What is an art experience like from the viewpoint of sculpting clay?

Abstract

For enactivists and pragmatists alike, sense-making is a systemic process of bringing the organism and environment into reciprocity. Steiner (2023) distinguishes enactivism from pragmatism by arguing that intention is compatible with enactivism but not pragmatism. After reviewing Steiner’s analysis, I consider its ontological consequences and phenomenological implications which I suggest cause problems for both enactivism and pragmatism, but in two different ways. Intention is consistent with the idea of an autonomy of sense-making but reveals its latent subjectivity – which sits uncomfortably with an enactivist account. The absence of intention implies the existence of states of supra-subjective consciousness but lack of such accounts is troublesome for pragmatism. Next, I introduce Material Engagement Theory. I emphasise its affinity to pragmatism and describe its role in developing clayful phenomenology, an experiential way of investigating creative practice from the perspective of the process. A case-study of a sculptural project illustrates how action, creating a construction-site atmosphere as it goes, gathers diverse materials and elements to itself: wood, clay, plaster, steel, a sculpted skull, a painting, a wall, tree trunks, scaffolding, neolithic sculptures etc. These elements draw themselves into rhythmical associations that resonate with others that are formed through and by sculptural gestures and these go onto form further gestural patterns. The project shows how a creative situation creates a sense of affective purpose by and through the act of creating itself.

“After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?” (Nagel, 1980, p. 443)

1 Introduction

I am an artist and for many years my approach was influenced by the conceptual art movement which, as the name suggests, meant I began by having an idea and if it was a good one, I would represent it as best I could. Before being an artist, I studied cognitive science and worked as a clinical psychologist for several years, specializing in brain injury rehabilitation. Art, as the representation of a concept, sat comfortably with what my psychology background had taught me about cognition. A few years after finishing art school I wanted to learn more about polymers (resins) and mould-making in order to realise my ideas more precisley and so I returned for a one-year course in polymerisation and ceramics. By the end of week-two we had covered the teaching on polymers. The rest was to be devoted to ceramics—clay. I had no interest in clay and its nostalgic links with tradition and I saw no place for it in the world of contemporary art but my tutor talked with such intelligence and enthusiasm about the ceramic process that I decided to give it (him) a few weeks to try and get a sense of what he was feeling that I was not.

To begin with, I would arrive at art school with a concept only to find, when I started work, that the clay did not appear to like my concept and would have its own requirements or ideas instead. Each day, I struggled to force the clay into the form of the thing that I thought was in my head. After a few weeks I gave up. But I did not leave the course. I stayed and began playing with clay instead, trying to find out what it was interested in doing. What I discovered was that sense-making could happen collaboratively from within a clayful relationship (as I call it now). It seemed that, whatever cognitive processing was going on during sculpting, locating it in the brain and describing it as a mental activity did not address the complexity or the phenomenology of clayful activity. My belief that the scientific method was the only credible way to make knowledge was shaken by feeling the exploratory potential of clay-gesture creative systems. Materially mediated activity presented an alternative way to model human-world relationships but, beyond exhibiting these experiments in material ideation as sculptures, it was difficult to find another way of articulating their knowledge-making potential. This changed when I came across a book about Material Engagement Theory (MET) How things shape the mind, by archaeologist, Lambros Malafouris (2013). I found I could cross out the words referring to archaeology, replace them with words relating to art practice and the text not only continued to make sense, for an artist it made even more sense.

I learned later that MET was part of a more general movement away from mainstream structuralist¹ methods in the cognitive sciences, towards functionalist accounts of the mind such as those covered by this special issue. MET undermines the distinction between subject and object and blurs the border between human and environment and so shares common ground with enactivism and pragmatism. What is less clear is whether enactivism and pragmatism complement or contradict each other and where MET fits into that debate. This paper is divided into two parts and I begin part one by addressing this question with the help of Steiner (2023) whose paper in this issue uses the notion of intention to expose an important difference between enactivism and pragmatism. From an enactivist viewpoint sense-making is intentional in that its purpose is to maintain the viability of an autonomous organism in the context of vital yet potentially hostile reciprocal environmental interaction. Steiner contrasts this with the pragmatist perspective in which human and environment are in indissociable unity and experience and purpose emerge together from and through the intra-activity of this union. I suggest that Steiner’s distinction not only highlights a pragmatic dispersal of directedness but also invites the need for a less subjective, more diffuse understanding of experience – which raises some important phenomenological questions. If consciousness circulates within a transitory system of activity, what is it like to be that system? What is its relationship to subjective experience? Are they mutually exclusive? I think about why these questions are difficult to address and what the difficulties mean for pragmatism. After which, I return to enactivism to argue that, if sense-making and intention are directed towards maintaining an autonomous organism then this implies a subject-object distinction which introduces a potential inconsistency. I illustrate the tension by reviewing a recent paper by Poizat et al. (2023).

Next, I turn to MET and show how it describes a mind that extends beyond the boundary of the human body into a sense-making assembly of human activity and material agency. Despite what the terminology suggests, I will argue that MET concepts like enactive signification and intention-in-action, describe human-environmental activity in transactional terms, locating MET within pragmatism rather than the interactionist perspective of enactivism. I end part one by describing how I translate the three principles of MET to the practice of an art workshop.

2 Part one. Theory

2.1 The relationship between enactivism and pragmatism

Enactivism and pragmatism have much in common. Both downplay the “standard” (Colombetti, 2014, p. 57) cognitive science position that perception, cognition and phenomenal experience are based on the manipulation of mental images. Neither supports the notion of an individual mind, subjectively separate from the that it processes. Both argue that thoughts, feelings and sensations are emergent features of a relational continuum of human-environmental reciprocal activity and both portray the workings (and feelings) of the mind in terms that are temporal and functional rather than spatial and structural.

