Other Worlds : Insistent moments of mark making/subjectivity

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CYANOTYPE SUN MAPPINGS/DRAWINGS

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer.

Adam Nicolson, Sea Room.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A history of Walking.

Site/Regional Specificity/Local Memory. 

SKIN, SURFACE, SUBJECTIVITY.

Insistent moments of alienated encounter.

Harriet Katherine Riches.

MATTER AND MUTABILITY

PRERSENCE AND AFFECT

Jane Grant.

AFFECTIVE ABSTRACTIONS

INTERMEDIARIES

CONSTITUENT PARTS

SPILL

IMMINENT REVELATION

EXPOSURE

NAMING THE LIGHTS

AFTERWORD

Garry Fabien Miller, Ian Warrell, Richard Ingleby.

The solitary artist literally at the edge of his environment and in a state of profound meditation about our place in the wider cosmos.

As if seeing herself from the desolate distance of a star, Woodman looks back through the alienating photographic lens of displacement and memory, her print the surface upon which she conjures an impossible moment of beautiful fusion.

Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to be challenged and to collapse.

For it is in the very nature of photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and in talented hands, an infallible medium of creation.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY.

Susan Sontag.

SPAB.

Building Conservation/Casework Campaigning/Innovative Research/Immersive Training Programmes/Working Parties.

Climate Action/Built Heritage.

Jacqui Donnelly, Spring 2022.

Traditional buildings are defined as those built with solid masonry walls, single-glazed timber or metal framed windows and timber-framed roofs usually clad with slate or tiles.

One of the most effective ways of increasing the resilience of our historical structures and sites is the application of good conservation practices.

Traditional  materials and construction techniques allow for the natural transfer of heat and moisture and relied on the thickness of the walls to cope with atmospheric moisture. It is therefore essential that all materials and finishes, including mortars, renders and plasters, used on traditional walls are vapour-permeable to allow this movement of moisture to continue.

Proactive Maintenance

Repair Programmes 

Upgrading through repair and adaptation.

Mitigation

Courses in traditional rural trades and crafts, Weald and Downland Open Museum.

The SPAB has made sure that the project not only repairs the mill but integrates public access and education into the process.

The scaffold design has allowed public access visits for the local community and students, offering opportunity to view the work while underway.

Douglas fir weatherboards

Vmzinc roof covering

Insulating Render, Cornerstone.

Developing a scheme that endeavours to fit a three-bedroom house into the existing footprint of the mud cottage and adjacent outbuilding,with some overspill into a new circulation space that connects the structures whilst clearly retaining the legibility of the existing modest forms.

INHABITATION, the inter-dependence of mankind within socio economic frameworks. 

Vernacular Concerns/Folklore/Heritage and Fabric of Buildings.

TONALITIES

BUILDING MATERIALS

THE POETICS OF SPACE

Gaston Bachelard.

Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar.

The numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index, whether they are in the first, second, or third position, besides having a purely ordinal value, correspond also to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and enquiry that, in varying proportions, are present in every part of the book.

Those marked 1 generally correspond to a visual experience, whose object is always some natural form; the text belongs to a descriptive category.

Those marked 2 contain anthropological elements, or cultural in the broad sense; and the experience involves, besides visual data, also language, meaning, symbols. The text tends to take the form of a story.

Those marked 3 involve more speculative experience, concerning the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world, the dimensions of the mind. From the confines of description and narrative we move into the area of meditation.

Celestial Architecture/Skyspaces/Serenity/Re-Animating Thought.

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Matter and materials that create the potential to act. 

STRUCTURE AS OBJECT

Light supply's the raw material for consciousness and its perception. 

The structural frame as generator of architectural form.

Vitruvius implies that the geometric forms of both the  Colchians and the Phrygians primitive houses are the consequence of direct operation with physical objects, rather than the abstractions that pre-existed in the mind of the builder.

Space/Structure/Light/Performativity/Physical Participation and Play.

Tate St Ives. 2011

Profound but intimate subjective evocations/assemblages of space and time.

Prototypes for Sculpture.

Model for Spheric Theme. 1937

Naum Gabo.

These prototypes give a unique insight into his working process, one in which he employed a playful intuition and childlike, hands-on approach to the development of what were often extraordinarily complex and apparently 'manufactured' forms.

Concetto Spaziale/Spatial Concept 1962

Lucio Fontana.

Buchi Works by Lucio Fontana are characterised by holes or punctures through various surfaces. By opening up these surfaces, Fontana introduces another dimension to his work, one of space, depth and time. In their almost infinite variation and difference, as well as their primal simplicity, they seem to approach something both fundamental and universal. 

