Introduction

Acknowledging that every aspect of human being is grounded in specific forms of bodily engagement with an environment requires a far-reaching rethinking of who and what we are.

Marks Johnson, 20071

1 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago &London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) p.1.

I’m interested in how we engage with our environments. I had recently been using stopmotion films to explore intuitive, imagined encounters between clay and mundane objects. I experimented with drawing pins, a comb, a wet wipe, some string and a toothbrush among other objects. The clay I used was white stoneware (see figure. 1). Whilst reflecting on this work, in conversation, I found myself describing the films as:

Sensual-encounters with ordinary things.

This phrase resonated with me. So, I began researching how I might be able to define it based on critical enquiry and cultural references. I started to speculate. If an ordinary encounter with an ordinary thing is ordinary, what is a sensual-encounter with an ordinary thing? How and why might we go about creating or revealing one?

I invite you on a journey where we can investigate the micro/macro-ness of exploring sensualencounters with ordinary things and ‘rethinking who and what we are’ .

Figure. 1 Emma Marks, Film stills from Encounter experiments, 2020

I will start by probing each word individually as I work towards tentatively proposing a meaning for the term: Sensual-encounters with ordinary things. I am aware that I run the risk of explaining away, such precarious momentary encounters. To nail one down might be like trying to capture and pin a butterfly – in which case I would not wish to fail or succeed.

How might we go about finding or eliciting such encounters with ordinary things? What can we learn from this exercise? We are looking for a heightened experience and affect beyond

the mundane. It is a heightened sense of wonder and enchantment that an artist may experience when inspired or making. It is also found in the moments of enchantment that Jane Bennett urgently asks us to look for in our contemporary world.

2

This exercise will blur Heidegger’s boundaries between art and the ordinary. 3 Our enquiry leads us through New Materialist thinking in terms of subjective, phenomenological experience and its effect on ways of being in the world. We will discuss “worlding”4 without needing Heidegger’s ‘complete world view’.5 Instead we will look to Donna Haraway to allow for speculative ways of world-making: ‘We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings. So do all the other critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking speciations and knottings. ’6

Due to the subjective nature of a sensual-encounter, I have chosen to investigate a number of partial situations rather than searching for universal truths and objective facts. In my quest for tales of extraordinary experiences with ordinary things we will journey to aliens; storytellers; fairies; objectum sexuals; and shamans. Along the way we will come across some commonalities in how to conjure a sensual-encounter, whether through ritual, predisposition or process. We will then consider sensual-encounters as a craft within art practice by visiting artists in lockdown; ceramicists; and verbs.

Since this investigation is about first-person experience, I also request some active participation from you. Look around you and please, choose an ordinary thing within easy reach that you consider to be normal, commonplace or standard.7 This is the object that I am going to ask you to have a sensual-encounter with. Please keep it with you throughout this journey. I will refer to it as we go as Agent1.

2 Jane Bennett, The Wonder of Minor Experiences in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3–16. 3 Raj Singh, ‘Heidegger and the World in an Artwork’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 48, no.3, 1990, pp. 215–222. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/431763. Accessed 20 July 2020. 4 “Worlding is informed by our turning of attention to a certain experience, place or encounter and our active engagement with the materiality and context in which events and interactions occur. It is above all an embodied and enacted process – a way of being in the world - consisting of an individual's whole-person act of attending to the world.” Patricia Pisters & Stephen Besser, Worlding the brain by, March 17 2016 <https://worldingthebrain2016.com> [accessed 1 July 2020]. 5 Ibid. 6Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016) p.97. 7 What is ordinary to you might not be ordinary to me (although I am sure we could collaborate quite easily on coming up with a list of commonly ordinary things between us). However, the point is that sensual-enounters are all about subjective experience. So, it is important that the ordinary thing you choose, is ordinary to you, irrespective of anyone else’s view.