Steiner (this issue, 2023) carefully follows the threads of historical influence between enactivism, phenomenology and pragmatism and draws three conclusions: that phenomenology directly and explicitly influenced the development of enactivism, that pragmatism and phenomenology showed limited cross-fertilisation and that any affinities between enactivism and pragmatism therefore arose indirectly and implicitly via phenomenology. Steiner then turns to the concept of intention and its relationship with enactivism and pragmatism. The derivation of intention is internalist, so he begins by stressing that enactivism does not equate intention with mental states. Enactivist intention, as the phrase suggests, manifests directly and pre-reflectively as action or emotional expression. Although an enactivist account does not preclude the proposition that intention may start as an internal mental state and proceed towards an external object, such representational origins are considered secondary to naturalistic operations in which intention is created by and through interaction between organism and environment.

Next Steiner uses intention to differentiate enactivism and pragmatism. He argues that the notion of intention contains an intrinsic directedness. Even if intention is contentless (not representational) and reciprocally generated, it nevertheless introduces a notion of cause and effect that draws a border between organism and environment. By transforming an integrated entity into an interaction, the border does two things: it makes intention inconsistent with pragmatism, which I come to next and it creates a problem for enactivism which I turn to afterwards.

For Steiner, the directedness of intention means that even in naturalistic guise, it is incompatible with pragmatism. “For Dewey there is not a relation between mind and world; they are so intertwined in encompassing situations that a fundamental distinction between them does not make sense.” (Steiner, 2023, p.14). Dewey uses the word transactional to distinguish the activity of a situation from the interactional relationship between separate entities. What Dewey wants to avoid is…” the assumption of the existence of a power or faculty of anticipation, foresight, or prediction belonging to something termed a mind, self, person, or consciousness.” (2012, p.430). Nevertheless, Dewey considers all situations to be prospective (directed towards the future). He stresses that… “impulses and habits have momentum, they reach ahead. Speaking more generally, all living is a going-on, and futurity colors the qualities of any situation into which organic factors enter as components.” (2012, p.430) Whether or not we see situations as being intended towards the future comes down to how we want to use the word. Dreon refers to the aboutness of emotions as their “intentional structure” (2022, p.124) and by melding purpose and practice into intention-in-action, Malafouris (2013) rejects the notion of prior intention. Although Dewey avoids the word intention, his theory of emotion nevertheless stresses that affect is directed towards future action. For example, when we say that John Smith feels resentful, “…we do not simply, or even chiefly, mean that he has a certain ‘feel’ occupying his consciousness. We mean he is in a certain practical attitude, has assumed a readiness to act in certain ways” (1895, p. 17). Dewey embeds and implicates John’s feeling of resentment into an evolving situation. And yet, he ascribes the “readiness to act” not to the situation but to John. How does this square with his rejection of the distinction between the mind and the world? In two ways.

First, Dewey argues that historically fractionalisation gave names (recognisable concepts) to otherwise ineffable situations. “It was on the basis of qualities of behavior that sheep were marked off from goats, and both from cows and so on indefinitely. It was on exactly the same basis that certain events were finally given the status of things and others of persons.” (2012, 197). Dewey’s use of syntax returns substances or things back into processes or practices of habit, what Steiner calls Dewey’s adverbialism (2017, p.14).

Second, Dreon (2022) uses Dewey’s (1895) example of a person meeting a bear to suggest that the functional abstraction of organism and environment is a way for the (abstracted) organism to reflect upon tricky environmental situations. But she stresses that, from the pragmatic perspective of a concrete emotional experience “…we cannot primarily separate our feeling afraid from the frightening bear that is scaring us, while both the object and we as the subject emerge from a basically unitary experience.” (Dreon, 2022, p.126).

In sum, emotion as the reciprocal intra-play of an ongoing situation is central to Dewey’s pragmatism. For him, organism and environment are not separate things, they are not things at all, they are terms he uses to summarise and unify a series of hybrid organic-environmental activities such as eating, breathing and moving around and, “stand for results of analysis of primary life-activities.” (Dewey, 2012, p.322).

But the unity of experience that Dewey seeks to establish is fragile, easily subverted by misapprehending the above-mentioned functional separation as concrete reality and easily undermined by a more pervasive assumption about the nature of experience, as Dewey explains:

Inherited cultural traditions have produced the belief that experience is inherently personal… The belief in question takes the following form. Whenever experience is mentioned with the doctrinal respect it merits, someone is sure to ask, “Whose experience?” The question is asked with a certain triumphant emphasis, as if it would be seen at once, without argument, that “experience” must be yours or mine, and necessarily in a private and exclusive sense of “you” and “me.” (2012, 191)

Bateson also challenges the conviction that feelings belong to us and in Steps to an ecology of mind (1972 he warns that the belief that only humans have access to experience poses an existential threat. For Bateson, first-person experience is a feature of a much wider, pan-psychic landscape which we are prevented from inhabiting by the excessive subjectivity of modern culture. Our failure to recognise the ubiquity of sentience turns the planet into a mindless resource that we risk exploiting to extinction. Yet even Bateson found it impossible to let go of being Bateson. “…if I am cutting down a tree, I still think “Gregory Bateson” is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. “Myself” is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling “mind.” (1972, p.101). As I have discussed elsewhere (March, 2024), the problem may persist because, despite recognising the divisive dangers posed by the concreteness of himself, if Bateson begins to allow himself to mingle with a wider sentient process the accompanying sense of dissipation feels more perilous, personal and immediate than the threat to humankind. And so, in a paradoxically self-affirming cycle, existential anxiety returns Bateson to himself and subjective experience is maintained as a familiar personal, social and cultural phenomenon.

