In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.

Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own

Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.

The realisation of my interiors project consists of two separate but relational elements that are presented into a built environment. The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area.

This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday. The rather hybrid design appropriates a merging of minimalism, modernism and the plastic architecture of a ruined Cistercian Abbey. The construction comes into close contact with its occupant, it is a restricted spatial apparatus that attempts to promote through its awkwardness distinctive experiences. In particular the apparatus of the Scriptorium and its materiality is attempting to promote a sensory intensification that is further underpinned by the cognitive processes of reading and perhaps other social dialogues. The sensory intensification of a hut like space promotes a haptic sensibility, allowing the nearness and intimacies of both the built space and the imaginative, virtual realm to become entangled.

Ultimately the Scriptorium is trying to build on unique human subjectivities that are manifested through a kinaesthetic repertoire or script that helps to enact further spatial experiences. It might be useful to think of this constructed space as itself still under construction, a site that acts as its own vessel within the multiplicities of human perception itself. The influence of the Cistercian Order, the site of Waverly Abbey and its pastoral landscape, have all contributed to a sense of the design process, The Scriptorium like the ruins themselves is open to the elements. Waverley Abbey remains as a sensory site between the remains of architecture and its society and the effects of our own global culture in the information age.

Spatial Practice could be a program and a site for a critical approach to social engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Reading Room
Materials and Objects in Social Space
Spatial Practices in The Politics of Things

‘Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries’

The Social Condenser in Operation.
Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space; a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.

Robin Evans,
Figures, Doors and Passages

Project Proposal Waverley Abbey Site 2014.

Exploratory project centred around the proposal to return the site with its Cistercian origins and its surviving ruins into a self sustaining pastoral and educational retreat.

Secular Retreat, Peter Zumthor

Krishnamurti Centre

Brockwood Park School, Holistic, Sustainable, Education.

This site requires a new working order much the same in stature as before its dissolution. This holistically based institute would operate as both a learning centre with research facilities and practical workshops that would facilitate in the development and maintenance of the site and its structures.

It is envisaged that new enclosures will articulate the project space as a whole and help to regenerate this once prolific pastoral community. The choice of materials and building practices is being reviewed and extended to allow the hybridising of the vernacular with the technological advancements of new building processes and materials. The new structures built into the existing site will mutually accommodate any existing feature or surface.

The scaffolding systems of construction will inform the envelope of the internal frames and built components will be incorporated as single spatial entities within the headroom of the structure. The seductive densities of materials and substances will theatrically inform space and surfaces.

Rooms can become thematic, theorised even through their content of substances, materiality, space and ambient light.

It is a design feature that these new adaptations for dwelling spaces should in some way index and register the spaces that have been erased by a process of over writing in the sense of a double occupancy, a place reopened back to a site. New surfaces become facsimiles of existing forms (use of clay impressions as floors) from which to create within the building a series of subtle palimpsests.

Spaces become fused with the monumentality of the existing historical remnants. Corridors navigate both the passage of individuals and the interventions that set-up possibilities for spaces between walls and floors.

The adaptation of this ruinous mass of historical architectural forms becomes enmeshed through sensitive and site responsive adaptations; living architectures that can playfully through a vocational necessity that (a being close at hand) crafts evocative, poignant and precise interior spaces.

Photographic Collage with text fragments and disparate images

Originally published 14 February 2017, revisited 2021

 Outpost 100223

Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

The body’s participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.

Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.

Theorial objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.

The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.

Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.

Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.

Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.

Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.

Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity

If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We’ll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.

Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.

The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.

Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.

Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies

The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.

Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.

Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013

Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.

Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.

Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.

Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena’s strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.

Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as ‘post studio ceramics’ as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance. Twomey’s work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.

Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation.

London.

Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.

The ‘void space’ water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These ‘void spaces’, three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.

Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.

Time : Duration and Perception.

Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.

One’s perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.

Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.

Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.

The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced ‘lived time’ is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..

Steven Holl.

Hungate, Norwich.

Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023

Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.

Clay Making.

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.

Antonio Damasio
The Feeling of What Happens
Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie.

Nick Cave, The Lyre of Orpheus.

Hildur Gudnadottir, Saman.

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

Inspired in part from the novel  ” The  Children of Men ”  by P D James.

Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency 2010

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.
My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.

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

Gaston Bachelard
Intuition of The Instant