Celestial Architecture.

Architecture Without Architects.

Bernard Rudofsky.

Among abstract architecture, some of the most imposing examples stand in Jaipur, India. They are gigantic astronomical instruments built in the eighteenth century to the plans of Maharajah Sawai Jai Singh 11.Their purpose was to achieve greater accuracy of astronomical data than that available from portable brass instruments. Since they never lived up to expectations, they represent that rare instance of pure, or nearly pure, architecture of a functionless kind.

Oxfam, Madeleine Street, Norwich. 

Aesthetics of Installation Art, Juliane Rebentisch.

Situation, Documents of Contemporary Art, Claire Doherty.

Deer Shelter Skyspace, James Turrell.

The layering of traces where the reader can find the intricacy of memory and imagination.

Rethinking The Animate.

Re-Animating Thought.

Tim Ingold. 2006

Contemporary western cultures have created our estrangement to nature, which has been established by the spiritual and religious ascendency of humankind over nature, and by the rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. 

European civilizations neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source, assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world.

Spell of The Sensuous, David Abram.

Cosmic Serenity/Solitude.

A Mind Attuned to the Intimate Garden.

In a culture exhausted and irreparably fragmented, the walls surrounding Luis Barragan's gardens are, perhaps one of the last defences to preserve centuries of thought and emotion.

On Nomadology.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1980

Fieldwork.

Deterritorialized Spaces.

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay.

A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys  both an autonomy  and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them. 

The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory.

Skyspaces.

James Turrell.

The sky is no longer out there, but is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky. 

In working with light, what is really important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought. The Deer Shelter is one of only a handful of private and public Skyspaces in Britain, including Cat Cairn, Kielder Forest in Northumberland.

Across the world Turrell has realised around forty temporary and permanent Skyspaces, although the Deer Shelter is one of very few that have been formed from an existing historic structure.

Drawing/Diagram/Script as a gesture of propulsion into the world.

Emotional Sensibility/Selective Intuition.

Making with the Inner Tensions of Each Element.

Timbre/Tone/Colour/Patina.

On Sonority.

Art and Technique.

Marcel Moyse. 

Spatial Distinctions/Piercings and their Movements.

In and Out of Material/Traces and Trails.

Interstices/Voids, Surfaces, Ceramic Forms, Black and White Slip over Terracotta.

Templates,Setting Bocks, Prototypes, Geometry Sets, Monoprints, Boxes.

Use of experimental photographic techniques and new materials through invention and application.

Communicative Space Of Drawing : Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

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The Communicative Space Of Drawing.

Braking down research.

Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

Re-combinent poetics/praxis.

The Architectural Scriptorium

The Photographic Darkroom.

Drawing, defined variously as an extruding, a gathering and/or a pulling closer.

The paradoxical nature of drawing is that it is simultaneously a form of recording and invention, somewhere situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view.

To re-examine the significance of the human body through drawing performatively and architecture.

To understand how buildings affect individuals and communities emotionally, how they provide people with a sense of joy-identity-and place.

Across The Space Of A Page.

Drawing Propositions/Propulsions from the Body.  

Landing Sites: Organism/Person/Environment

The World Opens Up In Front Of Us And Closes Behind.

The experience of our bodies, of what we touch and smell, of how well we are 'centred' is not locked into the immediate present, but can be recollected through time and memory.

Collisions with Bounded Spaces.

The Haptic and Geometric Grid/Centripetal and Centrifugal Radials. 

Haptic choreographies/circulations that create collisions with environments and bodies.

Body 'fit' and movement is affected by the haptic sense and by the tactile qualities of the surface and edges we encounter.

Patterns are composed mostly of paths and places, but it is the system by which they are related, that allows us to make sense of a bounded space.

Place and its choreography of collision that facilitate the transaction between body, memory and architecture, allowing us to dwell in them in the fullest sense.

All architecture in its beginnings was derived from a body-centred sense of space and place. The power of the home, comes from its being the one piece of the world around us which still speaks directly of our bodies as the centre and the measure of that world.

Buildings can encourage a choreography of dynamic relationships among the persons moving within their domains. 

Emily had been playing house in a nook right in the bow of a boat and tiring of it, she was walking rather aimlessly aft – when it suddenly flashed into her mind, that she was SHE.

Gaston Bachelard.

Poetics of Space.

Emily was neither particularly conscious of, nor looking at, the centre from which she was departing – nor the centre towards which she as walking. But she was able to detect her identity in the bodily act of moving from one centre to another, she recognized that SHE had been withdrawn and was now emerging.