The same cannot be said for the more unitary sense of experience called for by Bateson and predicted by pragmatism. For the reasons outlined above, it is difficult to have a sense of what a transient situation such as an art experience feels like (as opposed to giving a subjective report of what it feels like to be part of one). Even if experience escapes the comforting self-affirmation of anxiety into the ephemeral domain of a system of practice, our sense of self dissolves into the business of living the situation along with the chance of written report. Dewey was not a phenomenologist and to my knowledge, there is no methodology and only a limited vocabulary for describing what living feels like from the perspective of practice rather than person. Even so, Bateson and pragmatism are not the only arguments for extending the notion of consciousness beyond the personal. Wojcik and Chemero (2012, p. 47) describes conscious experience as “changes in behavior and bodily response to situations”. Follett as “the living interplay of myriads of self-generating activities which all generate themselves as a moment of the interplay.” (1924, p. 75). In Colombetti’s (2014, p. 143) view it makes little sense “to draw a line around the brain and stipulate that consciousness supervenes only on processes inside the line”. Colombetti and Kreuger (2015, p. 1160) talk about “affective niches”, Colombetti and Roberts (2015, p. 2) of “extended affectivity”, Silberstein and Chemero (2015, p. 2) of “extended phenomenological-cognitive systems”. Recent books by Telakivi (2023) and Kirchhoff and Kiverstein (2018) are entitled respectively, Extending the extended mind: from cognition to consciousness and Extended consciousness and predictive processing. This theoretical literature begs support from phenomenological accounts of extended consciousness that resonate with their ontological claims. I have previously reviewed reports from and interviews with artists, writers and musicians about the creative process that I interpret as revealing evidence of extended consciousness (March, 2019, 2023a, b, 2024, March and Malafouris, 2023) but overall, the dearth of phenomenological reports from the viewpoint of practice leaves a gap between a theoretical focus on experience as practice and what a practice situation actually feels like. In part two I try to narrow the gap with a case study.

Before that, I return to enactivism and describe how attempts to avoid the above tension creates a contradiction in its place. I will illustrate the problem using a paper by Poizat et al. (2023) that reorients the phenomenological unit of analysis away from individuals and towards the practice that organises individual behaviour. By doing so the authors aim to deliver what I argued above is missing, “a view ‘from within’ of practice” (p.109). For them, “Practice is not evidence of, or reflections of, underlying thought processes. It is instead the thinking processes themselves.” (2023, p.110). The paper presents the course-of-experience framework (COEF), a method which the authors claim, “makes it possible to study the extended phenomenological cognitive-cultural system in which human cognition is embedded” (p. 119). As Alessandroni and Malafouris (2023) point out, the authors’ description of COEF is predicated on a transactional understanding of cognition. So far so good. But Poizat et al. go onto suggest that it is the organism (and not practice) that is responsible for maintaining the relationship. They situate the COEF within enactivism and consider “The most fundamental concept of the enactive paradigm is that of autonomy.” (p.110). Although they understand meaning to arise from the coupling of organism and environment, they see the relationship as asymmetric because “…its very existence is continuously enacted by the endogenous activity of the autonomous system.” (p.111). It is here I begin to feel the tension in the authors’ account, a tension that Steiner (2023, p. 172) considers to be a general feature of enactivism. It also bears similarities to an inconsistency, identified by Colombetti (2014, p.449) between extended cognition and enactivism. She argues that the two are contradictory because, if sense-making is the activity of a living system then it cannot be extended to include non-living things.

Dreon (2024) describes Dewey’s understanding of meaning as a quality of intra-active, organic-environmental behaviour. In contrast, unless the asymmetry that Poisat et al. invoke is (in Dewey’s sense) functional, asymmetry suggests that meaning is ultimately constructed by the organism—an implication they later make explicit by claiming that practice gives rise to “first-person lived experience “(p.111) in the form of pre-reflective self-consciousness. Steiner suggests that such inconsistent shifts from practice to self stem from an assumption that lived experience is “intrinsically structured by mine-ness” (p.172, 2023). Responding to such criticism, Poizet et al. stress that:

Pre-reflective consciousness is an expression of in-betweenness. It is thus not conceived as a subjective experience, nor as the expression of interiority, but rather as ‘un éclatement vers le monde’ (Sartre’s expression). Our sense of self exists because it gives us an interface with the world (including others). (p.181)

I chose Poizat, Flandin and Thereau’s paper not because it weaves a story of Cartesian divisiveness, quite the reverse. The COEF is a process-oriented approach whose carefully constructed method aims to offer a phenomenological perspective from within practice. Yet, despite the explicit processual framework the authors give us a first-person account which they claim is relational. Even Sartre’s phrase, the one they use to defend their notion of in-betweenness, un éclatement vers le monde’, separates a mindless world (Bateson, 1972) from an attitude of fervent excitement. I chose this paper to show how tenacious subjectivity can be and I turn now to Material Engagement Theory because I believe it gives us a framework that mitigates this tendency of activity to precipitate into things.

2.2 Material engagement theory

For a full account of MET, see Malafouris (2013), with further developments in Malafouris, (2014, 2015, 2018a, b, 2019a, b, 2020a, b, 2021a, b). The brief introduction I give here is enough, I hope, to show that MET has more in common with pragmatism than enactivism. MET is based on three, interrelated principles which I define below in relation to sculpting.

The Extended Mind of Clark and Chalmers (1998) suggests that the mind is not confined by the brain and that non-living material like clay can play a part in structuring cognition. In contrast the MET mind is better understood, not as extended in space but as diffuse and transient, its extension taking place in a temporal dimension, during hand-clay gestural development.

