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.

Beyond the responsive making relationship with clay, we also understand the intimate bodily relationships that we share with functional ceramics, be they teacups, bowls or bathroom washbasins. And then there is the familial connection of knowing from where in the earth, that clay might have been dug, connecting us in an intimate and physical way.

Adam Buick uses locally dug clays, beach aggregate and seaweed from the Pembrokeshire coastline in his moon jars. The National Museum of Cardiff describes them as ‘so alive with the Pembrokeshire landscape which they literally embody, that his passionate connection to his environment becomes unmistakeable.’95

Let’s consider that the Pembrokeshire landscape (where I grew up incidentally) is the mashed potato, and for Buick, the pots are the mountainous form that Roy created. I propose that Buick is also a human being attuned to passionate attention through regular sensualencounters with the landscape, found materials and the clay he works with. His Moon jars make those encounters manifest through the clay’s transformation into a now rare and extraordinary object, ready to elicit wonder (and possibly sensual-encounters) in others. Those built forms will also transform Buick’s life in other ways. Roy’s mountainous potato lump in itself was not so extraordinary, but the experience affected Roy in an extraordinary way by motivating him to leave his family and home and to take off on a spaceship.

So, both material and artist are affected by sensual-encounters. I wonder what extraordinary effect the Rolling Clay project had on Buick when he ‘rolled a ball of clay on a one-mile circuit around Carn Llidi’? (See Figure. 8)96

Figure. 8 Adam Buick, Rolling Clay

95 Andrew Renton, National Museum of Cardiff on Adam Buick’s website < https://www.adambuick.com> [accessed on 3 July 2020]. 96 Adam Buick, Rolling Clay < https://www.adambuick.com/projects/rolling-clay/> [accessed 3rd July 2020].

From my experience, I have found that fellow ceramicists (who spend much of their time sharing focussed bodily encounters with clay) tend to be more attuned to sensual-encounters with other things. There is a common love of all things seductively material beyond their mundane use. Perhaps Potters can be considered as craftspeople of sensual-encounters with ordinary things as well as clay?

Could strong attunement to passionate attention through the practice of sensual-encounters be a key element of skilled craftsmanship itself? According to Sennett, at the higher reaches of skilled craftsmanship ‘people can feel fully and think deeply once they do it well.’ 97

97 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008) p.20.