How can the personal world of the body provide an alternative to excessive and disorienting events in the environment?

To diminish the importance of the body's internal values is to diminish our opportunity to make responses that remind us of our personal identity.

Memories at the Centre.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer/Moore.

John Latham.

Drawing/Unbounded Sensations of Time.

The Stage Of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Conversation : Avis Newman/Catherine de Zegher.

CdZ: What happens in the space between the gesture moving away from the body, towards everything that is outside of the self, and its landing as a trace on the page?

AN: I was thinking on the way the transmission of thought can depend on the hand and eye, and how this relates to the psychic space in which the mark exists as a potentiality. The effort of the mental and physical act of projection out from the body, away from the body, firstly into the air  -  an act that pitches the hand across the space of the page to site a mark where one intends – is quite a precise act : the most thoughtful and deliberate of acts, which I would speculate harbors a necessary thoughtlessness, in the sense that the certainty of coordinated actions is always in some way provisional and as such relies on the vigilant cooperation between eye and hand.

CdZ: Drawing may also be a recovery of the gesture that allows a discovery for the eye.

AN: To retrieve the gesture in a drawing is to translate the mark back into the action of the hand. It is very pleasurable to recover the gesture in that way and in so doing to follow the action of making. I think that experience in a drawing is very precise.

CdZ: Because the eye manages to discern what has become a trace on paper from a gesture in the air?

AN: Yes, the mind's eye. Perception becomes an act of reconstruction that moves unobtrusively between interior and exterior. I would make an analogy here between how we experience unconscious emotions in the repetition and accumulation of marks (irrespective of what is being drawn) and the intonation, hesitations, and inflections of speech, all of which hold a complexity of messages and can be at odds with what appears to be said, but which nonetheless determine meaning. It seems to me that this occurs independent of sight, as that which is generated by the mind and mediated by perception.

CdZ: In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time.

AN: My concern in making images relates more closely to the conceptual space of drawing, which is less circumscribed  than painting. In particular, the manner in which the boundary or edge comes to define the work is of a completely different order in drawing. In fact, the idea of inside  and outside does not occur in the same way. The marks define a position across the surface and are not registered in relation to limits. As a result the often ambiguous nature of borders can leave a vague uncertainty as to the stability of the image.

CdZ: Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

AN: The natural inclination of mark-making is a relational organisation of individual inscriptive acts, which is not an expression of a unitary world. The frame as the window on the world, which traditionally internalizes the picture. This view creates an illusion  of the unique experience of looking, in the sense that there is coherence to the image. There is not that illusory consistency in drawing, as the space and image are essentially open-ended and speculative. The unframed interferes with any anticipation we might have of ordered limits or completion, and suggests the possibility that something is missing and will always elude our attention, because it cannot be framed. It is the uncertainty of the edge and how it meets the real that I find fascinating.

CdZ: Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

AN: There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it bis all pressure from the inside outwards. And the idea of boundary then becomes problematic, our boundary as we project it onto the work. The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional, and when one looks, for example, at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17'' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space – this is not part of  drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Sense/Sensing/Feeling/Memory.

Hapticity and The Body of Memory/Experience.

Haptic drawings are composed of piece by piece responses to the situation at hand, rather than being based on any kind of visual or conceptual grand design.

The stone and wood of a house itself are embodied in these memorable centreplace's and even they belong to the body of memory, something that maybe regarded as possessing uniquely haptic properties.

The heat  from a fire, the rushing water in the fountain, and the smooth tactile objects on the mantle deliver feelings of touch and even permanence. Here in this interior space the lifetime memories of the person collaborate with the timelessness of the world outside.

Exercises on the Haptic Experience of Space.

Drawing Choreographies : Hapticity/Mark-making/The Body.

All architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction as such it is one partner in a dialogue with the body. 

Egon Schiele/Jenny Saville, drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.

Drawing marks that can be possessed, felt, touched and known, haptic drawings are memories of human experience, seeing, feeling, experiencing and exploring corporeality.

Studio Works : In art we conceive and combine new forms that enrich our lives.

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Studio Works.

Human beings are unique in retaining the capacity for play.

In art we conceive and combine new forms that enrich our lives.

To live more intensely than usual, inhabiting the whole of our humanity.

Mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, and as such it (myth) helps us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and perhaps allows a glimpse at the core of reality.

A Short History of Myth.

Karen Armstrong.

The Haptic Sense of Making.

Doing and feeling at the  same time.

