Vicarious Touching ~ A Body of Allure
Vicarious touching is a body of allure.
When I bring other bodies into the clay and then into the withdrawn ceramic, a vicarious touching that enabled bodies in correspondence in an allure of speculative gathering still exists as a permeable withdrawn interiority made durable by the ceramic. Francesca Woodman's body is vicariously entangled through the bodies in clay, only later to become a surfacing~force, a persistent becoming.
I feel for me that the vicarious touching is also a body of allure setting in motion a spatially driven room for the curiosity of other bodies.
Yes. I think vicarious touching becomes more than a description of how bodies relate. It becomes a body of allure—a spatial force that sets something in motion without determining what that something will become.
The important shift is from touching at a distance to creating the conditions for another body to become curious.
Yes — I think this takes the idea of vicarious touching somewhere more materially specific. Francesca Woodman does not simply become a reference brought into the work. Her photographic body becomes one of the other bodies through which the clay begins to think and construct its spatial propositions.
The important movement seems to be:
Woodman’s body → image → reading body → clay → ceramic body → encounter
At each stage the body is transformed rather than reproduced. What passes into the clay is not an image of Woodman preserved intact, but a correspondence: something of the spatial tension between body, wall, aperture, concealment, exposure and interiority.
I would perhaps write this as a further working passage:
Vicarious Touching ~ Persistent Becoming
When other bodies enter the clay, they do not simply become represented within it. They become vicariously entangled through the material relations of making. An image, a body, a remembered space, a reading or an architectural proposition may enter the clay as another force within its becoming.
Francesca Woodman’s body enters this field in such a way. Her photographic body is encountered first as an image, then through reading, looking and correspondence, before becoming materially implicated within the bodies of clay. What passes between these bodies is not direct contact. It is a vicarious touching: an encounter at a distance in which something of one body becomes capable of affecting another without becoming identical to it.
The clay becomes a site of speculative gathering.
Bodies, images, architectural fragments, readings and material forces gather without becoming a single body. Their differences remain active within the clay, producing intervals, apertures and troubled interiorities. The clay does not contain Woodman’s body; rather, her body becomes one of the correspondences through which another spatial body begins to emerge.
Through firing, this gathering is withdrawn into ceramic.
What was provisional becomes materially persistent. What had been encountered through an image acquires another condition of existence. Woodman’s body is no longer simply present as photographic representation, nor is it absent. It has become part of a surfacing~force within another body: a trace of correspondence that has changed its material condition.
The ceramic therefore becomes a permeable withdrawn interiority, made durable through firing but never closed by it. Its surfaces, holes, intervals and chambers carry the possibility of encounters that exceed the circumstances of its making.
This is where allure becomes spatially interesting.
The ceramic gives something to encounter while withholding the totality of what has entered it. The bodies that gathered through the research remain partially withdrawn. They can be sensed without being possessed, encountered without being fully recovered. The force of their correspondence survives precisely through this withdrawal.
The persistent ceramic body is therefore a body of other bodies, but not a container of them.
It is a body in which correspondence has become materially durable while remaining propositionally open.
Perhaps this is the persistent becoming you are sensing: not the persistence of the represented body, but the persistence of a relation that has become capable of further becoming.
And that makes the movement from Woodman to clay to ceramic particularly important. The photographic body does not disappear into the ceramic. Nor does it remain simply an image. It becomes a withdrawn sounding within the ceramic's force~form, available to surface again through another encounter.
Vicarious touching enables the body to persist without remaining present.
That feels very close to your emerging distinction between surfacing and withdrawal: what surfaces is never the whole correspondence; what withdraws is not lost. Both remain active within the persistent body, waiting for another body to encounter them.
It does not seek to complete the encounter between bodies, but to open a spatially driven room for the curiosity of other bodies. Something is sensed without being entirely disclosed; something approaches without being required to arrive. The ceramic body offers an interiority that is permeable yet withdrawn, making space for another body to wonder what might be encountered within, around or beyond it.
