Coming Alive

Coming Alive

By Chloe Monks 2019

Chloe Monks MA Ceramics and Glass Tutor: Rebecca Carson June 2019

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Page 3

Foreword

Page 5

Introduction

Page 7

1. Environment and Ontology

Page 9

2. Empfinder

Page 12

3. Facticity of Clay

Page 16

3.1 Raw

Page 16

3.2 Plasticity

Page 19

3.3 Dust

Page 23

Rumination

Page 26

Bibliography

Page 27

Appendices

Page 29

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List of Illustrations Figure 1 Challenging Mud by Kazuo Shiraga – Shiraga, K (1955) Challenging Mud. [Online] Available at: https://artnewengland.com/blogs/who-what-when-where-2/ (Accessed: 4 May 2019) Figure 2 B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds, Lacuna by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Lacuna. Unpublished Image.

Figure 3 M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Attentuate by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Attentuate.

Unpublished Image.

Figure 4 Phase of Nothingness by Nobuo Sekine – Sekine, N (1969) Phase of Nothingness. [Online] Available at: http://www.nobuosekine.com/image/phase-of-nothingness-oilclay-1969/ (Accessed: 23 April 2019) Figure 5 M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Coarct by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Coarct. Unpublished Image.

Figure 6 Time for Waste by Sam Bakewell – Monks, C (2019) Time for Waste. Unpublished Image.

Figure 7 A: 3 Minutes 31 Seconds, Trace by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Trace. Unpublished Image.

Figure 8 B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds, Lacuna by Chloe Monks - Monks, C (2019) Lacuna. Unpublished Image.

Figure 9 D: 4 Minutes 8 Seconds, Division by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Division. Unpublished Image.

Figure 10 E: 6 Minutes 59 Seconds, Wrap by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Wrap. Unpublished Image.

Figure 11 E: 6 Minutes 59 Seconds, Wrap by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Wrap. Unpublished Image.

Figure 12 G: 3 Minutes 26 Seconds, Trace by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Trace. Unpublished Image.

Figure 13 G: 3 Minutes 26 Seconds, Trace by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Trace. Unpublished Image.

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Figure 14 J: 3 Minutes 55 Seconds, Fixed by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Fixed. Unpublished Image.

Figure 15 L: 10 Minutes 33 Seconds, Warped by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Warped. Unpublished Image.

Figure 16 L: 10 Minutes 33 Seconds, Warped by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Warped. Unpublished Image.

Figure 17 M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Attentuate by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Attentuate.

Unpublished Image.

Figure 18 M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Attentuate by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Attentuate.

Unpublished Image.

Figure 19 M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Coarct by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Coarct. Unpublished Image.

Figure 20 M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Coarct by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Coarct. Unpublished Image.

Figure 21 N: 26 Minutes 54 Seconds, Revolved by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Revolved. Unpublished Image.

Figure 22 N: 26 Minutes 54 Seconds, Revolved by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Revolved. Unpublished Image Figure 23 N: 26 Minutes 54 Seconds, Burst by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Burst. Unpublished Image.

Figure 24 O: 41 Seconds, Pellicula by Chloe Monks – Monks, C (2019) Pellicula. Unpublished Image.

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Foreword Through the act of writing I’m opening up the question of whether experiences are as pure and true as we think them to be. How aware are we of our senses when clouded by the layering of preconceived ideas of what that experience is?

My research will be focused on the philosophical study of Phenomenology. Phenomenology is defined, in the simplest of forms, as the ‘science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being’1. A philosophy which is complex in its variation, with each phenomenologist taking a slightly different approach in their investigation of phenomena. It will be important for us to cover how different philosophers vary in their approaches and to identify which of these frameworks I will use as the foundation for my own phenomenological questioning. As a phenomenologist, inquiry is first and foremost discovered by looking and experiencing rather than assuming.

As Steven Muhull described on the In Our Time BBC Four Podcast, phenomenologists are fascinated to grasp and comprehend objects that life throws at them in their everyday lives.

Objects present themselves to them and they make sense of them. They believe there is a sceptical reality, appearances might mislead them into something illusionary. 2 Phenomenology was an early 20th Century response to the philosophical problems motivated by the metaphysics of early natural sciences. In particular, it was a response to the problems which grew from the methodological distinction between a real objective world and the so-called ‘subjective’ 3 world in which we live in. ‘Husserl thus argues in a direction opposite to that of Descartes 4: that the natural sciences are already given to the philosopher’s reflection as knowledge achievements which have to be accounted for in terms of the scientist’s cognitive ability to reach these ‘ideal objects’5. Husserl’s philosophy finds itself obliged ‘to reject nearly all the well-known content of the Cartesian philosophy’6. Cartesianism being the scientific and philosophical system devised by Descartes.7 Other philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have ‘gone underneath the Cartesian doctrine and exposed where Descartes has missed the phenomena of the world’8. Although, Merleau-Ponty did believe in certain aspects of Descartes’ findings, prominently that our thinking is part of an experience that gradually clarifies itself, becoming aware of itself and finding truth and its own existence. ‘I am conscious that I exist because I engage with a world that is always on hand for me.’9 With these philosophers in mind I will be focusing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French Philosopher who took phenomenology into the realms of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty depicted the experiences of our lived-body throughout his compelling writing of Phenomenology of Perception.

By becoming more phenomenologically aware we start to become aware of the basic structure of our lives, of the things outside our body and how they determine our ways of thinking, questioning the reality that we normally just accept. Firstly we need to free ourselves from what we already know. In order to capture a sense of experiencing perceptions, I will treat my writing Shorter Oxford English dictionary. (2008) Vol. 2. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Muhull, S. (2015) In Our Time [Podcast]. 22 January. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04ykk4m (Accessed: 10 May 2019) 3 Husserl, E. (1950) Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. p1 4 René Descartes, a 17th Century philosopher, considered widely as one of the founders of modern philosophy; having laid the foundations for Rationalism. Descartes was widely influential in 17th Century mathematics also, with the Cartesian Coordinate System being named after him.

5 MacDonald, P. S. (1996) Descartes, Husserl and Radical Conversion. Durham: Durham University. p198 6 Husserl, E. (1950) p1 7 Chisholm, H. (1911) “Cartesianism”. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8 Taylor, K. (2009) Phenomenological Interpretation of Descartes. UW-L Jounral of Undergraduate Research XII [Online]. London. Available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/12fa/6bcb0017b1520422105b02bc5c69867badbc.pdf (Accessed: 20 May 2019).

9 Taylor, K. (2009) 1 2

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as a phenomenological writing, meaning a poetising project to portray fluidity of thought and thought generation. By poetising, thinking becomes an original experience, taking myself into a more primal sense. ‘Language that authentically speaks the world rather than abstractly speaking of it.’10 I am looking for a deeper understanding of the experiential and making mind, a writing that will continue and follow me within my practice as a ceramic artist.

Furthermore, from the study of phenomenology I have a series of appendices that present a vocal transcript documenting a recording of myself in a state of phenomenological thought, through making and experience. There are also accompanying photos included showing the transformation of the material. The transcripts will be interwoven throughout the writing to find out if the primary research supports or oppose readings.

I will begin looking at the effects the environment has on our being and our being within the environment, reflecting upon anthropological writings by Tim Ingold. Followed by a descriptive account as the perceiver, taking Merleau-Ponty’s theories and applying my findings from the appendix to the research. Seeking findings such as whether thoughts create our senses, or our senses create the thought? Can we truly experience or does the experience lead to a lack of purity? Leading onto my material of focus; clay. The chapter is split into sections, based upon the different states that clay can take, make reference to my experiences with the matter within my appendices; researching the cycle in which clay lives, alike to human beings. Lastly, the rumination of all findings within the writing concluding to a rise of awareness, a rise of reason to the existence of ourselves.

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Manen, M. (1944) Practicing Phenomenological Writing. Alberta: University of Alberta. p39

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Introduction The research and findings that I seek throughout this written investigation are no doubt going to uncover an infinite alterity for myself as a maker. Through the intricacies of phenomenology, I’ll be unknitting every form of sensation, movement, action, speech, intimacies, vulnerabilities and intuitive thought from my embodied knowledge into clay, to unwind the logic of my own existence with the tacit knowledge that I’m unable to vocalise.

Clay is the soft malleable material that captures every movement and tension within our touch. It is a metaphorical material in relation to our states of mind and existence, one that is referred to as a metaphor for the creation of human life in Christianity; ‘But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou art out potter; and we are the work of thy hand’ 11 The material can be manipulated by human hands to portray a feeling or sensation after it has happened.

The phenomenological definitions in the Foreword express that phenomenology is still to be defined, the study concentrates on the structures of experience and consciousness, yet its definition continues to be transformed and changed dependent on the individual. However, as my focus will be Merleau-Ponty, it is necessary to define what his thoughts were. Merleau-Ponty ‘drew from the empirical findings and theoretical innovations of the behavioural, biological, and social sciences’12. Throughout his writing he uncovers everything that has been within us all along. We experience an uncovering of layers of information we’ve loaded onto ourselves to bring the undercurrent of our being into reality.

In other definitions, his ‘phenomenology is an attempt to describe the basic structures of human experience and understanding from a first-person point of view, in contrast to the reflective, third person perspective that tends to dominate scientific knowledge and common sense’ 13.

Alongside Merleau-Ponty I will also make reference to British Anthropologist, Tim Ingold who explores the ‘organism-person’, focusing on the growth of embodied skills, perception and action within environmental, social and skilled contexts of human development. As Ingold refers to the European tradition of philosophical inquiry and phenomenology, he uses Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s theories to find more reason or understanding of ‘being a being-in-the-world’ from the German In-der-Welt-sein14.

