ENCOUNTERING ECHOES: ECHOING ENCOUNTER



Following Rolf Hughes’ notion of exposition (2015) as the act of creating a field of encounter, this inaugural issue reframes exposition as a space of echoing—a resonance between the seen and unseen, the said and unsaid. To encounter is to come up against what resists assimilation—an idea, a material, a history, a theory, or another being. To echo is to let that encounter reverberate and transform. Between encountering and echoing lies an ethics of care, speculation, and reciprocity—a willingness to stay with what is incomplete, uncertain, or even misread.



In line with the Arts of the contact zone (Pratt 1991), encounters are never neutral; they unfold in zones of tension, translation, and transformation. Similarly, Studio Note treats encounter and echo as creative and critical forces that shape our practices, pedagogies, and therefore our identities. 



We invite contributions that explore encountering and echoing as speculative and performative acts of research. 


Studio Note Journal Nº 1 

 
Editors-in-Chief | Alphabetic Order:

Niloofar Amini
Gareth Jones
Jorge Valdovinos
Laura Yuile 


Associate Editors | Alphabetic Order:

Eman AlHabashneh 
Francesca Brunetti 
Ruehl Muller
Mohammed Ali Sharieff
Raynal Somiah
Yvan Tina
Zihong Yue


Typeset in: 
Editorial Team

Copy Editing: 
Editorial Team

Proof Reading: 
Editorial Team

Design: 
Editorial Team
Published by:
University for the Creative Arts | ICI

Publication location: 
Farnham, Surrey, UK
Xiamen, Fujian Province, China

Online publication date: 
Summer 2026 

ISSN: 2978-8080 (Print)
E-ISSN: 2978-8099 (Online)



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Temporal Feral Forms: Cascading Commons
Sarah Ryder - sarah@sarahryder.co.uk

I’m a working-class mum of two, based on the north coast of Wales. I work part time and just about get by on a low income. I’m not in the academy but am hooked on engaging with art as some kind of lubricant helping me think about how everything connects, from philosophy to play, politics to ecology, Captain Underpants (Pilkey, 1997) to washing the pots.
     Mine is not an unusual position, although within this journal maybe it is? Many artists persist tenaciously with their practice despite material conditions. There is a fierce dignity in that: in the exhaustion of simply getting through another day while still retaining the strength to resist the structural pressures that demand individuals reshape themselves in order to succeed.
     In 2019 I made a decision to see what would happen if I limited my predominant materials to aluminium cooking foil and acrylic paint. Central to this ongoing research is temporal autonomy: maintaining a self-determined rhythm in resistance to a politics and culture structured by acceleration, distraction, and the expropriation of time. Sustaining a practice in piecemeal pockets of activity happening with life, not separate from it.
     This led me to develop a conceptual framework for my art called Temporal Feral Forms (2019-2024) which think through interstices: of category, of time, of circumstance – and refuse to resolve them (Rosa, 2020). I use feral as a term that acknowledges an incomplete escape from the domestication of capitalism. This framework and my political awakening are symbiotic – each feeding the other, giving form to what I'd previously only felt.
     Acts of socialism brought me to this feral awakening, including conversations with friends, podcasts, mutual aid during the pandemic, and being part of our local environment federation. I see these as cascading commons persisting alongside the suffocating reality of capitalism and crucially keeping open our collective access to learning and art (Gilbert, 2020).
Feel the collective gesture of the bird chorus cascading across the globe. But how does an individual pursuit contribute to a collective body of living knowledge; feel part of a shared authorship? Is this an opening for distributed making, and thinking?
Working alone in the studio with the quantum multitude is not dissimilar to writing. A live, fluid, process of trying, thinking, feeling something into being from a myriad of encounters, and offered out as a transindividual contribution to the open-source terrain of somatic communism (Bottici, 2024). These notes reflect on a selection of encounters between bodies, materials, curators, and audiences, where echoes become residue feeding into my practice, shaping my speculative thinking on how to re-awaken our systematically suppressed embodied knowledge (Federici, 2021).I
Material Transformations and Temporal Autonomy
Temporal Feral Forms (2019) generally begin as double sided flat abstract paintings on surfaces created by glue laminated lengths of foil, the size of which is defined by the area of clear studio floor (roughly 2 x 1.7m). During the painting process I regularly flip the surface over, rapidly entering the realms of fluid sculpture. Temporal Feral Forms have an undetermined life cycle of becoming.From studio to exposition, they are re-flattened, folded up, packed, stored, unpacked, opened out, and collaborated with into new sculptural forms. Repeatedly, each time different, and sometimes incorporating additional (reused, or new) Temporal Feral Forms.
     Repose Paintings (2022) metamorphose from 2D to 3D after a person has been underneath, done some action or other, then crept out, leaving a free-standing encounter-made form (Fig. 1). A temporal collision of sides folding into each other, an amalgamation of shadowy crevices, bulbous contours, and pin pricks of light breaking through the surface. Originally, I’d thought of naming these ‘Collapsing’ (a trajectory from earlier ‘Slowly Deflating’ paintings), except that felt too defined. ‘Repose’ came from thinking about the power of calm within chaos. Understanding what looks like collapse is a form of becoming.
     This is what draws me to abstraction as an open-ended process with neuroplastic potential to trip our wiring. Perceptual openings tapping into suppressed collective imagination, and the recovery of possible futures kept structurally dormant by capitalism (Fisher, 2020). In 2023, I made a short video demonstrating how to install Repose Paintings for curator Matt Burrows, giving minimal instructions, encouraging him to be active in the process without pressure to achieve a certain outcome. This is not about abdicating responsibility, but more about experimenting with how an artwork can shake off the individual author’s mastery and become its own thing. I am uneasy directing others’ labour and felt both discomfort in assuming authority and intrigue at the prospect of relinquishing control.