Material Agency challenges the notion of human-centred agency but, despite its name, the hypothesis does not claim that clay has agency any more than agency belongs to the person holding the clay. Agency does not belong to anything or anyone, it is an emergent property of reciprocal activity.

Enactive signification refers to the way the meaning of certain signs, for example, sculptures, are inextricably linked, through sculpting, to their materialisation. Enactive signification is antithetic to symbolic meaning (the representation of a concept that exists separately from a sign or sculpture) but the two are not mutually exclusive. A sign can do both. The enactive in enactive signification does not refer to the sense-making of an autonomous (albeit embodied) sculptor in relation to the plastic properties of clay. Signification emerges from and through a self-generating practice of sculpting which makes sense of itself in relation to its own becoming.

Malafouris developed MET in an archaeological context by proposing that the evolution of humans and of our tools are inextricably intertwined. The above three principles define a relationship of synergistic transformation between mind and material, a relationship that is ongoing and applies across temporal scales: evolutionary, developmental and quotidian. MET puts Aristotle’s notion of hylomorphism into reverse. Thinking is not an abstraction of form (morph) and matter (hyle) but a union. Sculpting exemplifies this crucial transactional tenet of MET, what Malafouris (2014) calls creative thinging.² During sculpting, neither form nor matter can be dissociated from gestural activity. Sculpting only makes sense between hands and clay and in a moment of creative thinging there can be no asymmetry of meaning nor of experience. Creative thinging is purposeful and, although Malafouris (2013) refers to the directedness of the generative process as intention-in-action, the shift from the imagination of thinking to the practice of creative thinging leaves no room for the sort of intention that Steiner finds irreconcilable with pragmatism. In sum, thinking, sensing and understanding are transacted within a unified human–environment relationship suggesting that MET has closer ontological ties to pragmatism than enactivism.

Pragmatism predicts the existence of supra-subjective modes of experience that are emergent properties of evolving situations which could be ontologically consistent if only we had the phenomenological accounts that correspond to the prediction. The aim of the case study that follows is to supply one such account, one that arises from a playful perspective towards sculpting clay and which I call clayful phenomenology. MET, as exemplified by the concept of creative thinging, gives a transactional and therefore pragmatic portrayal of sculptural activity and provides the theoretical basis for clayful phenomenology. Before presenting the case, I will revisit the three principles of MET and define the phenomenological implications of creative thinging in terms of Dewey’s formulation of art as experience.

Extended Mind Art manifests the experiential qualities of an extended mind in the sense that the:

distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears. (Dewey, 1934, p.249).

I have argued that we cannot call such feelings subjective but I do not have another word to capture the phenomenal quality of workshop practice and so I propose processive as a way of differentiating emergent experience from subjective experience while maintaining symmetry between the two phenomena.

Material Agency

The above definition of the extended mind suggests that artistic expression is not guided by the sculptor’s feelings but is sculpted directly. Dewey’s understanding of aesthetic experience collapses emotion and action and emphasises the affective quality of creative thinging. Playful engagement of and through clay creates a sensibility of purpose, a sort of curious intent, with which it makes and feels its way towards its own future.

Enactive Signification

Comparing an enactive sign and a symbol emphasises the experiential quality of the former. In Fig. 1 the drawing on the left, the sculpture on the right and the phrase unicorn skull all identify a similar coherent and stable concept, one that could also develop an allegorical, symbolic meaning, such as the death of hope. But there are feelings that are enacted in the presence of the sculpture and in the circumstances of that unique encounter and these cannot be identified or predicted by the phrase unicorn skull nor recourse to a metaphorical association that exists separately from the moment. The transience of the experience of art, its formal ambiguity and the absence of narrative direction all undermine any attempt at coherent understanding. Making and encountering art facilitates the simultaneous emergence of a range of overdetermined, indeterminate, and contradictory sensibilities of purpose. Law (2004) calls such “techniques of deliberate imprecision” (p.3) non-coherent to distinguish them from coherent methods of making knowledge. By negating coherency, I think Law evokes incoherency rather than the idea of a confusing multiplicity of meaning so I have suggested polyherency (March, 2024).

Fig. 1

“A thing (e.g., a word) means the real thing or qualities or patterns of things for which it stands. But in art, the word or marble or drawing has welded into being the thing which it means.” (Alexander, 1925, p. 24)

The aim of the case study is threefold. First, it presents the key principles of clayful phenomenology in action, second, it demonstrates the capacity of a clayful phenomenological approach to clarify and third, it develops Dewey’s account of art-as-experience to show that a pragmatic approach is phenomenologically consistent and can indeed play out in practice.

3 Part two. Practice

3.1 A case study in clayful phenomenology: introduction

English grammatical structure does not lend itself well to describing diffuse phenomena like emergent experience, distributed agency or processive viewpoints. I therefore use a few discursive and syntactical strategies to avoid the active–passive trap set by language: reducing the use of the first person to when I am outside the system of creativity and referring to myself as the artist when I am within the process, increasing the use of the passive tense, creating neologisms or compound words and, if all those fail, composing unwieldy phrases. Having excused bad prose, I begin the story as I pull a fired sculpture of unicorn skull from a kiln (Fig. 1). I have previously described how this skull came into being (March and Malafouris 2023) and this account begins where that report stops.