Perception is a process that is continually flowing through all of us, but not paused or recognised enough, ‘the world which the perceiver moves around and explores is relatively fixed and permanent, somehow pre-prepared with all its affordances ready and waiting to be taken up by whatever creatures arrive to inhabit it’15. Ingold says that in 1988 he became ‘very familiar with the work of James Gibson’16; an American psychologist specialising in visual perception. He goes on to say ‘in the early 90’s… I picked up Merleau-Ponty and that was [when]… I realised then that there were clear differences between the approaches of Gibson’s ecological psychology and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and so on. But there were also some common threads’ 17. For Gibson, perception doesn’t exist in the operation of the mind, ‘perception is an active and Isaiah 64:8 English Standard Version Bible Carman, T. (2012) Phenomenology of Perception. Oxon: Routledge. Foreword 13 Carman, T. (2012) Foreword 14 Heidegger, M. (1989) Der Begriff der Zeit: Vortrag vor der Marburger Theologenschaft. Berlin: De Gruyter. p12 15 Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge. p168 16 Boyer, D and Howe, C. (2019) 169 – Tim Ingold [Podcast]. 21 March. Available at http://culturesofenergy.com/169-tim-ingold/ (Accessed: 13 May 2019) 17 Boyer, D and Howe, C. (2019) 11 12

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exploratory process of information pickup’18. Perception operates in the movement of our whole being in the environment, ‘it involves the continual movement, adjustment and reorientation of the receptor organs themselves’19. As Merleau-Ponty stated within his writing, he was never putting them into experimental action. Ingold continues ‘I can never understand philosophers in what they write until I’ve sought them out myself’20. Ingold is taking up the action in forming philosophers’ theories into his own fieldwork. He has been so explicit and clear in the nature of how he recovers and responds to Merleau-Ponty’s work in order to provide a theoretical and methodological agenda in his own writing and research within the anthropological field.

Therefore, it feels natural to continue this lineation by responding to Tim Ingold. Each phenomenologist seems to be responding to the previous philosopher, suggesting that their thoughts upon experience are not quite right. I am proposing to do the same, to add to the ongoing conversation.

Through this research and discovery, I reflected back on these findings during my thinking through making research.

Appendix B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds – Moving around the object and its thinking back on Gibson’s idea that you can’t truly perceive or have a perception of something or a sense unless your body is moving around it.

We are applying these philosophical ideas into real life situations focusing on experience in the simplest of forms: our own being, our own experience, our own education of reason, an uncovering of reason. Once faced with a sensation we’re reminded of the undercurrent of our own personal values and emotions ‘I am affected and the undergoing of a state of myself’ 21. …the only way one can really know things – that is, from the very inside of one’s being – is through a process of self-discovery. To know things, you have to grow into them, and let them grow in you, so that they become a part of who you are. 22

Consequently, the reason for my writing is the search for the motivated, phenomenology of making, expanding and understanding a practice that will support my position, practice, existence. I am looking into the account of patterns and actions, from logic to object.

Ingold, T. (2000) p166 Ingold, T. (2000) p166 20 Boyer, D and Howe, C. (2019) 21 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) p25 22 Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Oxford: Routledge. p1 18 19

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1. Environment and Ontology The societal and cultural background we have been born into has a strong effect on how we choose to create ourselves. To some extent it can affect the way we think and the decisions we make alongside being able to develop our own personal values. Philip Rawson, artist and writer, who speaks of clay as able to generate tacit thoughts as well as material knowledge, brings roots of humanity back into the material of clay. 23 Tim Ingold, looks at these views, ‘to place the maker from the outset as a participant in amongst a world of active materials’24. This chapter will focus on the evolutionary effect that our environments have on our body, our mind and the materials we come into contact with, that become extensions of a tacit thought, these materials form the environment and start to generate new environments.

Curtis Marean, a Palaeontologist from Arizona State University believes that symbolic thinking was a crucial change in the evolution of the human mind. He states that ‘when you have that, you have the ability to develop language. You have the ability to exchange recipes of technology’25. As the world around humans developed, our ontology and mind evolved the capacity for higher order and abstract thinking, allowing sensory receptors within the body to grow consciousness of the external stimuli around us.

Within the expanded thinking that Marean speaks of, there develops categories and hierarchies of modules in the brain. We can learn a pattern, remember a pattern, and implement a pattern.

‘What sets humans apart from all other species is not just their numbers, but their capacity for symbolic behaviour, and its material expression in terms of structures and artefacts.’ 26 This pattern may become part of your behaviour and an undercurrent of your unconsciousness.

‘Humans use material symbols alongside language in a routine way to help them represent and conceptualise ideas and relationships.’ 27 These hierarchal thoughts started to become organised; ‘brain creating thoughts, thoughts create your brain’ 28, which lead to connections with the experience surrounding us that we projected into materials as symbols, tools, and tacit forms of thought. These symbolic thoughts ‘may carry messages both explicit and unconscious, depending on their nature and context’29, as well as starting to be seen within objects that we then carry internally, both explicit and unconsciousness.

We are born into a societal structure, a culture, a web, a categorisation that has been developed over centuries. Through ‘the fate of a being who is born… given to himself as something to be understood’30. We seek a balance of understanding in the world around us, forget to truly understand the being that we are. How much of someone’s being comes from an inner essence?

How much of someone’s being is learnt through experience? The nature and mere fact of being are two swaying sides that continue to be juxtaposed and questioned. From the very start language, ideas and thoughts are laid out for us. Can thoughts we generate be believed as original if the language we are expressing them with is already created for us? How can we ‘engage language in a primal incantation or poetizing which hearkens back to the silence from which the words emanate’31? We generally have to use a combination or a modification of existing Rawson, P. (1984) Ceramics. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press Ingold, T. (2013) p21 25 Wayman, E. (2012) When did the human mind evolve to what it is today? [Online] Smithsonian. Available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-the-human-mind-evolve-to-what-it-is-today-140507905/ (Accessed: 18 April 2019).

26 Scarre, C. (2009) The Human Past. London: Thames and Hudson. p42 27 Scarre, C (2009) p43 28 Kurzweil, R. (2018) 29 Scarre, C. (2009) p43 30 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) p404 31 Manen, M. (1994) p39 23 24

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inventions in order to communicate. Although Manning and Massumi emphasise the importance and ‘expressibility’32 of language in order to describe experience: a language for story, a language that holds onto the tensile oscillation of imagining and experience, composes with the threshold of expressibility that was already active in the field, tuning to expression where there is not yet either a fully bloomed object nor a fully flowered subject – only the intensely experiencing-imagining bud of a qualitative becoming toward making sense in language. 33

By looking at expression, through language, culture and society that has been developed for us, we look at the spatial and temporal dimensions of humans. As Tim Ingold states, the ‘organismperson’34 constructs environments for themselves, ‘an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence’35. One has a sense of existence within a building because they are enclosed. The expanse is shut off and one has a position within that area, based on their purpose, experience and relation, causing the world to continually be around the inhabitant.

As inhabitants we move into already constructed environments as well as constructing environments for ourselves. The practicalities of routines and patterns start to function to allow beings to go through each day with ease. Without trouble of the unknown we have the same experiences happen repeatedly, ‘we find “memories” which paradoxically we never thought or felt before’36 maintaining an organised and structured order to our ways of life, lifestyle and our lifeworld37. We are constantly in an environment we’ve built for ourselves, therefore, only surrounded by items we are familiar with, we have pathways that suit us. We rarely come out of that environment for an extended amount of time to forget what that environment is.

While producing the recordings, I sought how the environment and our lifeworld38 determined my position prior to the activity of making. The environment is of primary importance as it’s the first part before making takes place.

Appendix A: 3 Minutes 31 Seconds – The environment that I’m in is a photography studio. It’s the most private I could be even though, just the idea of people walking outside or being able to hear me now is so off putting. I want to be able to be in this bubble and this void that there is no way of anybody being able to hear me so I can completely let go and to lose myself. But this is just the first stages of acts. The room is white, two triangles, from the ceiling, I’ve got the natural light on either side, there’s a backdrop for photography, speakers, tripods, tables, suitcase, ladders, Moving tripod, bench, two chairs and an empty cardboard box, a cable extension, a bag

Each of these surrounding objects bears ‘the human action it serves’ 39, all made to human scale that are traces of existence, present in the environment but not partaking in the activity they are meant for at the time.

From the very start of my recording, there’s an anxiety within me, before making, due to surroundings and other beings. This insecurity already shows what psychologists call ‘the experience error’40. I have immediately assumed a potential, non-existent experience into my reality such as the disturbance of others and how its manifold may constitute the significance of Manning, E and Massumi, B. (2014) Thought in the Act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p4 Manning, E and Massumi, B. (2014) p4 34 Ingold, T. (2000) p153 35 Ingold, T. (2000) p153 36 Manen, M. (1994) p39 37 Lifeworld; the immediate experiences, activities and contact that make up the world of an individual rather than as we conceptualise, categorise or theorise about it.

38 Husserl, E. (1970) 39 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) p405 40 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) p405 32 33

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the making and what the outcome may be. When being so aware and analysing my perception, I transport all these objectives into my consciousness. These objectives may be due to past experiences, things I’ve seen or felt may be repeated in sensations or visual through the work.