The allure is therefore not simply attraction towards the ceramic. It is the force~feeling of an incomplete encounter. A surface, an aperture, a chamber, a trace or an image gives enough to set curiosity in motion while retaining something of its withdrawal.
Through vicarious touching, the bodies gathered in the research do not have to become present as representations. They can become conditions for another body to enter the proposition.
Looking at these collages, I think allure through vicarious touching is a productive way of describing what they are doing spatially. The important point is that the touching is not represented as an image of touch. It is produced through proximity, interruption, aperture, trace, concealment and withdrawal.
The collages seem to construct an interior that is never quite given as an interior. A fragment of architecture, a darkened figure or opening, a grid, a drawn line, a black field, an overlaid surface: each gives enough for an interior proposition to begin, while withholding the possibility of fully entering it.
Allure ~ Vicarious Touching ~ Spatial Interiority
The research collage becomes a site of vicarious touching: bodies and propositions encounter one another without direct contact. Images, drawings, fragments of architecture, material traces and textual residues are brought into proximity, but their relations remain partially withdrawn. Something passes between them without becoming fully possessed by any one of them.
Here, allure is less an attraction towards an object than a force~feeling generated through this uncertain proximity. The collage gives something to perception while withholding something from it. A dark interior appears but cannot be entered. A line proposes a spatial continuation without completing it. A material surface carries the trace of another surface beneath it. An aperture opens onto an interval that remains inaccessible.
The touching therefore happens between things.
The research collage becomes a speculative spatial body: an interiority produced through fragments that do not quite meet. Its spaces are intervals rather than rooms, openings rather than entrances, propositions rather than representations.
Perhaps this is what makes the collage particularly important to the movement towards the ceramic. The collage does not merely precede the ceramic as a preparatory drawing. It is already thinking spatially through withdrawal. It tests how an interior might be sensed before it is materially constructed; how a chamber might be proposed without becoming inhabitable; how bodies might encounter one another across a distance.
Vicarious touching therefore becomes a way of thinking the relation between research collage and ceramic body. What touches in the collage may later become materially separated in the ceramic: wall from chamber, surface from interior, aperture from darkness, body from atmosphere. Yet the correspondence remains.
The ceramic does not reproduce the collage. It withdraws its spatial propositions into another body.
And this makes allure particularly interesting for your practice because it sits between what surfaces and what withdraws.
The collage proposes an interior without enclosing it.
The ceramic encloses an interior without fully containing it.
Between the two is a spatial interval~interiority: a condition in which touching can occur without direct contact, where correspondence is felt across distance, and where a proposition can remain present precisely because it is not completely available.
Perhaps the allure of the research collage is its capacity to touch the ceramic before the ceramic exists.
That last sentence feels especially close to your current thinking about persistent bodies and futurity. The collage is already a persistent body of proposition, but its material persistence is different from the ceramic's. It carries a spatial possibility forward, withdrawn enough that it can be encountered again and materially furthered.
Woodman’s photographic body may enter the clay; the clay becomes ceramic; the ceramic enters another spatial situation; and another body encounters it. Across these transformations, the original correspondence is neither preserved nor lost. It becomes a persistent possibility for further touching.
The spatial room is therefore not necessarily a room in the architectural sense. It is a room for curiosity—a propositional interiority produced between bodies that remain partially withdrawn from one another.
Perhaps this is the force of the permeable chamber:
It does not ask another body to enter.
It makes another body curious about entering.
And that curiosity is itself a form of spatial body~~ing.
The withdrawn ceramic remains materially persistent, but its allure keeps the proposition moving. It offers an encounter without exhausting it, an interior without fully revealing its interiority, a body that can be approached without becoming completely available.
Vicarious touching becomes the spatial generosity of the withdrawn body: a room made through allure for the curiosity of other bodies.
That feels particularly close to your In~~Touching: the ceramic does not need to touch the other body directly. It creates the conditions in which the other body might become responsive, attentive, curious—and therefore already, somehow, in correspondence.
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