The physical/spiritual/corporeal sense of being/becoming.

The Spatial Dimension.

Defining Self/Organizing Experience.

The human body its feelings at the centre of the architectural form.

Making Atmospheres/Environments. 

A Place Set Apart.

Mark Rothko.

WORK, volumes 1-6.

Don't Forget The Lamb.

Lamina.

Brian Clarke.

NOT FOR RESALE.

BOOKS FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY.

Sowing the seeds of knowledge.

Dawson Books.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

In the hands of a brilliant craftsman like Mies van der Rohe, a spatiality of alienation may still provide its rewards through the elegance of material and construction. But the more extreme applications of Cartesian space present an insidious threat to our identity as individuals. The other extreme to alienation of the body is over-manipulation of the body. Our bodies are circuited out of existence as our world is realized in electonically stimulated sensation.

To help people inhabit the world, we feel, the basic act is not organizing but caring; the architect's client is not undifferentiated society but caring individuals. In the rhetoric of the past decades, the difficult act of dwelling , based on the act of caring, is elitist. It requires effort, and that sets some apart from others. 

The architects' proper role, it seems to us, is an accepting and absorbing one, to encourage others to make the effort and to develop the physical surrounds that make dwelling possible and attractive. Curiously, the wholesale inhuman 'social' manipulation of urban form by twentieth-century architectural and planning offices has put a disproportionate emphasis on originality, on the unique.

 

Rather, we believe, the design of the environment is a choreography of the familiar and the surprising, in which the familiar has the central role, and a major function of the surprising is to render the familiar afresh.

Kent C. Bloomer, Charles W. Moore. 1977

Alternative Construction.

Contemporary Natural Building Methods.

Prototyping For Architects.

Sensing Spaces.

Marking The Line.

Ceramics and Architecture.

Drawing/Moving Bodies : Spatial Thresholds : In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

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In the body of knowledge, there is a mind in the flesh quick as lighting.

Artaud/Newman

Drawing ultimately corresponds with/to a mobile field of properties.

The Haptic Engagement.

The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

In drawing it is this potentiality and instability of the 'framed image/object' that reinforces our uncertainty  of any definitive definition. We are not so much looking at the thing itself, but at its suggestion and its very possibility in a formation that has yet to occur. There is the uncertainty (and its anxiety) as to what stage of language it is, in its becoming.

Looking with the eye and touch of an artist, even to a point of scrutiny, while keeping the societal content in which they emerge in mind. What forms the overall connection between the drawings in the exhibition is the value attached to gesture, as a primordial act of consciousness and to its trace on the paper. 

Catherine de Zegher, Avis Newman.

Drawing is conceived in the midst of loss and anxiety.

Within the realm of visual representation, drawing is present as an act of tracing absences. 

Opened and closed by the mark, an inscriptive game that is both motional and emotional, that enables an active control/participation over separation anxiety. While at the same time unlocking the way to the child's independence.

The earliest drawings are not guided by visual exploration of space, but by an exploration of movement and spatial concerns.

Bodily responses to drawing acts, of trying to bring about a visible language from visual inscriptions. Gestural traces in drawings evidence a continuous process of situating being/becoming.

Drawn from the body of knowledge into the/onto the surface event of experience. 

Drawing for me always seems to manifest the endless repetition of remaking, and as such as a sensation  it constitutes the space of anxiety, a childhood anxiety.

Moving Bodies

Spatial Thresholds

In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

St Jerome in his study.1474-75.

Messina examines 'earthly limits', St Jerome is sitting in a small study that seems to have been dissected to reveal its interior. The place, environment for his writing and any other material needed to cultivate his mind. As if to say that space can be crossed with a mind capable of entering  and crossing limits. This is the greatness of the mind, and also in architecture, that it is capable of crossing/entering spaces beyond there physical limits. In transcending physical limits Scarpa is setting up a spatial poetics of liminal spaces, is perhaps the main theme of his work at Brion Cemetery, alongside of the real physical and actual architectural figures of solid material. Thus for Scarpa, every time a threshold is crossed the limits between life, humanity and nature in the landscape are traversed as well.

Brion Cemetary by Carlo Scarpa.

Ina Macaione. 2017. 

Enric Mestre.

Architectures For Silence And Meditation.

Building models, blueprints for larger constructions.

Sculptures of the hidden, the concealed and the enclosed.

The work of Enric Mestre is much indebted to the principles of ancient classical form as to the vocabulary of modern architecture and sculpture. He is an artist who has a particularly sensitive feeling for massing, for the planar and spatial relationships of contemporary building, and how to size this down into pieces which possess their own particular intimacy. 