Firing clay turns it into a crystalline, quasi-vitrified material called ceramic, a material change that is also experientially metamorphic. From a processive perspective the sculpture that went into the kiln was propelled by a sculpting system that invented itself by and through its own actions, a simulacrum of itself as Deleuze and Patton (2001) would describe it. The fired sculpture came out with a different attitude. No longer a simulacrum, it presented itself as a model—a maquette, for something ten times larger – a skullscape (Fig. 2). The 40 cm horn, originally moulded from a carved, decaying stick now expressed a desire to be 4 metres high. The nasal process suggested a rock outcrop, the buccal cavity—a cavern large enough to crawl into. It did not feel as though the idea for all this came from me so I describe it as though the skull re-enacted itself into a maquette but it may be better to say that pulling the skull from the kiln enacted an affective intention to become a skull-scape. The skull emerged associated with a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1825–3, Fig. 3) but the association was not with the two men or the moon, but with the fissured tree issuing at an acute angle from a rocky outcrop. Perhaps the link enabled the skull sculpture to scale itself up to landscape dimensions but, whatever the reason for the relationship, the skull emerged imbued with the same melancholy romantism as the painting.

Fig. 2

The final installation, exhibited in Basel, Switzerland in 2017

Fig. 3

Two men contemplating the moon (1825–30) Casper David Friedrick, Wikimedia commons

Six months later my gallerist found funding to build the skullscape. Hearing the news the artist gazed towards the skull and watched as affective intention metamorphosed from aspirational maquette to contractual obligation. I describe it like this to emphasise that intention and situation evolve simultaneously and that this is evoked by a change in the material manifestation of the sculpture rather than a perceptual change by the artists visual system. This is possible because the material manifestation is neither physical nor mental but is, in Dewey’s words, the “complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events” (1934, p. 18).

3.2 Constructing an atmosphere

The artist moved temporarily into a large workshop and began organizing the workspace by, preparing scaffolding, installing winches and making a platform on which to construct the skullscape. For all this he needed construction tools on site and these needed to be arranged in an orderly manner. He has worked in construction and house renovation and the arrangements just described created an ambience more like a building-site than an art-workshop—an atmosphere that persisted throughout the project.

The skull maquette was made from clay mixed, by hand, with paper and hemp fibre (for strength), took three weeks to make and weighed 10 kg. In contrast, the initial construction phase of the skull-scape demanded 10 kg of clay every 30 minutes and a machine, called a pugmill to do the mixing. All this needed high levels of planning and brought a production-like rhythm to the work. It is tempting to assume that the artist’s a priori hylomorphic mental intention must have been responsible for putting the correct infrastructure in place but I am suggesting instead that the construction-site atmosphere has a sensibility of purpose that is organisational, which configures the task requirements and permeates the artist’s actions. A year later I realised that the atmosphere had also been permeated by the wistful yearning of the Casper Friedrich painting. I was writing up the notes of the project when I received an email from a friend in which he mentioned Mary Shelley. Only when I saw her name, with the project notes in front of me did the peculiar sense of haunted vitality retrospectively clarify the mood of the workshop into one that I could articulate as that of Frankenstein’s laboratory. I am using the notions of mood and atmosphere here to describe a process of decision-making that is based, not on mental concepts, but on the pervasive influence of context and I describe below how situation and sensibility of purpose emerge simultaneously.

The entire clay body of the maquette could be kept humid while sculpting, allowing earlier gestures to be brought into equilibrium with later ones and vice versa. This meant that modelling could happen in parallel across the whole sculpture. The skull-scape took four months to sculpt, a massive upscale that made it impossible to work simultaneously across regions. The lower sections were not only dry long before the remainder was complete, they had to be to support the weight of the clay above. Nevertheless, for the sake of overall sculptural coherency, the process needed to develop a systematic approach that showed no practice effects – a repetitive, progressive work pattern, one that consisted of overlapping waves of intervention. When I considered the situation subjectively (from outside the process) I feared that such specific, procedural knowledge and levels of gestural expertise would only arrive near the end but I need not have worried. The behaviour of the clay and the requirements of the task immediately set up their own rhythm. The clay’s consistency changed predictably over a few days. To begin with, the wet clay of a new section was reactive and sensitive. It offered little resistance while refusing to take a definitive position—like negotiating with someone who voices no opinions, says yes to all suggestions, and then does something different. After a few hours water evaporation gave the clay-wall the solidity it needed to begin thinging itself into a position that was both compatible with the preceding section while soliciting reciprocal thinging from/about the subsequent section.

Each section took a few days to become rigid and reach, what potters call the leather-hard stage. This first phase of construction reminded me of bricklaying, during which the work proceeds best if each gesture—posing the mortar, spreading the mortar, posing the brick, placing the brick, checking the levels, etc.— follows an invariant pattern as it steps into phase with the ambient temperature, humidity and the curing time of the mortar. Changing the dimension from space to time takes bricklaying from something that happens between bricklayer and bricks to the resonating alignment of divergent wavelengths from assorted material and organic behavioural patterns. The bricklaying analogy introduces a way of envisaging how curious intent blends distinct patterns of activity into new rhythmical phenomena whose temporal forms transgress the spatial perimeters of things and people. In Aesthetic Rhythms, Sanchez (2023) suggest that,

…this idea of rhythm erases the border between object and subject. When we are experiencing a rhythm there is only a dynamic process by which the thing that is being looked at – the painting – and the person looking at it – the observer – become one. This transformation is rhythm.” (2023, p.63)

I am suggesting that aesthetic purpose gave rhythmical form to the section-in-progress by making predictive overtures to the thinging-into-being of the next section and providing a contextual review of the previous section, what Dewey refers as coordination by which he means that…

…prior and the succeeding parts of an activity are in operation together; that the prior activity beside passing over into the succeeding also persists by itself, and yet that the necessary act cannot be performed until these two activities reinforce each other or become contributing factors to a unified deed. The period of maximum emotional seizure corresponds to this period of adjustment. If we look at the final outcome, the completed adjustment, we have coordination. (1995, p.26)

