Potters The best people I know to appreciate the complete embodiment involved in a sensualencounter with non-human matter are my fellow ceramicists. Julian Stair describes ‘craft as an expression of bodily kinaesthetic intelligence.’90 The crafts have long championed the embodied knowledge of the potter, the carpenter or the wheel maker. Juhani Pallasmaa cites Nietzsche’s dancer and Heidegger’s cabinet maker when he convinces us of the ‘silent wisdom of the body and hand’.91 However, Stair goes further to observe that although we are accustomed to the idea of body conveying knowledge through making, dance and any physical skill, ‘the body as receiver is at odds with the orthodoxy of high modernism and post modernism.’ 92 Stair goes on to validate this point by quoting from Professor of Neurology, Oliver Sacks: ‘One does not see, or sense, or perceive in isolation – perception is always linked to behaviour and movement, to reaching out and exploring the world.’ 93 Let’s think about Roy and the mashed potato again. He is not simply exerting his embodied skill on the potato. He is communing with it. He is entering its world and it is entering his entering his world. Reciprocity is important to our understanding of the complete embodiment involved in a sensual-encounter. In your sensual encounter, I am asking you to be open to the allure of ordinary things. Then, once it has gained your passionate attention, I am asking you to reach out to it in a carnal way. This could involve touch; imagined touch; an opening out of feeling towards it. Speculate new relationships with it beyond its everyday affordance. I’d like you to bring full carnal attention to your chosen thing, like Roy did with his mashed potato. Try doing things with it or imagining doing things with it that it is not normally meant to do. Perhaps potters will be among the most attuned to such embodied, reciprocal encounters with other things? Kearney’s embodied wisdom promotes the attributes of sensitivity to full bodily sensuousness and an ability to respond sensitively. Like, you could say, a potter with clay: ‘sensation is expression, expression is sensation’94 Porcelain will respond very differently to the fingers and the body than say grogged earthenware. Each require a different sensitivity of touch. Even while working with a particular body of clay, your fingers must be sensitive to its changing plasticity and malleability as it dries throughout the making. Intuitive building requires the maker to feel and understand the material in order to work with it. Throughout the process, the clay’s responsiveness to the maker’s touch changes and so the maker’s responsiveness to the clay alters accordingly.
90
Julian Stair, The role of the body and contemporary craft – Introduction, The Body Politic, University of Northumbria, July 2000, p.10. 91 Juhani, Pallasmaa, The Thinking hand (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009) p.116. 92 Julian Stair, Ibid, p.10. 93 Oliver Sacks in The Body Politic by Julian Stair. 94 Kearney, What is Carnal Hermeneutics?, p.117.
Emma Marks
Sensual-encounters with Ordinary Things: A Speculation
30