From a phenomenological standpoint, by contrast, the world emerges with its properties alongside the emergence of the perceiver in person against the background of involved activity. Since the person is a being-in-the-world, the coming-into-being of the person is part and parcel of the process of coming-into-being of the world. 41

We have a supposed idea of an experience, of our perception, our thoughts of sensing, not questioned upon consciousness but unquestioned belief in the world. We use evidence, our world and our memories, to perceive and define an experience which results in assumptions, whether we believe these assumptions or not, if we believe these assumptions its likely to have no experience at all, as we keep the memory of your last feeling of that experience in mind, not allowing new sensations to occur. We think we know what it is to see, to hear, to sense, yet perception has given us visual objects that we remember.

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Ingold, T. (2000) p168

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2. Empfinder The purpose of this chapter is to move from the environment and ontology, onto our body as the perceiver, the Empfinder - ‘the one sensing’42. The Empfinder is a term taken from the German Empfindung meaning sensation and ‘refers to the person who receives that which is transmitted’ 43.

Is it possible to gain the ability to truly experience and understand our sensations? What is the true experience, as a perceiver, of having a mind, of having a body?

I’ll be looking at theories presented by Merleau-Ponty as his emphasis within phenomenology was on embodied knowledge; sensations that occur within ourselves due to external stimuli that reassure us of our being and our own existence. To try and seek an answer to some of my questions I will compare extracts from the appendices to the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty. By looking at Merleau-Ponty’s theories, in combination with a reflection upon my appendices; a first-hand research into thinking through making, with clay as the material of choice, we will be able to consider the nature of perceiving both physically and mentally. This is an effort to ‘return to the lived world (Lebenswelt), which is prior to the objective world or the world of reflection and is made accessible only through the lived body’44.

As the Empfinder, I have tacit knowledge, ‘that component of knowledge that is widely held by individuals but not able to be readily expressed’ 45. Tacit knowledge is not applicable to speech but can be transferred from one person to a material which creates a new language and form of communication that others will then visually see and understand for themselves through the non-verbal act that triggers memory and judgements.

The living body is the centre of experience, both its movement capabilities and its distinctive register of sensations, play a key role in the account of how we encounter other embodied agents in the shared space of a coherent and ever explorable world. ‘One's own body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism: it continuously breathes life into the visible spectacle, animates it and nourishes it from within, and forms a system with it’ 46. I’m allowing myself the ability to let my consciousness of movement be free within my body, but also respond to the embodiment that is captured within a matter that I’m acting upon.

‘Since the seventeenth century the concept of “sensation” has come to form the basis of wellestablished classical and modern theories of perception’ 47. Reading the chapter Sensations48 by Merleau-Ponty evokes a desire to respond in my own prose; a poetic outburst of my own understanding of experience: Sensation, a sense, a pulse within your nerves, your head pulsing with thoughts. Imagery, feelings. Imagery catalysing feelings, catalysing thoughts. Sensations starting to create tension in your shoulders in your back. Vibrating down through your arms, seeking out a release. The end of your fingertips. The proteins at the tips of your fingers, hungry to taste. Hungry to feel.

Hungry to touch. A pulsing pressure to embrace something.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge. p75 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p499 44 Ayouch, T. (2014) Lived Body and Fantasmatic Body: The Debate between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology; Vol 28, No. 2. p6 45 Dampney, K., Busch, P. and Richards, D. (2007). The Meaning of Tacit Knowledge. Australasian Journal of Information Systems; Vol 10, No. 1. p3 46 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p209 47 Plomer, A. (1990) Merleau-Ponty on Sensations. Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology; Vol 21, No. 2. p153 48 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014). p3 42 43

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We want to see the difference of our realities, the nature of something happening, alongside the possibilities of what the experience was like for the thing to even occur. Having a phenomenological attitude tests our expectations and experiences, helping the enquirer have a special moment of intuition. The first realisation we must have is within consciousness, the epoché – a ‘suspension of judgement in regard to everything that, in the transition from the not-yetevident to what-is-evident, is to be left out of consideration’ 49. It is imperative for this to happen for me as ‘the epoché must become universal if the phenomenological method is to become philosophy’50. The intentionality denotes two things simultaneously, consciousness is actional, or consciousness is referential, rather than offering open choices. By exploring what happens during making; within our consciousness and our physical sensations, we start to search for the pattern of our experience that is both necessary and invariant, making our experience what it is.

This suspension reawakens our minds, takes away our structure to become being in the moment, being present, rather than distant or over stimulated.

By taking away expectations and assumptions, we turn to our embodied knowledge. This phenomenological focus allows our mind and body to forget what we know, to only act upon what we are feeling in that very moment from body to matter. Like a child experiencing an object for the first time we are able to learn new information. The introduction to the recent Phaidon epic book on ceramics, Vitamin-C, summarises perfectly: ‘who can remember the moment when their baby mouth explored [a] strange object; such explorations are not memories but are intrinsic to our sensory corporeality by which we gain consciousness of our world’ 51. The focus on embodied knowledge can change the way we physically act upon materials due to distinctive sensations that can only be experienced by the embodied experiencer concerned.

Lived embodiment is not only a means of practical action, but an essential part of the deep structure of all knowing52.

Appendix B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds – I’m just pressing my thumbs into it as if I’m massaging the surface of it like a human body.

I am trying to consider the physicality of the Empfinder and the bracketing that it demands, from being physical, touching, into the external material, through to the visual perceptions I receive into the thoughts generated from these actions.

Tactile experience … adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go in the world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me, and is not centred in me.53

Appendix D: 4 Minutes 8 Seconds – In my body I feel ache in my stomach, I feel this need to be consuming. To be eating. But I think that’s due to distractions. Wanting to escape. And working the clay like this, being able to have different things happen at one time makes me feel better in expressing because I’m physically expressing and by doing that, by speaking at the same time I’m able to mentally express through my vocal, through my voice.

A pattern that I noticed during the recordings, within my making, was a need to be stimulated by different things all at once. I was physical; heavily using my sense of touch and vision, once I realised one thing was happening, I felt a need to balance out my other senses. I start to become Kockelmans, J. (1994) Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. p118 Welton, D. (2003) The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p22 51 Lilley, C. (2017) Vitamin C: Clay + Ceramic. London: Phaidon. Page 16 52 De Vos, J. and Pluth, E. (2015) Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn. Abingdon: Routledge. p70 53 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) p369 49 50

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aware of my consciousness, ‘which assigns one and only one sensation to stimulus’ 54, craving further sensation.

‘Empiricism deduces the concept of attention from the ‘constancy hypothesis’ 55 and ‘the constancy hypothesis requires the assumption that the "normal sensations" are already there.

They must, then, go by unnoticed, and "attention" will be the function that reveals them, like a spotlight illuminating pre-existing objects hidden in the shadows’ 56. My attention is empowered through the acts of mindlessly making. To continue the metaphor, my searchlights are activated.

The levelling out of stimulations that no longer succeed in organizing themselves into a stable whole where each of them would receive a univocal value and would only be expressed in consciousness through a definite change.57

I became focused on slapping the clay. Not because of the mark it was making but the action, the slapping sensation.

Appendix K: 3 Minutes 44 Seconds – Slapping sensation, I just imagine like a cartoon animation of sparks coming in between your hand and the clay surface. An electricity.

If a given area of the skin is stimulated several times with a hair, we at first have perceptions that are punctual, clearly distinguished, and localised each time at the same point. To the extent that the stimulation is repeated, the localization becomes less precise, the perception spreads out in space, and the sensation simultaneously ceases to be specific. It is no longer a contact, but a burning, sometimes cold and sometimes hot.58

This in the same way came from when I was slapping the clay. I immediately had a sense of tension and extreme heat on the whole of my palm that gradually went to the ends of my fingertips; it was throughout my whole arm that I felt this heat and electricity of discomfort. I felt the material slapping back. I now know that this heat and stimulation comes from slapping clay, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty says ‘the stimulation is grasped and reorganised by the transversal functions that make it resemble the perception that it’s about to arouse’ 59. So, I now have memory of the feeling of what will happen, and I know it will arouse the nerve endings in my hands.

I cannot imagine this form which takes shape in the nervous system or this unfurling of a structure as a series of third person processes as the transmission of movement or as the determination of one variable by another. Nor can I gain a detached knowledge of it I only foresee what this form might be by leaving behind the body and as an object partes extra partes, and by returning back to the body I currently experience, for example, to the way my hand moves around the object that it touches by anticipating the stimuli and by itself sketching out the form that I am about to perceive. I can only understand the function of the living body by accomplishing it and to the extent that I am a body that rises up toward the world.60

From the point of Appendix M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds onwards I started to become lost in the making, in the experience. My body had warmed up; it was loose, free of the mundane traps that I had felt at the start, free of fear, free of the unknown. Things I didn’t expect started to happen.

My body moved, pulsed and forced in ways that were out of my control. I started to lack Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p237 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p28 56 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p28 57 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p77 58 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p77 59 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p77 60 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014) p77 54 55

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thinking before sensing, leading to sensation being the immediate action. The same sensations are evoked again now that I write about it. My speech became fast, a stream of conscious and unconscious vocalisations that were difficult to understand at first reflection - the time of writing up the appendix. Amongst the slapping, smacking of clay, and myself, against the wooden boards and the floor. I was starting to forget to breath normally, instead taking short sharp breaths. I began to sing; songs that had been played earlier that day, I sang an octave higher – showing the comfort and loose expression I was experiencing. There was a form of euphoria to be out of breath, physically active and singing in soprano form.