His works are  enhanced by the nuanced and controlled colouration of their clay fabric. Mestre produces patinas of great subtlety and variation that relate more to the fabric of a building than to traditional sculpture. Gritty open textures and smooth surfaces both soften and temper the austerity of his forms, in which he also uses sober tones and colourations to distinguish different sections, surfaces and planes.  

Mestre's work echoes the sculptural beauty of expressive functionalist building, it has the same starkness, the same asceticism that shares a strong sense of memorial and of elegy. They are deeply contemplative objects, that go beyond exercises in harmony, chromatics, proportion and formalism. 

They present a quietude that contains a profound sense of memento mori. For Whiting there is a sepulchre like quality about such of Mestre's work, for repositories of memory perhaps, sentinels of some unspecified commemoration. Sculptures where one's own imagination is allowed to roam in a disquieting world of urban areas and industrial like structures. 

Their cenotaph like solemnity creates a sense of isolation and loneliness, and we are left to make our own narratives, our own stories.

David Whiting.

Invisible Cities.

Italo Calvino.

With cities, it is as with dreams; everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires or fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful and everything conceals something else.

What is more mysterious than clarity?

What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over the hours and over men?

Eupalinos of the Architect.

Paul Valery.

Christopher Wilmarth

Drawing Into Sculpture.

Christopher Wilmarth (1943?1987), an American artist best known for his expressive sculptures constructed from plate glass and steel, was also an innovative draftsman. This compelling book?the first to focus on Wilmarth's use of drawing throughout his career?offers fascinating insights into his artistic practice and poetic personal vision. Edward Saywell considers three aspects of Wilmarth's drawings: his student and early works; the remarkable crossover that he made between two- and three-dimensional works in a series of drawings constructed from etched glass and steel cables done in the early 1970s; and the independent drawings he made directly after or during the construction of his sculptures as a means to think through completed work and to look forward to new creative ideas. Saywell also draws on previously unstudied materials, such as sketchbooks, preparatory maquettes, and letters selected from the Christopher Wilmarth Archive recently presented to the Fogg Art Museum by Susan Wilmarth-Rabineau, in order to shed new light on Wilmarth's working process.

Intimus/Spatial Practices : Drawing, Body Specificity, Space-Time, Place.

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The Dematerialized Space of the Image.

Drawing does not proceed from the object of perception, because the drawing 'itself' is desperate to keep hold of an absence – it all began with a silhouette of a shadow – on the wall.

The act of drawing dismantles consciousness and plunges the self into a zone of sensation and experience. No longer expressing the history and intentions of a subject, or the closures of representation. The work/drawing becomes thought that thinks itself through the material. 

What drawing produces/proposes is a confrontation with the real of experience, prior to signification or the subject. It induces a 'sense'/'feeling' that stands in critical and often destructive relation to pre-existing codes of visual language or modes of interpretation.

To draw becomes to embody and manifest movement, which is neither the rhetoric of motion nor a parody of eros, but rather that what keeps the imaginary in the state of possibility and allows it to be both diachronic and synchronic, markings in times feeling.

In drawing there is no distinction between inside and outside. 

In drawing we are no longer in the realms of distinctions.

There is no inside-out and vice-versa, because the threshold and its distinction was never passed.

The harmony of marks touches body and matter. Harmony determines transparency; it maintains the  metonymic character of desire because it temporarily annuls the distinction between imaginary and image, between the labyrinth and elaboration. The imaginary keeps its own status of impalpability and moves in the interstitial where it loses the confines of here and now, inside and outside. 

Stella Santacatterina.

Drawing into a corporeal sense of place.

Marks in 'times' feeling.

An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporiness of the phenomenon joining a diffuse invisible flow of energy that wends its way ceaselessly through the world, animating it as it goes.

Vital Nourishment.

Departing from Happiness.

Francois Jullien.

Nonsense drawing is about remaining in the simplicity of our origins, free from concepts and representations that veil things. The nonsense drawing is becoming thought.

Inside This Clay Jug.

Jackie Leven.

A vessel that still contains a quantum of energy.

The Egyptian Pot.

Hans Coper.

Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness.

Sadhana, bearing the difficulties of existence.

Butades on loss, her lyrical and indexical inscription.

The awakening of inert objects (a table, a forest, a person that plays a certain role in the environment) which, emerging from their stability, transform the place where they lay motionless into the foreignness of their own space. 

Stories thus carry out a labour that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. 

