Compressing Atmosphere- - ceramic encounters with clay, clay body and site is an exhibition of supporting material research, visual documentation and objects representing the written flow of my dissertation. The thematic chapters illustrate correspondence with trees, where I investigate the rural sites of Merrijig and Tallarook. The potential of compression chapter tests making from sites closer to home, such as Royal Park and inner Melbourne streets. A pandemic takes hold, presents research and outcomes particular to the experiences of a hotel quarantine and of creative practice during a global pandemic.

In addition to my research, a selection of artwork corresponds with the concepts explored in the final chapter, assembling assemblage and compressing compressions. These works survey how a ceramic practice can reflect personal commentary on cultural, social and environmental events as embodied material experiences.

When
Open: Thursday 11 July 1-7pm (one day only)
Event: Celebratory drinks 5-7pm 🥂

Where
SITE EIGHT Gallery,Building 2, Level 2, Bowen St (off La Trobe St), lift access via Rodda Lane, School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne, Naarm.

In my initial research I was consciously attuning to the material of two sites of making, both on Taungurong land: Merrijig and Tallarook. My material correspondence is a relationship between my clay of choice, and the material bodies of granitic sand, dust storm ochre, river stones, and tree bark experienced at these sites.

Words of gratitude to @sandrabowkett who shared her Tallarook studio and experience the wonder of wood firing and the material beauty of black wattle ash.

In my examination exhibition the first table exemplifies material research encompassed in the chapter a correspondence with trees. This title is influenced by the British anthropologist, Tim Ingold’s thinking about the potential of materials and our human relationship to them.

To paraphrase Ingold An Ecology of Materials, 2018:

As a researcher with clay and into the ceramic process I am someone who is ever-observant of the movements of stuff around me, and I bring the movement of my own conscious awareness into line with the movements of the surrounding materials. Therefore, making something is a mode of question and response, in which the maker puts a question to the material, and the material answers to it; the maker puts another question, the material answers again, in a circular and iterative process.

The term correspondence captures this mutual responsiveness. In my research I follow the material and that process as a correspondence between the flow of the material and the movement and flow of my consciousness.

Correspondence, then, is a matter of bringing these two lines into agreement.

Clay bears physical witness to compression actions. Clay holds the indexical marks from a making hand. This research asks what if? and how might? questions of my material practice. Posing questioning is a technique used by improvisational artists to promote play, spontaneity, inventiveness, and break habits.

Framing a clear proposition in my practice is also new methodological approach in my research. The concept of propositional thinking is described by affect theorist and philosopher Brian Massumi to describe the ontological existence of affect. He advises that a proposition should not be reduced to a logical, self-determined writing:

It is a proposition of potential, by the world, for this time and times to come, in serial turnover and penumbral variation. It is a traveling propensity of the world to make a qualitative difference, over and over again, grounded in the serially continuing identity of a self-varying event that in actuality was once and for all, but in potentiality is for all times. (Massumi Parable of the Virtual Movement, Affect & Sensation, 2021)

Massumi’s evocative words capture this tumbling sense of possibility framed but not restricted by a propositional statement. I use a propositional statement to question how I make with clay; how compressive action might expand my ceramic practice? A proposition posed by an affect inclined-artist is instructive and aligns closely with the iterative action-reflection process of practice-led research.

The identification of the action of compression as a generative concept for creative expansion is a threshold moment in this research. I move from a method of hollow forming making, where my finger pressure alone is evident. I am thinking about how pressing with, against and away from my body with clay might shape a form.

I am asking how this action has the potential to discover new methods of making and responding to the site making.

I understand:

o   How my physical body responds to compressive indexicality with clay expanding from pinching to pushing, knuckling, punching, and using casts of my touch in plaster.
o   How these indexical marks on clay are evidence of the temporal acts of compression.
o   How compressions against bodies encountered at a site record my correspondence between me and them, capturing a textural identity of that body, at that place in that time.
o   How objects compressed by fingers and hands return onto my making body and may affect it.
o   How events from site (wood ash or granitic sand) can be compressed within the artefact made.
o   How the resulting artefact made through the interdependent relationship with clay, bodily actions and site is a compression of all that is sensed by the body.
o   How this sensing; my attunement to affective space when making, is a quality that is a manifestation of felt compression.
o   How making that is bound by a set duration manifests in a temporal psychological compression of experience.

Research Focus 3: isolation, atrophy and absence of agency; continuing creative research in lockdown

Compulsory hotel quarantine with my 15 year old son at the end of 2020 was a isolating experience that provided a uniquely contained timeframe and location for creative research to be tested and reflected upon. The 12-day event remains a scar on my pandemic psyche; however, it clarifies how affective theories best define my methodology of creative engagement in terms of my feeling and moving body and its connection to the site of art making.

Affects are akin to forces or intensities that are viscerally sensed through seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, hearing, felt unconsciously and without initial intention or emotion. I entered (with my son) a situation that was certainly emotionally charged. My embodied ‘sensing’ of an atmosphere of fear, love, isolation and claustrophia of the hotel quarantine experience was also an ‘atmosphere which is always already “there,” filling up lived space around us; thereby they subtly yet pervasively set the tone for our being and being-together’. To respond creatively I had to inhabit this site with the open intention to see, smell, touch, hear and feel.

By bringing clay into my quarantine dwelling time, I intuitively make provision for explorative making to happen. Hugo and my shared inhabitation demanded profound adjustments on emotional, physical and familial levels. Here I acknowledge the artistic research of Carolyn Eskdale.

Freed from the expectation that artefacts made might be fired, each daily outcome was staged in sequence against the veil of glass that separated us from the outside world of fresh air, breezes, natural sounds and living things. As the days unfolded, 12 expressions emerged.

The ‘infusing affect’ of the 'unseen' hotel atmosphere was felt intensely both somatically and emotionally. A definition of atmosphere as something that ‘envelops like a space but lacks definite boundaries’ perfectly describes the enveloping, suffocating sense of compressed space, light, air and ultimately time experienced under hotel quarantine. My research acknowledges the affect theories of Brian Massumi and Peter Slaby.

As Marina Ambramović advises, I devised a list of parameters to bind my making in the hotel room.

Quarantine Residency Manifesto:

1.     Reacquaint myself as mother to my son.

2.     Utilise all clay to hand, cut into 12 pieces, one for each day of quarantine.

3.     Make one sculptural object per day.

4.     Use food containers as display devises.

5.     Post daily on Instagram.

6.     Wait for time to expire.

7.     Exercise.

8.     Watch great movies.

9.     Hope that there are no other cases of COVID-19 in our hotel.

Fieldnote: Journal November 2020.

This body of research also questioned what it is to be a mother and an artist and the tensions between time and respect to practice parenting allows. I embraced the critical perspective of Lauren Fournier as a way to not only situate my current research but to validate my previous years on intense parenting. Autotheory is the merging of theory and philosophy with autobiography as an approach to critical artistic practice.

Explicitly, Fournier (2021:10) writes:

Artists turn to autotheory both for its innate troubling of dominant epistemologies and approaches to philosophizing and theorizing and for its capacity to make space for new ways of theorizing and understanding their lives.

Autotheory reveals the tenuousness of maintaining illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the self, research and motivation, just as feminist artists and scholars have long argued.

Finding Fournier gave me courage and language to admit that I was forcing life into separate compartments: creative, personal and professional. Compartmentalising one’s responsibilities does not give respect to the labour of all these commitments and the associative influences that flow from a rich and truthful acknowledgement of feminist discourse, experience and theories.