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3. Perception of Material / Conditions of Clay As we have seen through the study of phenomenology, the mind is capable of functioning in the same manner. Clay has the ability to be protean: it exists as a chameleon; it operates on different states of existence and changes freely between them. Each state has a different characteristic and therefore has different modus operandi. It is a metaphor for the mind, and how we perceive reality. This is why I have used it as the medium for my own physical research and vocal recordings.

It is, therefore, absolutely fundamental that we investigate what the potential meaning of different clay states may have. Understanding the metaphors that clay can provide may in turn provide us with answers for phenomenological questions that have arisen throughout this writing, alongside how our own cycle of existence is reflected within clays. ‘Each piece of ceramics contains evidence of its coming into being and registers the time and place within which it was made.’61 This ties back into the first chapter; Environment and Ontology, the clay can not only have meaning imposed upon it, but also infer a meaning from itself. Is the thought being imposed upon clay or does clay impose the thought? Is the environment imposing the thought or is the environment caused by the thought itself?

3.1. Raw Philip Rawson believes that ‘Clay has the relation to the earth, life, mankind, relation to practicality, utilitarian, survival craft into social and spiritual factors in the life of man all at once’62. Changes and transformation in material culture was an integral part of human behavior and change in human societies, following the adoption of agriculture. ‘Thus, material culture not only created an increasingly artificial world in which individuals lived and worked, but also signaled social diversity and social difference.’ 63 Alongside the development of human’s capacity to work in materials outside of themselves. Clay became the primal interweaving of matter, mind and human action.

The ground that holds us and allows us to stand up on our own two feet contains the enchanting, ever-changing, raw matter of living minerals. Raw, vulnerable and exposed is the earth, dirt, mud, clay. Clay changes and flux’s into forms of the formless(ness) 64, naturally and intentionally by those within the environment. As humans, we seek an experience of rawness, vulnerability, exposure and sensitivity to allows us to look back on ourselves and our bodies. We seek acts of purity, acts of truth to experience new sensations, to seek what we already are – clay.

Mayo, N. (2016) From the Ground Up; Conversation with Clay. An essay from the 2016 Degree Show exhibition catalogue, Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff. 21 – 27 May 2016.

62 Rawson, P. (2017) Existential Base. London: Bloomsbury. p19 63 Scarre, C. (2009) p192 64 Bataille, G. (1929) Formless Documents 1. Paris. p382 61

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Clay is Protean – it shares the nature of Ovid’s description of Proteus, the sea god; Some, my brave Theseus, have been changed the once And keep their changeling shape; some have the gift To change and change again in many forms, Like Proteus, creature of the encircling seas, Who sometimes seemed a lad, sometimes a lion, Sometimes a snake man feared to touch, sometimes A charging boar, or else a sharp-horned bull; Often, he was a stone, often a tree, Or feigning water seemed a river Or water’s opposite a flame of fire.65

Proteus; the early prophetic sea god of ‘elusive sea change’ 66, the constant changing nature of the sea reflects a personification of our unconscious, the changes and development that happens within our minds alongside the ever-changing qualities in clay. Various shapes, forms and formlessness’ are found beneath our layer of dirt, finding the primitive informe67 of clay.

Something that is protean, like clay, changes; fluxing dependant on the environment it is within, dependant on the actions that are applied to it, dependant on the conditions that may cause it to break down, wilt, harden or melt.

We are created and exist from clay; ‘this, according to the gods, is the ubiquitous material from which we are all made. Prometheus is said to have taken mud from the river bed and stolen fire from the hearth of Zeus to animate the messy creature that he modelled’68. This flesh like material, alike to our skin, and ever-changing conditions reflecting our unconscious - our impulses, power and pressure are held for a moment in this plastic surface. In my recordings I speak of how clay…

From Appendix B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds feels so human, twisting their skin and stretching their skin and breaking their skin. Once its ripped in half you see there’s so much space inside of it.

Curator and writer, Ingrid Schaffner exposes the visceral qualities of clay in her essay On Dirt: Impulses in Clay69 that accompanied the exhibition Dirt on Delight at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. During my recordings I read out passages of Schaffner’s writing to ignite feelings and sensations; From Appendix I: 3 Minutes 40 Seconds Even that title ‘Impulses that from Clay’, it’s this thing of the material is something but also nothing until you put your body into it, your impulses and your power and physicality. And possibly from this writing I may respond to it in what I make next, her writing is very visceral, very raw.

Schaffner speaks of Georges Bataille’s reference to mud as the form that ‘enabled us as humans to stand erect in the first place’70. So far humans are referenced as being formed from clay and put through the fire, humans are able to stand, have a figure, have a function for our limbs to form, to walk, to move. This same act could happen if did not stand, we’d wriggle, roll like ‘those

Ovid. (1986) Metamorphoses. Translation by Melville, A. D. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p193 Sherwood Fox, W. (1964) The Mythology of All Races: Greek and Roman Vol. 1. Lanham: Cooper Square Publishers. p261 67 Bataille, G. (1929) Formless Documents 1. Paris. p382 68 Cooper, E. (2009) Contemporary Ceramics. London: Thames & Hudson. p7 69 Schaffner, I and Porter, J. (2009). Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay. An essay from the Dirt on Delight exhibition catalogue, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. 11 July – 28 November 2009 70 Schaffner, I and Porter, J. (2009) 65 66

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poor earthworms Bataille calls upon to help his readers conceptualise the power of the informe to confer status so low as to be crushable on the spot and made formless as spit’ 71.

The poor earth worms that Bataille refers to in Schaffner’s writing leads us to looking at the Japanese artist Kazuo Shirago, famous for his participation, from 1945, in the Gutai Art Association, the first radical post-war group in Japan72. Shiraga produced action paintings in performative methods using his whole body, such as Challenging Mud, pictured in Figure 1. This work was a performance of Shiraga wrestling, writhing around in clay until he was so exhausted that the earth had ‘won’73. It was believed that from this work, the post-war group named themselves Sodeisha, after earthworms wiggling in the mud. ‘His bare chested-body launched against a heap of mud’.74

Figure 1 - Challenging Mud by Kazuo Shiraga Shiraga, K. (1955)

Kazuo Shiraga said; ‘I decided to lay myself bare, and free myself from the weight of all preexisting forms… at the end I succeeded with my bare hands, with my fingers and with my feet.’ 75 He was aiming to free himself from pre-existing experiences and expectations, to succeed at something with only the work of his physical body. It is in this way that Merleau-Ponty believed that conscious movement is not a true, pure movement, what Shiraga was searching for.

When we attempt to think movement or to undertake the philosophy of movement, we immediately place ourselves in the critical attitude or the attitude of verification: we ask ourselves what is actually given to us in movement, we prepare ourselves for rejecting appearances in order to attain the truth of movement, and we fail to notice that it is precisely this attitude that reduces the phenomenon and that will block us from attaining it itself, because this attitude introduces - along with the notion of truth in itself - presuppositions capable of concealing from me the birth of movement.76

Similarly, contemporary ceramic artist Jennifer Hawthorn explores clay in a corporeal manner, from clay to her body from her body to the clay. ‘Through manipulation… the forms are often corporeal, retaining the shape of my shoulders or a moment when my limbs have reached out; the clay is a way for me to capture a physical trace.’77 Experiencing making in clay in the way that Shiraga and Hawthorn have displayed, I realise that there’s a slippage, and a rupture opens allowing a maker to create the formless. The raw essence of dirt hints at delight and desire. The Schaffner, I and Porter, J. (2009) Tomii, R. (2007) Art, Anti-art, Non-art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. p10 73 Groom, S. (2004) A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley. Liverpool: Tate Liverpool. p38 74 Kunimoto, N. (2013) Shiraga Kazuo: The Hero and Concrete Violence. Art History. Vol 36, No. 1 p155 75 Groom, S. (2004) p68 76 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) p318 77 Hawthorn, J. (2019) An extract from the Ceramics & Glass, SHOW 2019 exhibition catalogue. 28 June – 7 July 2019.

71 72

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physicality and sensuality in which thrums from the sensor through to the clay entices elements of euphoria. The alchemy of clay can start as a temporary moment of rawness, formless to dust or permanence, recording a passage of a moment of a being in the world by taking it through fire.

From Appendix B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds It’s the fact this material can become any state right now.

3.2. Plasticity Clay is the most primitive of materials and has been an ‘integral part of human society for many millennia’78, clay also has the chameleon-like ability to mimic any material, and it has a memory that can record form and touch far beyond the lifetime of any human. We could consider the matter of clay as being made up of three earths, in the way that John Becher did in the 17 th Century; fusible earth, fluid earth and fatty earth 79. The fatty earth – terra pinguis / phlogiston80 (later the existence of which was entirely disproved I may add81) was what Becher believed gave clay its ability to be moulded, shaped and formed.

William Henry Holmes, a nineteenth-century American archaeologist wrote that: Clay has no inherent qualities of a nature to impose a given form or class of forms upon its products, as have wood, bark, bone, or stone. It is so mobile as to be quite free to take form from its surroundings, and where extensively used will record or echo a vast deal of nature and of coexistent art.82

The plasticity found in clay is the possibility of all actions and avenues that can be created for the perceiving maker.

Prima Materia, an exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, borrowed its title from Aristotle’s theory of the alchemical transmutation of basic matter into form. Clay, ‘marked by its inherent malleability and morphological nature, clay’s essential “informe” invites artists to draw upon the historical context of its varying forms and functions to create visceral experiences that challenge our notions of art and objecthood’.83 With the strength of traditions that clay has associated with it, it’s impossible for historical redolent to not appear within works produced in the material of clay. Instead, powerful and pictorial references tend to surface. Here I want to make it clear I’m aware of this but at the same time I aim to become oblivious to that fact.