They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces.

A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

The Practice of Everyday Life. 

Michel de Certeau. 1984  

Drawing as actualizations of spaces, a spatializing frenzy of inscriptions becoming a textual place.

Drawings on narrative actions that organize feeling and their perspectives determined by a phenomenology of existing in the world; producing a graphic of actions and findings that are indicative to a situated body within the space of a practiced place.

INTIMUS.

Interior Design Theory Reader.

Drawing On Body Specificity/Space-Time/Place

What is explored as distinct spatial experiences, how is text narration explored as a negotiator between that which is seen, mapped and stable, and that which is experienced, toured and individuated.

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Georges Perec. 1999.

The Apartment.

Georges Perec, renowned for his literary work, takes time to question the banal and mundane activities occurring in the spaces of our inhabitation. In 'The Apartment' he discloses the ordinariness of space when considered alongside functionality of room requirements, particularly when mapped through a slice of time. Against this method of narration, Perec proposes several other spatial layouts generated by either functional relationships between rooms, or the functioning of senses, or days of the week, or thematic arrangements.

Every apartment consists of a variable, but finite, number of rooms.

Each room has a particular function.

It would seem difficult, or rather it would seem derisory, to question these self-evident facts. Apartments are built by architects who have very precise ideas of what an entrance-hall, a sitting-room (living-room, reception room), a parents' bedroom, a child's room, a maid's room, a box-room, a kitchen, and a bathroom ought to be like.

It's not hard to imagine an apartment whose layout would depend, no longer on the activities of the day, but on functional relationships between the rooms. It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses.

In sum, a room is a fairly malleable space.

I don't know, and don't want to know, where functionality begins or ends. It seems to me in any case, that in the ideal dividing-up of today's apartments functionality functions in accordance with a procedure that is unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral. The activities of the day correspond to slices of time, and to each slice of time there corresponds one room  of the apartment.

Inside Fear : Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings.

Anne Troutman.

I do not believe the house is a safe place. For me, it is a collision of dream, nightmare, and circumstance, a portrait of the inner life. The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears. Its interiors are a map of the conscious and unconscious, with conscious securities and insecurities visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces. There is danger in the house.

In this semi-autobiographical account of childhood spaces, Anne Troutman suggests that dwelling holds an intimate, mirror-like relationship so that we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us. This Freudian connection, dividing and connecting inner and outer selves, gathers hidden spaces with visible house, and cloaks the visual with other senses such as fear, terror, fright and anxiety. Discussed this way the storyteller's relived world is contingent on conscious and unconscious associations that redefine the interior through psychological space.

Intimus, Interior Design Theory Reader. Mark Taylor and Julieanne Preston.

Spatial Stories.

Spatial practices concern everyday tactics, they are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication, the beginning of a story  of which the rest is written by footsteps, to the daily news, to legends and myths. These narrative adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into the commonplaces of an order, do not merely constitute a 'supplement' to pedestrian  enunciations and rhetorics. They are not satisfied with displacing  the latter and transposing them into a field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it.

Michel de Certeau.

Drawing Space/Discourses of The Body.

Enunciative Focalizations ( the indication of the body within discourse).

Markings, utterances and graphic gestures caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a form dependent upon many different conventions, that are situated by the act of the present, (nowness) and modified by the translations/transformations caused by successive inscriptions and their contexts.  

Situated selves, of being situated by desire, indissociable from a direction of existence and implanted in the space of a landscape.

There are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences, the perspectives of which are determined by a 'phenomenology' of existing in the world.

M Merleau-Ponty.

Michel de Certeau establishes 'Spatial Practice' as the proliferation of metaphors/spatial trajectories (stories that traverse and organize places, that link and select, that can make sentences and itineraries). He is interested in the role narrative plays in both reading and acting in space as a theatre of actions that accumulates meaning and relevance over and through time, and that spatial experiences are specific to each body, time and place.

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated/performed by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. 

In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way , an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.

Printed Drawing.

Figural markings and frottage on cyanotype surface.

Languages that inform on/and interrogate drawings.

DRAWING FORMAL ELEMENTS and vocabulary.

Found document, hand-out for students AS/A2 Brockwood Art Barn.

1. Format: portrait, landscape.

2. Scale and Proportion: Systems of measurement:

Calculating relative size by counting.

Outstretched pencil covered by thumb.

Linking up with markers suggested by other objects and intersecting lines within the environment.

3. Dynamic relationship: The straightness or curve of the central axis; relative angles of neck, limbs, to the rest of the body or surrounding furniture etc.

