – Ben Highmore Violence and the Act of Reading JG Ballard – Richard Hayes Marks and Remembrancers: Alison and Peter Smithson’s Architectural Memory – Ryan Johnston The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. By Jane Bennett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 213p. 55.00cloth, 17.95 Paper … – Kennan Ferguson Retreating in / from art institutions – Heather Anderson

Working Notes: Edmund de Waal.

Independent research for Studio Practice Theory and Analysis

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 Galleryl41. 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:

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’ The shadows of the stacked pots.

‘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.

The Curse of the Contemporary

Living in Spatial Times
Instantaneity/depthlessness
Doreen Massey, for space

Making sites that matter : choreographing situated knowing in architectural analysis and design.

Oren Lieberman

Organism, Person, Environment :  Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

Space for Peace, Winchester

Situated Knowledges : Donna Haraway

chaos, territory, art

Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Elizabeth Grosz

The Illuminated Cathedral

RELATIONSCAPES
Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning

Prelude : What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Temporal Perspectives

Working Notes/Spaces

Space and Place
The Perspective of Experience
Yi-Fu Tuan

Experiential Perspective
Space, Place, and the Child
Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values
Spaciousness and Crowding
Spatial Ability, Knowledge, and Place
Architectural Space and Awareness
Time in Experiential Space
Intimate Experiences of Place
Attachment to Homeland
Visibility : the Creation of Place
Time and Place

for
space
Doreen Massey

A Relational Politics of The Spatial
Making and Contesting time-spaces

Contemporary artists aim to produce specific relations with the technologies they adopt and adapt;
This schematic offers a partial taxonomy.
Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium : Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art 2006

Immersive
the “cave” paradigm, the virtual helmet, the black-box video, the earphone set

Alienated
taking technology and “making it strange,” exaggerating attributes to provoke shock, using technologies to switch senses or induce disorientation

Interrogative
work that repurposes  or remakes devices to enhance their insidious or wondrous properties; available data translated into sensible systems

Residual
work that holds on to an earlier technology, repurposes or even fetishizes an abandoned one

Resistant
work that refuses to use marketed technologies for their stated purpose; work that pushes viewers to reject technologies or subvert them

Adaptive
work that takes up technologies and extends or applies them for creative purposes, producing new subjects for the technologies in question

Transactive Memory
Systems Virtual Teams
The Body
Minds and Metaphors
Laban-CHOREUTICS

The Mind In The Cave
David Lewis-Williams

The Matter of The World
Minds and metaphors
Cathedrals of Intelligence
The ‘Looking mind’

Information Processing and Performance in Traditional and Virtual Teams
The Role of Transactive Memory
Terri Griffith, Margaret A. Neale

Acquisition/Sharing of Implicit and Explicit Information

Organisations increasingly rely on teams to do much of the work traditionally accomplished by individuals.
Successful groups are those who are able to create synergies in the form of information aggregation and innovation that is beyond the ability of any single member.

Nascent Knowledge
Information Diversity
Task Conflict

The knowledge and perspectives of group members from the same social networks may be more redundant than diversified. However a total diversity among work group members is not desirable; some ‘redundancy’ (agreement in perspective) among group members is necessary to ensure enough common ground to facilitate successful group interaction.

Transactive Memory : Knowing and Accessing What We Know

For teams to have synergy they must be able to access their information, it is important to know who does what.
Wegner 1987; 1995)

RELATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
TIME
Synchronous/ Asynchronous
COMMUNICATION

Transactive Memory : A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind
Daniel M. Wegner

The study of transactive memory is concerned with the prediction of group (and individual) behaviour through an understanding of the manner in which groups process and structure information.

Individual Memory
Information is entered into memory at the encoding  stage, it resides in memory during a storage stage, and is bought back during the retrieval stage.

Organisation : differentiated/ integrated
Label
Location

THE LABAN SOURCEBOOK
Dick McCaw

Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) was a pioneer in dance and movement, who found a extraordinary range of application for his ideas; from industry to drama, education to therapy. Laban believed that you can understand about human beings by observing how they move, and devised two complimentary methods of notating the shape and quality of movements.