Hovering between past, present and future in this way, sculptural gestures blended with the influence of humidity, temperature, the form of the maquette, gravity and the search for quasi-bilateral symmetry to hold and maintain three-dimensional consistency. By quasi-bilateral symmetry I mean the sense of deformation that emanates from the sculpture because its two halves are near-enough mirror-images of each other to produce a sensation of errant symmetry (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

A sensation of errant symmetry

Projects that concern themselves with symmetry, such as this one, can practice a unique way of learning themselves into existence, a method that exemplifies ongoing creative intention as a self-organising process (Kirchoff and Kiverstein, 2019) and which efficiently renders obsolete a role for internal representation in creative cognition. Each half of the sculpture can thing in relation to how the other half things. I mean that, if side A things itself into something interesting, side B can learn from A’s progress. Then, by trying to make itself into a mirror image of A, side B may create an innovation that appeals in turn to side A, which begins thinging along similar lines. By dynamically referencing each other, the two halves hold sculptural gestures in the balance, nudging the artist’s hands backwards and forwards towards a final resolution. Follett gives a similar example of emergent creativity in relation to caring for an orchard.

We prune and graft and fertilise certain trees, and as our behaviour becomes increasingly that of behaviour towards apple bearing trees, these become increasingly apple bearing trees. The tree releases energy in me and I in it; it makes me think and plan and work, and I make it bear edible fruit. It is a process of freeing on both sides. And this is a creating process…the release and the integrating are the same process... (1924, p.118-9)

3.3 A working surface

Once a section was leather-hard, the clay could withstand pressure without deforming and it was time to begin work on the surface. Like the construction phase, working the surface needed to be sensitive to the local requirements of the sculptural landscape while being consistent across sections. The task daunted me because the surface area was so much greater than a normal clay sculpture but, stepping forward to begin, the artist re-entered a construction-site atmosphere that made it clear that the usual clay-smoothing tools were not apt to the task of making the initial passes and the artist’s hand reaches for a plasterer’s trowel instead. With the trowel-in-hand it makes processive sense to approach the surface with gestures that come with plastering a wall, by which I mean that holding the trowel simultaneously created the plasterer and the wall to be plastered.

It is difficult to describe the plastering-state-of-mind but I think it has two aspects. First, it is expansive, it does not reduce the world by focusing concentration in the manner that wiring a fuse box creates an electrical-mind. Plastering gestures are dispersed across space and the attitude of curious intent diffuses across the entire wall. Second, plastering gestures are sensitive to the need to bring work to a sudden stop. Although acutely attuned to the consistency and behaviour of the surface just under the trowel, the plastering mind expands from there so that it becomes impossible to draw a line of separation between the plaster surface, the fluid film of plaster particles between the surface of the wall and the trowel, the trowel itself, the grip, wrist, arm, shoulder and torso. The all-embracing engagement of plastering gestures paradoxically makes their curious intent so sensitive to the moment to let go that sometimes my subjective self finds itself behind the curve. A gesture ends away from the wall, the plasterer steps back and only then do I realise that the plastering-mind has called a halt. Sennett (2009, p. 168) describes how chefs gain precise knife-skills by developing a capacity of minimum force—the facility to rapidly withdraw force by incorporating readiness for recoil into the gesture. When sculpting, such rapid release from total engagement sometimes comes as a shock. I have learned that feeling surprise often suggests that I have left the creative system to become its spectator.

After the initial trowel-work, the surface needed further attention from more traditional sculpting tools. My tools are made from silicon of different flexibilities and colours: blue—hard, green—medium and yellow—soft. When to use which tool was, once again, not really a decision but a rhythmical interactional resolution between the intention of the surface, the existing surface-state and the humidity of the clay. For example, using the blue tool on smooth, leather-hard clay increases the surface density so the surface looks like polished metal. The same tool on a dryer, rougher surface gives it a scratched and pitted aspect. I could watch my hands working, swapping tools from one hand to the other, discarding one to choose another but for the most part, work-rate was too rapid for subjective consciousness to monitor or control the parameters of each differential interaction. Even so, when I step back to look at the outcome of such a processive process, it nearly always looks and feels right. We can get an idea about why this is by thinking about it in relation to (so called) natural phenomena. Alexander argues that the aesthetic impulse is a specific instance of a more general…

…impulse of constructiveness, which is an outgrowth from or a modification of the instinct of constructiveness which we share with such animals as the bee, the beaver, or the bird which sings for courtship or builds a nest for its young. (1928, p.11)

We can apply this to geological features. Noticing a rock formation (Fig. 5) we do not question whether the actions that sculpted it were correctly chosen and well executed because the rock and its formation are indivisibly fused into a process that has no intention of referring to anything else. Applying the argument to the skull-scape, it looks right because the surface emerged from its own, auto-generative, surface-forming system. It is not an appearance imposed on it by an external choice-making mechanism. Nor was the surface made to represent another surface—an external referent that can later be used in judgement against it. Whereas things can appear incorrect if they are made to resemble something else, the surface-making system of the skull-scape has only itself to get right. Art makes its reality… “when we feel the work of art to be real on its own account and not as a realistic exhibition” (Dewey, 1934, 193).