4. Composition and design: point of focus (close-up, distant view) featuring human figure in space. The whole sheet of paper must be owned - even where there are no marks, this is still part of the composition – positive and negative space.

5. Perspective: When drawing from life we translate what we see as 3D spatial relationships onto 2D picture plane. Recessional space or depth in a drawing is achieved through correct calculation of: Vanishing Points, Horizontal Line, Foreshortening, Volume.

6. Line quality: Outline is only used where a shadow is visible, very often not necessary.

7. Pattern: Mark making; repeated elements that contribute to the structure of the whole; organisation of the elements or parts, in the way that feathers are arranged in a bird's wing, or the leaves on branches of a tree.

8. Tonal values: Greyscale; highlight, shadow; colour of ground; distribution of weight in terms of light and darks.

9. Colour: Wet and dry media; combining complementary, secondary, tertiary relationships; also (as with tonal values) hues, tints and shades.

Helgate Proposal Review.

Anglian Potters.

Why clay?

How has clay shaped you?

Ceramics

Visual Fine Art.

Teaching in Art Education

Praesentia/Drawing and Assemblage : Cyanotype Exposure/Trace.

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency, of phenomena close at hand unfolding.

The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Between the Shape of Light and the Shape of Things.

Outpost 220324

Japanese Pottery/Raku Bowls.

Drawing, the layers create an aggregate, they are generative rather than descriptive.

Carlo Scarpa.

Between the Shape of Light and the Shape of Things.

I believe that it is art that makes us grasp the reality of the world. It is the effort that human beings have made since the beginning. To make clear for themselves through forms, their own existence.

Carlo Scarpa. 1978

Scarpa finds rhymes/waves, conversations between the structural forms and the shapes of the objects, he designed with transformation and decay in mind. He knew how to wait, how to let ageing and patina complete their work.

The creative consciousness of collapsing time and of death marks all Scarpa's strategies and narratives. At Castelvecchio he leaves great distances between objects allowing them to converse with one another solitarily. His job he believed was not to show himself but to show the works and lend them sight, intensifying their resonance with one another and setting up dialogues between them and the architecture.

Light as a Mutable Presence.

Scarpa needed a light that moves, to give depth to the surface of the casts and to lead them into conversation. I set up my work by pairing like images, to show the different character of pieces as the fall of light changes, not to show light is brought in, but to account for its effects. Each work becomes solitary, tranquil but together they engage in a distant conversation, a little distracted as if in a world of their own. They look at one another from their private pools of illumination.

Guido Guidi.

And what of the present?

The present has no duration, when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustine.

Few architects have dealt with the kind of luminosity, reflection and the sheen of materials as  that which preoccupied Scarpa.

The Chapel of St Ignatius.

Steven Holl.

Architecture holds the power to inspire and transform our day-to-day existence. The everyday act of pressing a door handle and entering into a light washed room can become profound when experienced through sensitized consciousness. For Holl to hear, feel and see these physicalities is to become a subject of the senses.

Goethe, one should not seek  anything behind the phenomena, they are lessons themselves.

The spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola argues for a philosophical interpretation of the senses. This work preceding later writings on phenomenology by 300 years, critically re-orders the hierarchy  of the five senses. Hearing becomes the most refined sense, while sight the traditionally dominant sense comes third after touch.

A Gathering of Different Lights.

Vision.

Realization.

Radiance/Illumination.

The Haptic Realm.

Studies in Light.

Steven Holl in 'Questions of Perception' describes a phenomenology of architecture that argues for a heightened development of spatial and experiential dimensions through individual reflection on the senses and perception. Holl comments on the need to open ourselves to perception, we must transcend the mundane urgency of 'things to do'. We must try to access that inner life that reveals the luminous intensity of the world, only through solitude can we begin to penetrate the secrets around us. An awareness of one's unique existence in space is essential in developing a consciousness of perception.

Architectural Abstracts/The Works Subject/Conceptual Resonance

 

Outpost 070723

On The Plane of Feeling.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Individual Human Experience. 

We Are Moved To Think.

Incipient Expressions.

Feeling-with is a force for thought.

A work creates a force for rethinking as much as a force for the experience of sensation's relays towards prearticulation.

One work can have many dynamic forms, many concepts, many feelings or thoughts.

The artist is not the subject, rather prearticulation is.

The Work's Subject

Is Its Dynamic Form

Its Valuation

Its Conceptual Resonance

Its Diagram.

Activating new parameters for thought.

The force of feeling-things becoming into existence.