Reeves, G., Sims I. and Cripps, J. (2006) Clay Materials Used in Construction. London: Geological Society of London. p401 Myers, R. (2003) The Basics of Chemistry. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. p20 80 Datta, N. (2005) The Story of Chemistry. Hyderabad: Universities Press. p106 81 Myers, R. (2003) p20 82 William Henry Holmes. (1886) Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art, Fourth Annual Report in the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Washington DC [Online] Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19953 (Accessed 10 May 2019) 83 Margulies, A. (2012). Press Release from Prima Materia exhibition, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels. [Online] Available at: http://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/1001/press (Accessed 13 May 2019) 78 79

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Appendix B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds Once its ripped in half you see there’s so much space inside of it. Bubbles where it would’ve been pushed through a pugmill. Then there’s this danger of bringing in the terms of ceramics. Saying pugmill, just brings in a whole tradition of ceramics into it, a whole history of the material. But it is embedded.

Linking to the traditions and moments of ‘delight’ 84 that clay offers within Ingrid Schaffner’s writing; Slapped from all sides, as opposed to squeezed through one reading or text, dirt yields up many possible meanings, associations and histories for those who would engage in working with, looking at and thinking about clay. Ever resilient, it punches back with constant hits of delight.85

Figure 2 - B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds, Lacuna by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

The plasticity of clay creates a transformative element, ‘something undeniably material, wearing the evidence of its material nature in its visible and tangible forms and attributes’ 86, it becomes a deposit for information, cataloging action and imprint; ‘so much projected into [clay] from man’s daily life and experience… that it can seem to him almost like a projection of his own bodily identity’87. The extreme layering of history, thought, embodied knowledge and skill that are held within an object reflect back an unconscious make up. A piece of work made in clay ‘thus becomes an external testimony to his existence’ 88.

‘When clay is still in its raw state it can be broken down…objects can be made and remade indefinitely.’89 If wrapped airtight then clay will remain wet indefinitely, therefore indefinitely being malleable. Writing in A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley Edmund De Waal claims that clay’s ‘plasticity is almost dangerous; it allows for revision and effacement… Every touch is present but contingent. As Tony Cragg has said of this transparency of expression possible with clay, “I move, it moves.”’90 It is alike to the dynamics and kinetic energy that James Gibson refers to as perception operates in the movement of our whole being. Yet, MerleauPonty’s views on movement attains a lack of perception and experience once movement takes

Schaffner, I. and Porter, J. (2009) Schaffner, I. and Porter, J. (2009) 86 Rawson, P. (2017) p19 87 Rawson, P. (2017) p19 88 Rawson, P. (2017) p19 89 Groom, S. (2004) p38 90 Groom, S. (2004) p38 84 85

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place; ‘we ask ourselves what is actually given to us in movement, we prepare ourselves for rejecting appearances in order to attain the truth of movement’91.

The danger that De Waal speaks of proves the infinite possibilities within clay, an avenue that excites me; Appendix D: 4 Minutes 8 Seconds That’s the thing with ceramics you want to be making something that looks impossible, you question what it is.

This links into the mental danger of this material. Japanese artist Imu Noguchi speaks of his fear when working with clay; ‘anything can be done, and I think it’s dangerous. It’s too fluid, too facile…The very freedom is a kind of anti-sculpture to me’ 92. For Noguchi clay has too much possibility, it becomes intimidating and loses its clarity; ‘when I work with a material like stone, I want it to look like stone. You can make clay look like anything – that’s the danger’ 93. Noguchi’s fear is within the plasticity of clay, any deformity caused to its original form becomes permanent.

When stresses are applied that exceed its yield strength, the clay stretch’s, elongates, buckles, bends and twists to the point of destruction.

This is then dependant on the condition of clay, a difficulty I experienced throughout my research in the Appendix was the hardness of the clay I worked with; Appendix B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds The difference it makes to work with hard clay and soft clay is a huge difference. Like, two completely different materials.

Due to the stiffness I started to spread the clay thin; Appendix M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds the veins in my hands swollen from pressure. Creating channels down seeing how the clay moves in between the lines of my skin. A direction I’m just going within. I’m now realising how I shouldn’t think too much about what I do for this. Just allow it to happen let the unexpected happen don’t be so fearful even things like this I thought to myself wouldn’t happen and its happening.

These actions emphasize how ‘clay is a reciprocal, emollient material that softens beneath hand and finger, offering almost complete formlessness’ 94.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) p318 Noguchi, I. and Kuh, K. (2003) An Interview with Isamu Noguchi. Horizon, Vol. 11, No 4. p4 Noguchi, I. and Kuh, K. (2003) p4 94 Mayo, N. (2016) 91 92 93

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Figure 3 - M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Attentuate by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

Japanese sculptor Nobuo Sekine practices with the malleability of clay in his work Phase of Nothingness – Oil Clay 1969 in Figure 4 which becomes a feature of the imaginary. The sculpture is the presentation of an extraordinarily large amorphous mass of raw clay, weighing over twoton that ‘exists in a constant state of tension between our awareness of its overwhelmingly physical presence and our conscious desire to form it’. Like the innate interest that a toddler takes ‘in its own faeces and manipulating clay, … [and the] enormous pleasure is to be had from squeezing, rolling, shaping and refining this matter’ 95.

We want to engage in Sekine’s work because we are mentally drawn to ‘the profusion of possible forms its surface might suggest, or physically, drawn as we are to the tactile nature of the material in its infinite malleability’96. This same sensation Sekine evokes is alike to the states of change that occur throughout the Appendices as my desperation to gain the attention of the thing becomes stronger. I begin to look for ways to grasp what it contains, of what it consists of, of what it could be developed into. There is no possibility of taking control of this thing.

Figure 4 - Phase of Nothingness by Nobuo Sekine Sekine, N (1969)

95 96

Lilley, C. (2017) p161 Groom, S. (2004) p21

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No matter how bad I want it, the functions and actions of clay is out of my hands.

Appendix M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds It’s as though the clays going to tear away the skin from my knuckle, it forces against me. Moving down towards me but then away. Punching it down with both hands. Compress it even more. This gradual thing of towering up, that slappy suction into my knuckles and the clay that grasping onto my skin then letting go.

These surfaces are: immediately responsive to impressions of touch. [We enter] into a conversation with it, considering its amorphous nature as a provocation to set against [our] intent. They enter into a battle of wills, until either the clay or their hands become calloused and dry! 97

Figure 5 M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Coarct by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

The reason ceramics has such a huge aesthetic interest is because it’s the material that can connect and hold a person’s daily life, interests and experiences. It holds an identity an extreme history, a thought, an action.

3.3. Dust The condition of clay, if not dried and fired, gradually decomposes and becomes a deposit of dust. Throughout this chapter, we have seen the cycle from raw clay, plastic clay to clay particles in the form of dust. The clay cycle is alike to our being ‘man, [is] mere water and dust’98.

Within our everyday we try to live within clean conditions that leave no traces of things happened from the past such as a spill, a stain or a sheet of dust over our surfaces. Yet we live within the detritus of ourselves. Dust can be a ‘discord between the scientific image and human perception’99, and ‘is literally almost insubstantial’100. Dust is informe101 and ubiquitous, yet we look through it, this invisible space of content, excreted from things and beings over time carries elements of place, history and memory. ‘A trace is ephemeral, a locus of ambivalence suspended Mayo, N. (2016) Maneri, S. (1979) The Hundred Letters. Mahwah: Paulist. p199 99 Love, J. (2017) Lightless Air: Drawing Dust and Disappearance Publication. Lichlose Luft: Lightless Air [Online]. London: Camberwell Press. Available at: https://www.johannalove.co.uk/research/(Accessed: 15 June 2019) 100 Love, J. (2017) 101 Bataille, G. (1929) 97 98

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in the unstable space between construction and dispersal, presence and absence. A trace is very little, almost nothing. But it is also an index of life.’102 This formless disintegration has the opportunity to reform within a collection of itself. From a collection of clay dust, we’re able to reclaim, to retrieve or recover a condition of clay that was temporarily lost.

Ceramic artist Sam Bakewell tests the realm of ceramics in a state of dust. Bakewell’s recent exhibition Time for Waste, held at Corvi Mora Gallery earlier this year (pictured in Figure 6), interrogated timelessness, formlessness and took an exciting position of originality and bravery.

His work portrays an incredible journey of personal archaeology and alchemy; questioning what clay can be, what it can be seen as and become. Instead of extracting dust, like most of us do from our daily lives, Sam has spent time over his practice keeping the left overs of other works, shavings, dust, off cuts into a collection of memories, past experiences and personal collectables.

This exhibition was a presentation of his collected detritus.

Ceramic dust is dangerous and invasive. The maker ‘exists in it and by it; it fills his lungs and blanches his cheek; it keeps him alive and it kills him. His fingers close round it, as round the hand of a friend’103. I’ve spoken of the dangers before, creatively with clay and now it’s the conditions of the clay, dust that settles in our lungs.

From Appendix E: 6 Minutes 59 Seconds With ceramics there’s this harm, there’s this bodily harm, you know it’s actually so harmful for you because of the amount of dust that it produces, it keeps you on your toes keeps you on the edge of danger all the time.

We get into the habit of transitive actions; scattering, tipping.