Diagram : Three Planes of Movement from Choreography
Inner and Outer Tension : Inner and Outer Form

CHOREUTICS : Principles of Dynamic Space and Movement

Choreutics presents the grammar and syntax of spatial form in movement and the nature of movement’s harmonic content.

Effort
Exertion of Power, Physical or/and Mental

Force
Space
Time
Flight

Indulging/Contending

SPACE Flexible/Direct
WEIGHT Light/Strong
TIME Sustained/Quick
FLOW Free/Bound

Shadow Moves
An acute observer of Shadow Movement of a person in different situations and at different times will show the consistency of that individual’s basic attitude and personality.

Effort and Recovery

Movement Psychology
Thinking
Intuiting
Sensing
Feeling

AN
ANTHROPOLOGY
OF
LANDSCAPE
Christoper Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

Materiality
From our perspective in this book representations of landscape, textual or pictorial, are of secondary significance and we should treat them as such; they are selective and partial, and often highly ideological, ways of seeing and knowing.
It forms a material medium in which we dwell and move and think.
Redirecting the study of landscape from representation to the materially grounded messiness of everyday life and the minutiae of material practices that constitute it.
Landscapes are contested, untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making. Our landscapes of modernity are frequently on the move and peopled by diasporas and migrants of identity, people making homes in new places.

Field Observations
Spatial relations within the landscape are complex.
The manner in which persons and their bodies cannot be understood apart from the landscapes of which they are a part, reciprocally involved in forms of movement, action, awareness and social memory.
Embodied Identities
Art in and from the landscape
Fragile Environments : Nature and Culture

On Ways of Walking and Making Art
A personal reflection
M Collier
Making art is a practical application of phenomenology
Engaging  with an embodied experience of space and depth (what Merleau-Ponty called the ‘flesh of the world’).

WATERLOG
Journeys Around An Exhibition
Landscape and Memory

AFTER SEBALD
Essays and Illuminations
Edited by Jon Cook

The Forum, Norwich : Research Outposts
Alternative Photography

Vessels of Retreat : Dark Pots around the Innerness of Ceramics

Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places

Thrown ceramic vessels fired on the remote beach at St Ninian’s Cave, Scotland.

These vessels were originally thrown on a momentum wheel situated in the small niche like space of a scriptorium. The interiority of the bowls seek to reflect the quietness and openness of a ‘retreat’ through material and the muted light of its surroundings. A post firing process was employed of removing the bowls and their still molten interior into a chamber excavated on the beach to become reduced by local organic material and to cool. Once cooled the bowls were washed in the Irish Sea to reveal their glazed interiors for the first time.

Heidegger’s topology, Being Place, World.

Jeff Malpas on the concept of place and how it relates to core philosophical issues found in Heidegger’s engagement with place, his philosophical starting point: of finding ourselves already ’’there” situated in the world, in “place.”

Clarifying the relation between space and place which contains inherent difficulties in as much as they are necessarily connected (inasmuch as place carries a spatial element within it even while space is also a certain abstraction from out of place), but there has been a pervasive tendency for place to be understood in terms of purely spatial. Jeff Malpas

SPACE= ROOM TO MOVE

or as a verb To Make EMPTY, EVACUATE, EMPTY OUT. The Production of Space/Human Agency/Place

PLACE=VTLLAGE, TOWN, or OTHER SETTLED LOCALITY.

PLACE=HOME

PLACE=A VERY SPECIFIC FORM OF BOUNDEDNESS/GATHERING As a gathering of elements that are themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together within the place they also constitute.

DESIGN=TO PUT IN PLACE

Place referred to merely in the sense of position or location – usually the location or position of some already identified and determined entity.

Slippages, Anomalies and liminal spaces. Our relationships with space and place.

THE MEMORY OF PLACE

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE UNCANNY

Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape into the body and its experience of the world. Trigg analyses monuments in the representation of public memory, “transitional” concepts such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves.

