Glossary of Terms

Coordinates for the Practice

INTERSENTIENT STATES

A change in a viewer’s awareness arising through encounter with material form.

Intersentient States describes a perceptual circuit in which a viewer’s attention passes through an encounter with form and returns altered. Sentience belongs entirely to the viewer. The object’s proportions, surfaces, mass, spacing and response to light condition the encounter without implying consciousness or agency.

The prefix inter- names the relationship between two moments of sentience within the same viewer: awareness before the encounter and awareness as it returns from it.

An Intersentient State may arise through sustained looking as a condition of heightened attentiveness in which meaning remains open and unresolved. Familiar, human, architectural or archaic associations may become apparent while the form continues to resist final categorisation. The concept directs attention towards the ways in which the material and spatial properties of a work organise perception.

THE ATTENTIONAL INTERVAL

The interval in which an encounter with form prompts the viewer to look again.

The Attentional Interval describes a phase within a viewer–form–viewer circuit. The viewer first attends to the work, encounters its proportions, surfaces, mass, spacing and response to light, and is prompted to return attention to it. The interval occurs between the initial apprehension of the form and the renewed act of looking.

A simple analogy is the unexpected reflection seen in a puddle. Attention passes from the surroundings (which may include an observer) to the reflected image and then returns to the surroundings, which may now be perceived differently.

During this interval, recognition remains incomplete and perception continues to develop. Each return may alter what the viewer notices, remembers, anticipates or infers, allowing the encounter to become recursive.

The causation is material and perceptual: the properties of the work affect the viewer’s attention. The Attentional Interval therefore provides one of the principal conditions through which an Intersentient State may arise.

OSCILATORY ATTENTION

The repeated return of attention through an encounter with form.

Oscillatory Attention describes the movement of a viewer’s attention between what is seen, remembered, anticipated and inferred. Attention returns repeatedly to the work rather than settling into immediate recognition, and the viewer may experience the object as alternately familiar and unfamiliar, resolved and unresolved. Each act of looking modifies the next.

This repeated movement sustains the Attentional Interval by delaying closure and resisting definitive interpretation. Meaning remains provisional as perception continues to move.

Oscillatory Attention may occur without conscious deliberation. It gives uncertainty a productive role, allowing the work to continue occupying perception through repeated acts of looking. The process contributes both to the emergence of Intersentient States and to the Sisyphean Horizon, which is approached through repeated acts of attention without being finally reached.

THE SISYPHEAN HORIZON

Approaching resolution without arrival.

The Sisyphean Horizon is the continually receding point of complete resolution towards which a maker works. Each adjustment may bring a work closer to an imagined resolution while also revealing further decisions. Progress is real, although absolute completion remains beyond reach.

The figure of Sisyphus provides an image of continual engagement. Each act of refinement alters the maker’s understanding of what resolution might require, causing the horizon to recede as the work develops.

The Sisyphean Horizon therefore describes a productive condition in which uncertainty continues to sustain enquiry.

RELIQUARY FORMS

Vessels for possibility.

These works recall the stillness and gravity of devotional objects while remaining independent of any particular tradition. They provide sites for projection, reflection and pause, with their possible contents kept deliberately uncertain.

Their significance lies in the relationship between the suggestion of containment and the withholding of whatever might be contained.

VESSELES, FIGURES, TABLEAUX

Three related modes of enquiry.

Within the vessel mode, I explore volume, containment, proportion and spatial presence.

Within the figure mode, I consider posture, orientation and embodied encounter.

Within the tableau mode, I examine surface, image, inscription and pictorial space.

These modes continually inform one another. Ideas are carried between them, creating a practice in which the boundaries remain intentionally permeable.

DISTILLED ATTENTION

A studio term describing the gradual reduction of form towards necessity.

Its emphasis is concentration. Decisions accumulate through repetition, hesitation, adjustment and return, gradually compressing complexity and allowing the form to be apprehended with greater clarity and intensity.

SUSPENDED GEOMETRIES

Forms held in balance without closure.

Such works occupy a condition between order and instability, structure and dissolution. Their perceptual force arises from the tension of what remains unresolved, sustaining uncertainty in place of settled equilibrium.

RESONANT GROUPINGS

Configurations in which relationships between forms become part of the perceptual encounter.

The viewer encounters meaning through both the individual objects and their spatial arrangement. Distances, alignments, interruptions and formal echoes contribute to the overall experience.

I sometimes describe these arrangements as choral juxtapositions, in which multiple forms are held within a shared field while retaining their individual identities.

CHORAL JUXTAPOSITIONS

Groups of objects whose relationships permit readings unavailable through any single work alone.

The term takes its analogy from music, where independent voices are heard together as a larger structure. Choral Juxtapositions invite apprehension through rhythm, spacing, proportion, repetition and difference.

CHIRAL JUXTAPOSITIONS

A term adapted from chemistry, where chirality describes forms that resemble one another without becoming identical.

Within the studio, the term refers to pairings or groupings that appear related while resisting symmetry. Similarities remain evident while exact correspondence is withheld, producing a condition of proximity without equivalence and a balance between likeness and difference.