From Appendix H: 1 Minute 20 Seconds How quickly it goes from this soft extra, second skin on your hands into dust that just crumbles as you move your hand and just how I do find it quite uncomfortable, because it just gets everywhere.

Once you have it on your hands and you’re walking around with it, it just detaches itself from your skin, drops off and stays where ever it’s fallen.

The addition of water to this dry matter brings it back into a state of plasticity, it ‘brings new forms out of what might have been detritus’104.

The sieved dust was fired, re-sieved and fired again to set, creating the Dust series. Some of the pigments flux more – making piles sintered together, slightly fused. Others remain so dust-like you hardly dare to breathe in from of them, but you can. This is the elegant deception of the series. 105

Holmboe, R. (2011) Gabriel Orozco: Cosmic Matter and Other Leftovers. [Online] The White Review, March. Available at: http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/gabriel-orozco-cosmic-matter-and-other-leftovers/ (Accessed: 12 June 2019) 103 De Waal, E. (2019) Waste Lands – A Cultural History of Dust. An essay from the Time for Waste exhibition press release, Corvi Mora Gallery, London. 15 February – 23 March 2019.

104 Britton, A. (2019) Waste Lands – A Cultural History of Dust. An essay from the Time for Waste exhibition press release, Corvi Mora Gallery, London. 15 February – 23 March 2019.

105 Britton, A. (2019) 102

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Figure 6 - Time for Waste by Sam Bakewell Monks, C (2019)

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4. Rumination After combining environment, ontology, sensations and matter I come to the reflection of my writing in relation to my primary research within the Appendices. This study has allowed a new direction, a new vision for my writing, practice in making and thinking. Yet; As in poetry, it is inappropriate to ask for a conclusion or a summary of a phenomenological study.

To summarise a poem in order to present the result would destroy the result because the poem itself is the result. The poem is the thing.106

In conclusion, I simply offer a reflection: Within the Appendix I have applied myself as the Empfinder to the plasticity of clay, I realise there are many repetitions that I only became aware of after looking over the recordings. I drift into a rhythm of speaking and a pattern of content such as speaking of my physical aches and pains; the act of making arose the reflection of my physical self, the different parts of my body. I reference the clay as a fabric, with ripples and a fragility at the edges when spread thin, and there’s a repetitive act of folding and unfolding – possibly lack of action due to the hard conditions of the clay.

The patterns that occurred link back to the beginning of my writing as I aimed to search for the motivated phenomenology of making, expanding and understanding a practice that will support my position, practice, existence. Looking into the account of patterns and actions of logic to object.

Anxieties that came up during experience of making began to disappear deeper into the making within the recordings. Although I had expectations of what could possibly be acted upon and made, I didn’t have the expectation of a loss of stress and anxiety. The possibility that these stresses were expressed physically and mentally through speaking, proving my primal need for making to fight those anxieties through a material rather than flight through non action.

There are realisations that assumptions and expectations occur in my head before the act has occurred Appendix E: 6 Minutes 59 Seconds although I have full knowledge of what it does and already, I’m thinking in my head

Alongside these patterns I realise the lack of form within my work. Linking to writers such as Bataille’s notion of the informe; the importance of the formless has always been an underlying factor in the way I have thought, worked and produced. Being human and having a living experience: sentient, active, passive, perceiving, moving, acting and existing.

Although visually, the results of my making are very similar pieces to those formed in previous work, the whole experience from Appendix M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds onwards was a form of making I hadn’t experienced before. It created a newfound sense of relation to the material of clay.

106

Manen, M. (1994) p39

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Tomii, R. (2007) Art, Anti-art, Non-art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. p10 Welton, D. (2003) The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p22 Magazines/Journals Ayouch, T. (2014) Lived Body and Fantasmatic Body: The Debate between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology; Vol 28, No. 2. p6 Britton, A. (2019) Waste Lands – A Cultural History of Dust. An essay from the Time for Waste exhibition press release, Corvi Mora Gallery, London. 15 February – 23 March 2019.

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Dampney, K., Busch, P. and Richards, D. (2007). The Meaning of Tacit Knowledge. Australasian Journal of Information Systems; Vol 10, No. 1. p3 De Waal, E. (2019) Waste Lands – A Cultural History of Dust. An essay from the Time for Waste exhibition press release, Corvi Mora Gallery, London. 15 February – 23 March 2019.

Hawthorn, J. (2019) An extract from the Ceramics & Glass, SHOW 2019 exhibition catalogue. 28 June – 7 July 2019.

Holmboe, R. (2011) Gabriel Orozco: Cosmic Matter and Other Leftovers. [Online] The White Review, March. Available at: http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/gabriel-orozco-cosmic-matterand-other-leftovers/ (Accessed: 12 June 2019) Kunimoto, N. (2013) Shiraga Kazuo: The Hero and Concrete Violence. Art History. Vol 36, No. 1 p15 Love, J. (2017) Lightless Air: Drawing Dust and Disappearance Publication. Lichlose Luft: Lightless Air [Online]. London: Camberwell Press. Available at: https://www.johannalove.co.uk/research/(Accessed: 15 June 2019) Margulies, A. (2012). Press Release from Prima Materia exhibition, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels.

[Online] Available at: http://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/1001/press (Accessed 13 May 2019) Mayo, N. (2016) From the Ground Up; Conversation with Clay. An essay from the 2016 Degree Show exhibition catalogue, Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff. 21 – 27 May 2016.

Noguchi, I. and Kuh, K. (2003) An Interview with Isamu Noguchi. Horizon, Vol. 11, No 4. p4 Plomer, A. (1990) Merleau-Ponty on Sensations. Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology; Vol 21, No. 2. p153 Schaffner, I and Porter, J. (2009) Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay. An essay from the Dirt on Delight exhibition catalogue, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. 11 July – 28 November 2009 Taylor, K. (2009) Phenomenological Interpretation of Descartes. UW-L Jounral of Undergraduate Research XII [Online]. London. Available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/12fa/6bcb0017b1520422105b02bc5c69867badbc.pdf (Accessed: 20 May 2019) Wayman, E. (2012) When did the human mind evolve to what it is today? [Online] Smithsonian.

Available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-the-human-mind-evolve-towhat-it-is-today-140507905/ (Accessed: 18 April 2019).

William Henry Holmes. (1886) Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art, Fourth Annual Report in the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Washington DC [Online] Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19953 (Accessed 10 May 2019) Non-print Sources Boyer, D and Howe, C. (2019) 169 – Tim Ingold [Podcast]. 21 March. Available at http://culturesofenergy.com/169-tim-ingold/ (Accessed: 13 May 2019) Muhull, S. (2015) In Our Time [Podcast]. 22 January. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04ykk4m (Accessed: 10 May 2019)

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APPENDICES Making: A Phenomenological Study

Friday 17 th May

A: 3 Minutes 31 Seconds Already, even days before knowing this session is going to happen, I felt anxiety, because this is the unknown yet the excitement that this will lead my writing my work into a way to interweave and combine within one another. To make sense of this primary research, to make sense from everything I’ve been reading from Merleau-Ponty to realistically using his theories and in the same way that an Anthropologist would do with fieldwork.

Putting these theories into context making sense of them, making sense of them as a being in an environment.

The environment that I’m in is a photography studio. It’s the most private I could be even though, just the idea of people walking outside or being able to hear me now is so off putting. I want to be able to be in this bubble and this void that there is no way of anybody being able to hear me so I can completely let go and to lose myself. But this is just the first stages of acts. The room is white, two triangles, from the ceiling, I’ve got the natural light on either side, there’s a backdrop for photography, speakers, tripods, tables, suitcase, ladders, Moving tripod, bench, two chairs and an empty cardboard box, a cable, extension, a bag and I’ve got a plinth and I’m down on my knees with a board, with buff clay in front of me, and I’ve started already to, taken it out the bag to just touch the skin of the clay because at the bottom you can see that it becomes to be very organic and actually look like there’s growths coming onto the surface and I’ve just smooshed them over with my thumb twice. And the lines of my fingerprint have been reflected into the surface of the clay where I’ve dragged my finger along the clay has moved in-between the prints of my thumb and you can see that. It’s the already huge juxtaposition between how the clay has been coming out the plastic bag with all the wrinkles, it’s been in there for 7 months. So, it’s started to mold and rot in the bag.

Figure 7 - A: 3 Minutes 31 Seconds, Trace by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

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B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds I’ve got to let go of constantly hearing people from outside. So, the clay is really hard.

I’m trying to push my hands into it. The difference it makes to work with hard clay and soft clay is a huge difference. Like, two completely different materials. And this clay, I’m just pressing my thumbs into it as if I’m massaging the surface of it like a human body.

All down the sides, I’m kneeled down on my knees, with my knees up against the board.

And it’s really coming from my shoulders into my forearms to my thumbs into my fingers. Then I just can’t help but feel distracted by noises outside, by knowing the people are moving outside of this door. It seems to bother me a lot. Now I’m just stroking the surface of the clay with another lump of clay and molding it back into its body. Smoothing it over, seeing the different surfaces you can gain from the same thing.

Like they were saying, Edmund De Waal and Japanese artist, the danger that clay can just be seen as anything. Smoothing it over it can be a massive surface of matte steel that is incredibly plastic. The whole piece in one it is solid. But then once you take pieces off, so soft and malleable. But also cracks and breaks even though it’s still wet.

I’m going to the piece and twist it in half. I’m pushing it with my right hand and pulling it towards me with my left. Trying to put my leg up. It seems really body like, really corporeal. It’s as though I’m giving some person a really intense massage and twisting them either side. It feels so human, twisting their skin and stretching their skin and breaking their skin. Once its ripped in half you see there’s so much space inside of it.