Figure 1. Ryder, S. (2022) Repose Painting (Active Stillness), in Feet. Brain. Back Again. Galeri, Caernarfon.
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Collaboration, Labour, and Authorship
The experience opened up ethical questions about collaboration, labour, and credit. Packing up the work also involves others leaving traces of their contact, so the work is still being made… where does crediting end? The question is further complicated by uneven economies of labour: curators and technicians are often paid; the artist’s labour is often not (Beech, 2019). Their contact materially enters the work, yet authorship remains singular (Fig. 2). Or does it? This question of whose contact counts – whose labour enters the work – kept expanding. Loose Parts Paintings (2023) are a further agitator to this line of thought. I made several paintings specifically for children to play freely with in a gallery-turned-playspace exhibition. There was a liberating absurdity in the antagonistic logic of making aesthetically engaged paintings knowing they would soon be utterly and uncontrollably transformed.
     Observing the children’s encounters was amazing – building dens, ripping, folding, squashing… totally ignoring (Fig. 3). Harsh for the ego, but it got me thinking about art as scenography rather than main character. Like parenting, or other unequal relationships of care, where sometimes your role is to simply be a silent, sentient, presence (privately invoking the patience of a saint) – radiating support and encouragement. Creating space for organic, deep learning. Easy to dismiss in our panic-react-perform culture, but the choice to intervene – or not – is a powerful and generative method of pedagogy (hooks, 1994).

Figure 2. Ryder, S. (2023–2025) MULTIFERALS. Artist and technician Erika Cann assisting with the packing of MULTIFERALS.

Figure 3. Ryder, S. (2023) Child playing with Loose Parts Paintings in PLAY – The Movie!. Ty Pawb.

 I collected the high-speed palimpsestic entropic remnants of paintings after the exhibition, noticing how the foil bonding had shifted from glue to contact-forged cohesion, resulting in forms holding haptic collective memory, and tacit knowledge (Fig. 4). Like musing the form of a walnut in your hand and understanding its Doctrine of Signatures1 is to nourish your brain. What Doctrine of Signatures do Temporal Feral Forms hold? If the children’s transformations materially enter the work, does play begin to function as a subversive form of labour? Or is that thought a form of liberal hand-wringing distraction from the real question, which is: why are there now so few opportunities for children to play freely in the commons?