Fig. 5

Haytor Rocks, Dartmoor, UK, Wikipedia commons

3.4 How the sculpture got its horn

According to Kipling’s Just So (1902/2009) story, the elephant got its trunk through “insatiable curiosity” in the face of relentless discouragement. The horn came into being in a similar way. The model was made by casting a carved, decayed branch. When that skull became a maquette for a skull-scape, the horn projected itself onto the tree in the David Friedrick painting—an aggrandisement which I assumed would take form by scaling up the process. I began searching a forest for a suitable candidate. Only when I tried shifting a trunk, 2.5 m long and 40 cm in diameter did it become quickly apparent that the task that presented itself was impossible without lifting equipment. Looking for another solution, I tried lifting trunks of ever decreasing diameters. Next, I began sawing a large trunk into sections to make it easier to transport. The handsaw cut easily through the first two centimetres of rotten wood, drawing me into the process but the deeper the cut, the healthier the wood, the harder the work and the greater the discouragement or affective dis-intent. Dewey talks of how, when “…there is difficulty in adjusting the organic activity represented by the attitude with that which stands for the idea or end, there is temporary struggle and partial inhibition. This is reported as “Affect, or emotional seizure” (Dewey, 1895, p. 31) In this case the emotional seizure of sawing healthy wood encouraged the search for a change in strategy, a search that also presented a solution. Decaying tree trunks have exactly the pitted, cracked, and decayed surface needed for the horn, hence the choice of a rotten branch for the maquette but, as the sawing blade cut deeper into healthy wood, the struggling action realised that carving a cone-shape from a rotten trunk would remove the decayed surface that was the whole reason for the effort. Affective dis-intention stopped the sawing and emotional seizure reoriented action to search the forest for smaller trunks, ones that could be transported to the workshop where they could be cast, without sculpting, into sections, A series of clay imprints could then be made from these casts, flattened and “stitched” together like Frankenstein’s monster, to create a single larger diameter cone. The discouragement of sawing into healthy wood turned into a sort of Aha! experience. We normally refer to such moments of sudden recognition as insight (for a recent review, see Wiley & Danek, 2024) but here, the realization did not happen inside the head by manipulating representations in conceptual space but in a forest, during the external activity of an extended mind in a moment that would be better called, outsight (Vallée-Tourangeau and March, 2020).

On its return to the workshop, the creative system cast the trunks into 30 sections, each measuring 60 X 40 cm. These sections were to be used to make clay imprints which would then be tapered along their vertical axes and “stitched” together into the cone-shape of the horn. Except that material constraint stepped in to influence the process. The plaster casts produced slabs that were too large and unwieldy and cracked when handled. Held by and in the emotional seizure of disintegrating imprints, the plastic limitations of clay re-thinged the dimensions of the sections by cutting each into three. But the horn-making process began realising another problem by making itself from smaller slabs (Fig. 6) and emotional seizure intervened again to reorient the process. As they were stitched together the imprints made a patchwork, the surface structure of which needed major reconfiguration to achieve consistency across slabs. The effort of engaging in significant gestural re-modelling began by questioning the point of arranging the slabs in their original order and then went further by interrogating the wisdom of reproducing the morphology of each tree trunk. Faltering gestures expressed unease about representing something that already exists somewhere else and the curiosity of intent responded to the discomfort by seeking to define a structure that differentiated itself from a tree trunk and grew into itself instead. The slabs already in place incited the artist to prepare a selection of imprints and to hold each up in front of the next vacant position so that the topography of existing slabs could decide which candidate-slab showed the best potential to integrate with them. Usually, they made their choice easily. But, if not, the artist would prepare more candidates. The developing horn would sometimes choose the imprint of a section that had already been used elsewhere but this did not seem to matter because individual slabs disappeared as their individual characteristics became absorbed into the gestalt.

Fig. 6

Slab cut from a longer section, resting on its plaster-cast

Once in place, the borders shared with its neighbours by the chosen section were re-modelled to harmonise the pattern across adjoining imprints. Once local consistency was achieved, the intervention was broadened across several sections. For a wider perspective, it was necessary to step back and sometimes this stepped me out of the creative system and when it did the accompanying surprise was at how a miscellany of imprints from different parts of different trees was metamorphosing into a novel, coherent surface structure (Fig. 7)—thinging its way into itself, like the larva of a caddis fly larva thinging herself into her case (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3BHrzDHoYo).

Fig. 7

The slabs play their way into themselves

3.5 Support structure

Like many construction tasks the sculpture required support during development, a structure that was: rapidly adaptable while offering easy access and good visibility. Designed in advance, the (prior) intention might have been limited to function but support and sculpture developed together and so they integrated themselves within the aesthetic intentional state of the project. I am not arguing that emergent design is a better strategy than thinking in advance only that they will have different consequences. In this case an emergent approach had repercussions that reverberated into the final installation.

The base of the sculpture is narrow, and the sides of the lower jaw rise obliquely. Thus they need to be braced to stop them collapsing outwards under the weight of the sculpture above (Fig. 8). The platform on which the sculpture was constructed, was made from wooden floorboards supported by rafter-beams and the lower jaw was buttressed by a series of vertical joists, screwed into this platform. A horizontal beam projected from the top of each joist (Fig. 8). and a wedge was placed between each beam and the oblique wall of the sculpture. The joists and beams were made from offcuts from the platform and other construction projects. As the sculpture proceeded, the joists extended along its length. A regular rhythm and homogeneity of process developed that pulled support and sculpture into the same wavelength, making them a unified experience.

Fig. 8

The oblique sides of the lower jaw with support

Ceramic is stronger and more rigid than clay and from years of experience I predicted that, once fired, the oblique sides of the lower jaw would support the entire weight of the skull, a subjective forecast that envisaged the final work as a self-standing sculpture. But the creative system made other intentions for itself. As the lower section neared completion, it began doubting its capacity to support itself, let alone the weight of the skull above. Before reattributing this as subjective anxiety, it is worth noting that the processive appraisal of strength is phenomenologically derived from weeks of direct, intimate experience of ongoing auto-generative materially expressed activity. In contrast, although grounded in experience, both subjective prediction and prior intention are abstract and general in nature. Perhaps the processive anxiety about future collapse was connected to the present feeling of security emanating between the clay sculpture and its wooden support – a sense of wholesome synergy provoking a sense of fragility and a readiness for a sculpture-structure fusion that was not yet inhabiting processive experience.