Bubbles where it would’ve been pushed through a pugmill. Then there’s this danger of bringing in the terms of ceramics. Saying pugmill, just brings in a whole tradition of ceramics into it, a whole history of the material. But it is embedded. There is so much satisfaction in ripping clay because these are surfaces you wouldn’t be able to gain.

Because these are surfaces you wouldn’t be able to gain in any other way. Just looks like a surface you may walk past on a rocky stream. I can just imagine water flowing down through them. Through the seams through the cracks. Yet if water was running down this material, you’d lose this detail it would become moist and smooth over and gradually become a liquid. And it’s the fact this material can become any state right now. It can be a liquid it can be incredibly smooshy mooshy clay, it can be hard clay like it is right now, it can be dry with no water inside of it whatsoever. And then you can add water to it again and it becomes slip.

Figure 8 - B: 6 Minutes 45 Seconds, Lacuna by Chloe Monks Monks, C. (2019)

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C: 1 Minutes 45 Seconds Having these in between parts of recording allows me to think about what I’ve said so far in recordings. I’m picking up a piece of clay that has come off of the sides of this lump of buff clay and just pressing into it. Pressing it in the tension from my fingers into this piece of clay that’s getting flattened in between my two fingertips, between my thumb, my index finger and my middle finger. Folding it in pressing it in my palm.

Creating a fist like position with the clay in-between, squeezing it out in between the seams of my fingers and openings within my palm. This tension I’m just thinking, where to go next, taking photos in between capturing these movements that are happening to the clay due to the force that I’m putting into it. But I think what I need to do is be focusing on my experience right now. So far, this reflection that I wouldn’t usually work with mass that’s so hard and difficult to twist and turn.

D: 4 Minutes 8 Seconds I’m just holding it in my left hand and ripping the pieces off with my right hand, throwing it down to take the one piece into loads of little pieces. And it rolls off the ends of my fingers, this embodiment of force, down on my knees. And as I’m doing this I’m thinking about what Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, thinking about the Japanese performance ceramic artists, how they were battling with the earth seeing who would win first. Who would tire one another out, how far can you take the material how far can you push yourself until you become exhausted? And the recording will maybe show that today, maybe not conclude but will show evidence of what way it sways.

In my body I feel ache in my stomach, I feel this need to be consuming. To be eating.

But I think that’s due to distractions. Wanting to escape. And working the clay like this, being able to have different things happen at one time makes me feel better in expressing because I’m physically expressing and by doing that, by speaking at the same time I’m able to mentally express through my vocal, through my voice. And seeing a big lump of clay fall into two lumps and now into multiple pieces, there must be thirty pieces and some of these pieces I look at and I’m like, ugh I’d love to fire that, They’re just so, the ones that just doesn’t look like they’ve been touched by someone, they just look completely natural, the most satisfying, I think that’s the thing with ceramics you want to be making something that looks impossible, you question what it is you don’t even know that its ceramic and that’s where people are trying to take it to today. I’ve also brought terracotta clay, as that’s heavily in my practice at the moment, terracotta clay, and I would usually see it as the most amateur clay to use, yet I now see how sublime it is.

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Figure 9 D: 4 Minutes 8 Seconds, Division by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

E: 6 Minutes 59 Seconds I’ve got another bag of clay that’s a bit wetter, loads of dust though. And I guess with ceramics there’s this harm, there’s this bodily harm, you know it’s actually so harmful for you because of the amount of dust that it produces, it keeps you on your toes keeps you on the edge of danger all the time.

Now I’m just slapping a lump of terracotta on top of the buff clay that I’ve just ripped apart. Slapping it down, taking another piece but pulling it apart into balls of clay and slapping it down. As I’m slapping it down these two, grey and red that are contaminated, but they are forced together by the force that I’m putting from my whole upper body down to my hand down to the clay that’s being throttled down into the base. Looking down at this, I start seeing faces and resemblances of things that pre-exist in my mind. I do think to myself how it’s just looks like any other performance artist, you know, they just get a bag of clay and their like I’m going to print my body in this this clay will hold my shape and structure but I just want to be loose, free within this. And maybe, with what I’m doing I’m trying to act as though I’m one to have forgotten and not known any structure or technique or skill within clay just taking use of the material and mushing it, pulling it, squishing it, slapping it throwing it as if I’m a blank slate of what this thing does. Although I have full knowledge of what it does and already I’m thinking in my head I’ll take that apart and put that in the kiln, or I’ll push something else into that piece and it might come out like this and I have these expectations.

Right now, I am only using my hands, I’m not using, I mean I am using my whole body but I’m not imprinting my whole body within this work. You know. And I’m not making anything in particular that’s not what I’m thinking, I mean I guess that I could be thinking that I’m making something that’s going to be a thrown piece the size of my hand or one piece. Slapping it down and letting it roll off the ends of my fingers. Again, there’s this funny feeling in my stomach of hunger, doing physical work immediately makes me hungry. Reaction of my body, once I start to get physical it just needs something to put into my mouth. To taste something, to have flavour because my senses, my physical senses are alive.

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Figure 10 - E: 6 Minutes 59 Seconds, Wrap by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

Figure 11 - E: 6 Minutes 59 Seconds, Awry by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

F: 1 Minutes 52 Seconds So am I truly experiencing something new or is what’s happening now something that was expected? And I think true experience, wiping what you know off, there’s a part of me that knew there’d be lumps of clay, ripping them apart tearing them, manipulating the surface of the piece and having lumps. Having lumps that would be combined with a different clay that would combine colours and create a new colour palette. It’s these expectations isn’t it. You’ve got to know that it’s what I’m feeling, not what I’m visually seeing, I didn’t think that I’d be ripping the clay apart and throwing it down onto each other, I didn’t expect that to happen, I didn’t expect to be throwing or slapping. I didn’t expect, I mean I guess I kind of thought I’d be, my body would be kneeled down on the floor, working on the floor. But it is raised, whether I bring it up to my hip level to work from.

G: 3 Minutes 26 Seconds Pressing it altogether, putting all these pieces into one thing. Collecting them up from the edge into the middle, and just folding it in on itself and pressing my body down onto it.

Imagine it like Ingrid Schaffner says in ‘On Dirt’. Might get some water just to make it even messier. Is you sort of can have flash backs of imagining doing this to get mud from the ground just mushing it pressing into it and having all these different minerals and life forms within your hands, all these things that are alive. That’s the same if the clay was alive within the clay, so you’re bringing that life into it. It already has an existence but bringing it into a different form of existence. Just pressing my palm down, moving my body around these camouflage patterns coming from where the terracotta’s has been inside of it. Thinking to myself, what am I going to eat? I could have an apple, have a cookie. I mean there’s mounds pushed form the middle out so there’s no centre point as such, I’m pushing as there are bubbles erupting over the surface. I’ve got my feet out as if I’m doing a plank because this clay is so hard. Surface so smooth where my palm goes over and then so rough where I take it off. Impact of side punching it.

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Figure 12 - G: 3 Minutes 26 Seconds, Trace by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

Figure 13 - G: 3 Minutes 26 Seconds, Trace by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

H: 1 Minute 20 Seconds As I was washing my hands to get the clay off, off of my hands I was thinking about how quickly it goes from this soft extra, second skin on your hands into dust that just crumbles as you move your hand and just how I do find it quite uncomfortable, because it just gets everywhere. Once you have it on your hands and you’re walking around with it, it just detaches itself from your skin, drops off and stays where ever it’s fallen. And also thinking about as I was washing my hands even thinking about what, how I hope for this writing to be following me through the rest of my practice how will this work that I’m making now, will that be coming into next year. Or is it just the thinking that I want to come into next year. It is so object led this course as well and obviously I’m focusing on this course because it’s my life at the moment. You realise how object led it is and how it’s like for money and commercial.

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I: 3 Minutes 40 Seconds So, I’m going to read out Ingrid Schaffner’s ‘On Dirt: Dirt on delight impulses that form clay writing. Even that title impulses that form clay, it’s this thing of, the material is something but also nothing until you put your body into it, your impulses and your power and physicality. And possibly from this writing I may respond to it in what I make next, her writing is very visceral, very raw.

These days the annals on dirt flop right open to writings on the informe or ‘formless’. That principle, as theorised by the French philosopher Georges Bataille, itself frequently recourses to mentions of mud. Mud oozes up around the big toe in Bataille’s rumination on that appendage, which enabled us humans to stand erect in the first place. Head to sky perhaps, but feet (and mind) forever mired. Mud is viscous and lugubrious. Smacking of excrement – of excess and expenditure – it is a base material, one of life’s raw essences. And it is home to those poor little earthworms Bataille calls upon to help his readers conceptualise the power of the informe to confer status so low as to be crushable on the spot and made formless as spit. This peculiar power is what makes the informe such critical operative in recent art history: it undoes a narrative that privileges form, while offering nothing as an alternative. Nothing being everything in the universe rendered formless. In other words, the informe is a noun that performs as a verb. Bataille called it a mode d’emploi. And given what good use he made of mud, the informe seems an excellent rhetoric to employ in a discussion of clay as both material and impulses in contemporary art.

Already from that this ‘poor little earth worms that Bataille calls upon to help his readers conceptualise the power of the informe’ makes me think of Kazuo Shiraga himself and the other potters called themselves an earthworm, as they were fighting against the earth, they were wriggling around in the mud, trying to move within it and also the ‘Smacking of excrement – of excess and expenditure – it is a base material’ it is formless, is just what has happened here. There is a possible form then it gets cut and transformed and changed and it’s turned into another form. But it’s a form that can only exist once. Every single detail is there for a moment.