Figure 4. Ryder, S. (2025) Detail of Loose Parts Paintings being re-used in All Kinds of Hands: an exhibition of co-produced sculpture. The Storey, Lancaster.
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MULTIFERALS and the Exhibition as Commons
This sense of our collective knowledge being increasingly warped by capitalist conditioning became the underpinning of MULTIFERALS (2023-2025). Some exhibitions feel like a government funded classroom sermon, or a flagrant display of luxury goods parading stark wealth inequality – which ironically are sometimes even sold back as #anticapitalist (Dubrovsky and Graeber, 2019).
     Oh! Does that grate. Especially when it’s the only venue you have access to reach, meaning you’re stuck with another hollowed out tax haven of an exhibition for the next 3 months (Steyerl, 2017).Having experienced this for a long while now, plus being aware of the scarcity of places for artists, outside recognised networks, to show their art, I feel an acute sense of responsibility to make the absolute most of whatever public space my art may be given.
     I wanted to use Temporal Feral Forms to create an exhibition where visitors would feel invited, uplifted, and generative (Fig. 5). If, as Paulo Freire (2018) suggests, we become anaesthetised within oppressive systems, then moments of feral connection could interrupt that conditioned domestication, enabling temporary escape and potential to re-awaken our innate curiosity.
     There was no installation plan except to trust the process – which was easier said than done now all the work was tipped out of its boxes to form, what seemed to be, a lengthy dry-stone wall of folded clothes with coiled snakes resting on top. I was feeling out of my depth to say the least. Working with Matt again I noticed and appreciated his light-touch curatorial guidance helping realise MULTIFERALS (2025-2026) without overtaking it. Redistributing authority in ways that allowed the exhibition to unfold experimentally and retain vitality.
     I was deeply moved by visitor responses about how MULTIFERALS (2025-2026) had affectively resonated with people. I had begun to understand the work as emerging from a triadic relation between myself, materials, and time. But this now expanded beyond, a kind of portable commons, where encounters with visitors, curators, technicians, and architecture, produced further echoes. In this expansion, temporal autonomy begins to feel more like a shared negotiation of time – across bodies, encounters, and spaces.

Figure 5. Ryder, S. (2025) MULTIFERALS installation, Gallery 2, Exeter Phoenix Gallery.
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Beyond Individual Practice
This shared negotiation seems most natural to me, and why I have always felt resistance calling my art practice 'work' – associating 'work' with capitalist capture of time, attention, and production. Art, very much like childhood play, has a way of unlocking non-linear time. Evading capitalist logic. Yet, increasingly, I feel like art is more being done to us, than democratically flowing through us.
     Tamed, trained, classed, and filed under captured. In our yard, many plants grow in containers. Roots enclosed, cut off from the wider mycelial network. Yet, their sprawling bodies, debris, and pollinators are abundant with life, within a cascading common of mutual aid.
     Movement and exchange. An unresolved coexistence of contradiction and confusion. I reject puritanical politics2, advocate for constant struggle, and remain sceptical of neat conclusions. Capitalism is embedded in our strata, but the cascading commons are waves that keep rolling. Taking us beyond individual survival into the full messiness of collective life.





1.A medical herbalist friend of mine, Karen Richmond, taught me this term as we walked through the woods, exploring how plant forms hold clues to their health properties. Doctrine of Signatures was coined by Jakob Böhme in his book 'The Signature of All Things', published in 1621, though the practice dates to Hippocratic medicine. At least this is the dominant narrative. However, it’s clear considering decolonial thinking, this knowledge wasn’t unique to Western males and was part of a much older, more widespread practice of plant study and oral knowledge-sharing – before it was expropriated and enclosed.
2.
The term comes from the Puritans, a Protestant group in 16th–17th century England who sought to create a society governed by strict religious and moral principles. Over time, puritanical became a broader term used to describe attitudes that impose rigid standards of behaviour, morality, or ideology.


- Beech, D (2019) Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production. London: Pluto Press.

- Bottici, C. (2024) Anarchafeminism. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Dubrovsky, N. and Graeber, D. (2019) 'Another Art World', e-flux journal. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/102/284624/another-art-world-part-1-art-communism-and-artificial-scarcity
- Federici, S. (2021) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. London: Penguin Random House.

- Fisher, M (2020) Acid Communism. London: Pattern Books.
 - Freire, P. (2018) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 50th anniversary edn. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Gilbert, J. (2020) Twenty-First Century Socialism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

- Hooks, b (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
 - Pilkey, D. (1997) Captain Underpants [series]. New York: Scholastic.

- Rosa, H (2020) The Uncontrollability of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Steyerl, H (2017) Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. London: Verso.

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