STOA, a complex topology.

The Stoics took their name from the place where they met. In the stoa they talked as they walked along the long shaded alcoves. The stoa offered shelter from the sun and rain without becoming an enclosed room. It was an in-between and transitional space, neither outside nor inside. Conversations could commence through casual interruptions in a site of gossip, rumour and information.

We imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation and for sociality without the duty of domestication.

The stoa is the pivot point at which private and public spheres interact and from which the cosmopolitan sense of being and belonging from the vantage point of the stoa, then the telematic linking of two screens in the public squares of Australia and Korea can be viewed in a new light.

The linking of these screens creates a new transnational public space, a space for the creation of a new discourse on the topology of the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art practice.

Thinking the place of art within this context is more than jumping from either the local to the global, the private/oikos to the public/bouletrion, or even the singular to the universal. It is more like the liminal zone of the stoa.

Public Screens and Participatory Public Space Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire

Flesh and Stone,

The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Richard Sennett.1994

Basically a long shed, the stoa contained both cold and hot, sheltered and exposed dimensions; the back side of the shoa was walled in, the front side consisted of of a colonnade which gave access onto the open space of the agora. Though free-standing the stoas were not conceived as independent structures, but rather as edging for the open space of the agora.

Sennett: Flesh and Stone, page 50. Bringing Things to Life

Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials Tim Ingold

EWO= The Environment Without Objects

THINKING AT WAVERLEY, as a site of multiplicity and memory. Walking is Thinking, Richard Long

Heidegger-To participate with the thing in its thinging

Our most fundamental architectural experiences, as Juhani Pallasmaa explains, are verbal rather than nominal in form. They consist not of encounters with objects – the facade, door-frame, window and fireplace – but of acts of approaching and entering, looking in or out, and soaking up the warmth of the hearth (Pallasmaa 1996: 45).

As inhabitants, we experience the house not so much as an object but as a thing. (Ingold 2008: 8)

Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places

Ceramic Gate/Waverley Stoa : Objects in a landscape/studio space of Gordon Baldwin

One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity, Miwon Kwon. 1997

The Reading Room (a library of subjective taxonomies on the alchemy of building)

The Listening Room (a soundscape interior in time with its environment)

The Sheltering Corridor (a modernist Stoa as a place for encounters/dialogues)

The Pot Room (a installation of thrown objects creating the interior partitions)

The Empty Studio (a adaptation of architecture through the ritual of creativity)

Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object, mindfully and experientially explores voids, vernacular materials and agency of spaces.

Utsu means nothing or emptiness, the void.

Wa means the border between nothing and something.

I want to make what we don’t see, and that means I must make what we see. My work is a container for what we don’t see.

Taizo Kuroda, Potter.

Natural Connections, Exhibition Proposal.

Humanities about the processes and experiences that map the evolving human condition.

Humanities and the Arts.

The Body and its Entanglements with Things.

The Ceramic House,

A space of life.

Exhibition

Architecture of the ceramic vessel

Ideologies of Innerness

The Archive

Flesh can house no memory of bone; only bone speaks memory of flesh. Voids, spaces between the bones, residues of the flesh

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Understanding the beliefs and practices that enable Relational Egalitarianism

Kuper, Tim Ingold

Exhibitions, Pavilions, Huts and Observatories.

The Parallel of Life and Art, Alison and Peter Smithson The Physical Self, Peter Greenaway

Thames Dig, Mark Dion

The Barcelona Pavilion, Mies de Rohm

The Solar Pavilion, Alison and Peter Smithson

Field Photography: Light on Natural Phenomena and Site.

Pinhole photography and photograms on light sensitive paper with annotations from both research material and working practices. Visual material and artefacts acquired from archaeological sites whilst participating in recording the archaeological process at St Mary Magdalene Leper Hospital, Mom Hill, Winchester. The work explores subjectivities in the recording of natural phenomena, the spirit of place and its scientific inquiry and production of fabricated forms in the realm of a contemporary art context.