At this point, I visited Sardinia for a long weekend and while I was there I went to see the Giants of Monte Prama. Their fragmentary remains are supported by complex, beautifully crafted armatures whose steel grip sensitively cradle the broken body-parts (Fig. 9). With a concern that was gentle and firm armature and artefact absorbed each other into a single pietà and in another moment of outsight the material quality of stone and steel found harmony in each other and by metaphoric projection, pulled the clay of the sculpture and its wooden support into similar resonance.

Fig. 9

Fragment of one of the Giants of Prama, Cabras, Sardinia

Sculpture and support were now united in development, but the harmonising consonance of wood and raw clay would not apply itself to fired clay and this stopped the process of unification passing to the final installation. It is difficult to articulate why, but the discord stems from a sense that, whereas stone and steel share a sense of permanence, clay and wood a sense of relative fragility, the durability of wood does not correspond with that of ceramic.

The following day I visited an eleventh century church. Crossing the grounds I passed an excavated stone wall which lay exposed and supported by scaffolding poles (Fig. 10). The scene recalled construction-site atmosphere of the workshop and the lower jaw of the skull-scape sculpture held in place by wooden joists. In another moment of outsight, the stone wall projected itself onto its clay sides, the rusty steel of the scaffolding poles onto the wooden struts (Fig. 11) and the unification of sculpture and support as exhibition installation finally became a thingeable possibility.

Fig. 10

The supporting scaffolding in the grounds of the church of St Peter, Bosa, Sardinia

Fig. 11

Scaffolding and skullscape in the final installation

4 Conclusion

Summarising part one, enactivists and pragmatists try not to separate the world into subjects and objects but they have different ways of refraining. Enactivists mitigate division by embedding the autonomous organism in a reciprocal interactional relationship with the environment whereas pragmatists understand that organism and environment unify themselves through transactional activity. Each infers something different about phenomenological experience. Each inference has a problem. In enactivism sense-making helps to maintain the autonomy of the organism which also maintains the legitimacy of a subjective perspective. The trouble is, it re-introduces the subject-object distinction and creates an ontological inconsistency that is difficult to resolve.

Pragmatism defines experience as a synergistic feature of the transactional processes that take place within a situation. A situation might be an art experience, by which I mean those activities that come together to form, what a subjective perspective calls, an “art workshop” and which enables the transactional processes of sculpting to take place. In pragmatic terms, subjective experience is a functional derivation of situational or, what I have dubbed, processive experience. Subjective experience is familiar and ubiquitous and when an artist describes what it feels like to sculpt a sculpture the account is normally delivered and heard as subjective. Subjectivity creates a sense-of-self and vice-versa. This irreductive relationship of circular causality maintains the impression of autonomy by absorbing the affective intentions of transient experiential systems (from which it is functionally derived) into itself and claiming ownership of them. This means that it is difficult to find accounts of what it is like to be an art experience as opposed to what it is like to be an artist within that experience. It is this lack of situational phenomenological support for pragmatism that I hoped to mitigate with the case study.

Part two is an attempt to describe the experience of art as it brings itself into existence by gathering and loosely configuring alliances between activities, behaviours, proclivities and propensities, some of which are anthropogenic, many of which are not. The case study presents a contingent, polyherent process which, without a central executive, and when compared to the ordered flow-diagrams of an information processing approach to cognition feels muddled and confusing. But, by renouncing the search for the origin of experience and concentrating on what is happening in the present instead, we can see how a vigorous array of conflicting, convergent, confounding and confirming influences coordinate into a single expression of curious intent. Art maybe a contingent experience but it is a sharply focused one.

You may be concerned that the account of experience that I offer has a poor evidential basis and you may argue that I have misattributed my own feelings to a collection of inanimate objects. To this I would say two things. First, I accept that the story I tell is easily re-cast as a subjective account and indeed, as I suggested earlier, the English language and the cybernetics of subjectivity lend themselves perfectly to that. A subjective narrative would pass as normal, go unnoticed and therefore provoke fewer questions. But it would not improve evidential credibility. It would replace one poorly substantiated proposition for sentience with another. There is nothing outside the experience itself that affiliates affect and subject aside from assumptions based upon three or four centuries of post-enlightenment rationalism. And no matter how good we get at pinpointing the neural correlates of consciousness (see Nani et al., 2019 for a recent review) this does not locate experience in the temporal, occipital and parietal cortices any more than the gestural correlates of a phenomenological account can locate experience between hands and clay.

Second, although the evidential support for both subjective and processive experience is wanting, the correlates of the processive experience of sculpting are more accessible and easier to investigate ecologically than those of subjective experience. Take outsight, whether the examples given in the case study accurately describe the way an idea comes about is moot but the accounts do possess concrete markers of the process that at least indicate a credible pathway and provide the basis for discussion of alternative interpretations. Accounts based on subjective reports of insight are inaccessible to investigation and difficult to challenge (March, 2023a, b; March and Malafouris, 2023; Vallée-Tourangeau, 2023). Finally, I do not wish to pit processive and subjective experience against each other. If we see experience as a transient auto-generative organism, then its process of sense-making enacts the boundaries of sentience on a moment-by-moment basis. When plastering or sculpting, those boundaries are wide; when claiming authorship of a paper they shrink considerably.