To posit a subject for feeling means, engaging with the creative from the outside. This taking form is less the formation of a concrete identity than the culmination and residue of a process.

The Work creates its own subject, its subject is the force of becoming it proposes.

Feeling is power's compulsion of composition.

Whitehead 1929/1978.

The compulsion to compose is an aesthetic drive, a will towards sensation, a will to power-feeling.

Becoming-Bodies Feel-With The World.

Amanda Baggs feels-the-world. Watch her reading a book, she touches it, puts her face into it, listens to the pages rustling, smells it, looks at it. Through her the book becomes conjunctive, valued within a complex responsive environment. By culling the bookness from the book, Baggs makes the field of its musicality felt, its texture, its force of becoming not only as an object to be read but as a relation to be lived.

By feeling the book, Baggs brings the book into relation with a force of prearticulation that exceeds the book-as object.

Erin Manning.

Concepts appear/manifest-themselves as forces of expression in its incipiency.

The Multiple Sense Of Concepts.

There is no event,

No phenomena,

Word,

or Thought 

Which Does Not Have Multiple Sense.

A thing has many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it.

Deleuze. 1993.

Concepts value the rhythmic pressure of feeling/thinking with the work/world.

The concept is a gear-shift mechanism that acts on blocks of sensation, oscillating between thought and articulation, it pulsates between the actual and virtual realms. On the virtual stratum concepts propel the becoming event of thought, they feel its force of creation. On the plane of composition concepts articulate the dynamic form of prearticulation, they express the feeling of force.

The theoretical object as a concept to express the force and feeling of inquiry.

The Stick Thing, Canterbury School of Architecture/Spatial Practice/Oren Lieberman. 2009.

Robert Irwin

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

2011/2017.

Editor's Note to the Reader.

Beatrice Hohenegger.

The fact that so many manuscripts have until now remained unpublished reinforces Irwin's characterization of his writing as motivated not by communication or publication, but rather by a desire to examine and clarify core questions that he was pursuing at key moments in his career.

Introduction 

Irwin's Writing.

Matthew Simms.

In a statement published in 1998, Robert Irwin emphasized that his essays, were not written in order to communicate, I am a visual artist, not a writer, or to refute criticism, writing was for me a means to examine the questions that were turning in my head concerning the 'why' of art, with the intention of clarifying the process of making. Together, they reflect relatively well the development of my thinking and the guiding idea of my work: the potential of each person to perceive the surrounding world from a unique aesthetic perspective. 

Notes toward a Conditional Art brings together for the first time Irwin's published and unpublished writings. While the texts span a wide range from letters to project proposals, the vast majority are personal ruminations, sometimes set down in draft form and other times worked up into fully developed essays. They cover a diverse conceptual terrain including, among other things, Irwin's philosophy of teaching, the lessons of modern art, and the artist's understanding of art as a form of pure inquiry. Above all, this book makes clear that starting in the 1960s and continuing up to the present, writing has been and remains an integral element of Irwin's multifaceted art practice.

White Washed Spaces:

Hungate/Water.

Provisional Objects/Architectures.

Porous Fired Clay-Drawings as Spaces.

Thinned Gesso, Sanded/Abraded Surfaces.

Lead  Sheet/Glaze/Slip/Batt Wash/Opal Glass.

Compositional Tilt-up Pieces/Vessels.

Figural Body/Water on Chinese Paper.

Hybrid Body-Trace Drawing.

Indian Ink/Cyanotype Process.

Mounted/Inter-hanging/Canvas/Screen Mesh.

White Conduit/Nylon Line.

Re-Visiting The Human Outline.

Chinese Paper/Thinned Gesso/Wax/Lime

On The Plane Of Feeling.

We are moved to think through a conceptual unfolding a reaching towards-expression.

Through feeling, thought begins to take form as a conceptual force.

The complex interplay of the transversal passage between thought-concept-articulation-

For Whitehead, feeling is the pulsion that transduces thoughts into becoming concepts.

Feeling is a pulsion to think, a sensitivity that situates thought in the world. Through feeling, thought's affective tonality is foregrounded.

Affective tone is an environmental resonance of a  feeling-in-action, as a vibrantile force that makes a resonant milieu felt. (The Hungate, Norwich, Propositional Workings)

Feeling Is Affect Bleeding Into Thought.

Activating complexities on the verge of expression. At the threshold of thought as creation, feeling provokes an aperture for that which has not been thought.

Thought is a lure for feeling that prearcticulates the virtual inflections of its incipient expression.

Feeling-with is not without thought, it is a force for thought.