J: 3 Minutes 55 Seconds The first step in working with wet clay is to wedge it. This involves kneading, slapping and squeezing out any air bubbles that might lead to explosions in the kiln later down the line. Physical and direct, wedging offers a useful demonstration for getting to the material at hand let’s just pummel the dirt out of clay.

Let’s just pummel the dirt out of clay.

Slapped from all sides, as opposed to squeezed through one reading or text, dirt yields up many possible meanings, associations and histories for those who would engage in working with, looking at and thinking about clay. Ever resilient, it punches back with constant hits of delight. Like sex, the physicality and sensuality of which thrum throughout this exhibition, discerning the dirty from the delightful is inextricably intertwined when it comes to a material as elemental as clay.

I’m going to wet the clay and start to wedge it. The first step of working with wet clay is to wedge it. Orh, nearly broke my wrist then punching it. You wedge the whole thing, a bag and a half of clay. Bending it, pushing it, pushing those bubbles out. I’m just pushing it in on itself. Picking it up and dropping it down. Picking it up, dropping it down. All that I’m using is my chest I’m going to try using my legs this time.

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Figure 14 - J: 3 Minutes 55 Seconds, Fixed by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

K: 3 Minutes 44 Seconds From the formless to the form. I’ve spread out a piece of clay, now coming into this terracotta is so hard, slapping the dirt out of clay, then drying with water to make it a ceramic solidifying the minerals within the clay to bond with one another, to secure one another. Rubbing my finger on the surface, taking the initial surface away terracotta is so hard. Just using my fingertips to run down the clay. As it’s running down the veins of my skin, it’s always this desire and sexual, sexuality and sensuality that comes into touching clay. Caressing the material in a direction you either want it to go into or a direction that your excited to see what causes what reaction it gives. Same as if you were doing it to a person. Caress that person in a way that you may not know what will excite them or repulse them. That excitement might end up with repulsion. Very fine line that can be crossed very easily with caressing. Kneading the clay. Slapping sensation, I just imagine like a cartoon animation of sparks coming in between your hand and the clay surface. An electricity picking it up and turning it around feeling a bit sick.

L: 10 Minutes 33 Seconds So reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty Page 77 The vague localisation of the stimulus is not explained by the destruction of a localizing centre, but by the levelling out of stimulations that no longer succeed in organizing themselves into a stable whole where each of them would receive a univocal value and would only be expressed in consciousness through a definite change. So the stimulations from a single sense differs less by the material instrument they use than by the manner in which the elementary stimuli are spontaneously organised among themselves. This organisation is the decisive factor both at the level of sensible ‘qualities’ and at the level of perception.

Interesting in a way of when I started to make this morning. As soon as I was making, I was physical and I was heavily using my sense of touch and my sense of vision I felt as though I needed to level out with sense of taste and hearing, not so much hearing, more taste. My mouth was desperate to be moving or tasting something, or a flavour in my mouth, or moving something about in my mouth. It’s like, it’s this inability to concentrate on one thing when your sensing it I want to balance out all the sense and 36

have something happening in all of my senses rather than only one of them being focused on.

If a given area of the skin is stimulated several times with a hair, we at first have perceptions that are punctual, clearly distinguished, and localised each time at the same point. To the extent that the stimulation is repeated, the localization becomes less precise, the perception spreads out in space, and the sensation simultaneously ceases to be specific. It is no longer a contact, but a burning, sometimes cold and sometimes hot. Later still, the subject believes that the stimulus moves and traces out a circle on his skin.

In the end, nothing more is sensed.

This in the same way came from when I was slapping the clay. I immediately had a sense of tension and extreme heat on the whole of my palm that gradually goes to the ends of my fingertips. And the sensation wasn’t only in one area, it was throughout my whole arm that I felt this heat and electricity, but it was uncomfortable. You just feel the material slapping back. There’s a lack of control. And now I know that there’s this heat and stimulation comes from slapping clay like Maurice Merleau-Ponty says here; The stimulation is grasped and reorganised by the transversal functions that make it resemble the perception that it’s about to arouse So I now have memory of the feeling of what will happen, and I know it will arouse the nerve endings in my hands. Quote; I cannot imagine this form which takes shape in the nervous system or this unfurling of a structure as a series of third person processes as the transmission of movement or as the determination of one variable by another. Nor can I gain a detached knowledge of it I only foresee what this form might be by leaving behind the body and as an object partes extra partes, and by returning back to the body I currently experience, for example, to the way my hand moves around the objct that it touches by anticipating the stimuli and by itself sketching out the form that I am about to perceive. I can only understand the function of the living body by accomplishing it and to the extent that I am a body that rises up toward the world.

Moving around the object and its thinking back on Gibson’s idea that you can’t truly perceive or have a perception of something or a sense unless your body is moving around it.

Again, it’s trying to fold it in half. Folding it in half and it, the stages that the clay can, I’m focusing a lot on the state of clay, but the stage of clay right now is hard but it so stunning, the rips that occur that you can only really see now, unless you let it deteriorate or fire which is likely to explode because of the air bubbles inside that haven’t been wedged out haven’t been slapped out, haven’t slapped the dirt out of the clay.

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Figure 15 - L: 10 Minutes 33 Seconds, Warped by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

Figure 16 - L: 10 Minutes 33 Seconds, Warped by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019) M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds Taking the same form and unfolding it, thinking about this elastic deformation into the plastic, pushing it so hard until it starts to fracture. Pushing it from the middle, folding it again. Break it in half just like I did with the first piece, bent over, I’m higher now but bent over in an uncomfortable manner with my back. Swapping over onto the other piece, spreading it down. Just using my pam. Making a formed object into a formless object. Pushing it away from me. Decreasing its height my right palm, in direct contact with the clay and my left palm on top to push my hand down. Otherwise the clay would push me back and wouldn’t let me go in the direction that I want. Moving and sensing feeling the pain at the top of my arm as I continue to do this. Immediately it takes my print, and I know this already the amount of detail it takes is just. Impressive I just want to spread it along the board as it goes into my skin. The only main contact is my hand, spreading it like paste thinking about all the stages it can be within the object into thing.

My whole body carrying over the board, the veins in my hands swollen from pressure.

Creating channels down seeing how the clay moves in between the lines of my skin. A direction I’m just going within. I’m now realising how I shouldn’t think too much about what I do for this. Just allow it to happen let the unexpected happen don’t be so fearful even things like this I thought to myself wouldn’t happen and its happening. The experience of just spreading so much clay out working clay in this way makes me think more about the nature of it all it takes you back to the earth always brings back this human nature challenge with the organic. Versus the manmade creating ripples from the edge’s fragility and strength in this one piece. Can you call it a piece? This main point of contact where the material is travelling down from, this mass,

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Figure 17 - M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Attentuate by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

Figure 18 - M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Attentuate by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

I’m now just going to continue to press it down, move around the piece using my knuckles I have closed hands this time, pressing my fingers, feeling my right hand is a lot stronger than my left, it’s as though the clays going to tear away the skin from my knuckle, it forces against me. Moving down towards me but then away. Punching it down with both hands. Compress it even more. This gradual thing of towering up, that slappy suction into my knuckles and the clay that grasping onto my skin then letting go.

Figure 19 - M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Coarct by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

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Figure 20 - M: 15 Minutes 28 Seconds, Coarct by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

N: 26 Minutes 54 Seconds Doing intervals of, down taking pieces from the bottom and pressing it down over it.

Doing this stage of knuckle working and palm working and gradually I have this expectation, that it might be something completely different. Take it in stages you can’t immediately put the pressure on in this state and expect it to do what you want it to.

Need some air. Remember to breath. This down. What does it remind me of? The experience I’m having is short breaths hot face red hands, thinking about memories of what this piece reminds me off. This boundary of the edge of the board, edges of the clay trying to push itself over, spread itself out. Thinking now what difference it would make if I was using this as a practice was having a board against it would make a massive difference thinking too much about what they would expect.

Twisting my hands around, I realise how weak my left hand is completely floppy I can’t seem to put any sort of muscle into my knuckles, feels quite primitive, chimp ripping up the clay, ripping it up.

Figure 21 - N: 26 Minutes 54 Seconds, Revolved by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

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Figure 22 - N: 26 Minutes 54 Seconds, Revolved by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

I’m ripping up then spreading it on the bottom. If I do this in a smoother way, back to my normal breath, smoother air travel in and out of my lungs are very short still, lean back and deep breath filling air expose itself from the skin of the clay. My hands pick it drop it down get to the bottom of the piece. Clay could be anything it can be used for anything it can become anything, under my nail bed the satisfaction and discomfort at the same time, that attraction, repulsion linking to sex, sensuality, the very small border between the two.

Pushing it down. Thicker it is the harder it gets. Rather than this be making, I’m making an experience, not making a thing. Making an experience of something that can be new, uninitiated, unexpected, the pre-empted ideas that it would be fired and used in the future. I don’t think that’s do able, unlikely. Now I want to take a piece of clay and pick up each trail that’s made where I’ve spread. They’re like thin pieces of fabric, that are folded then crushed, so, so easily.

Slipped back with the same suction that you can feel on your skin, but the contact on clay with clay, clay that’s attached to an object that’s already clay, clay that I’ve picked up by myself. ‘you know the way that I fight for you, you never call me you never fight back’ Open and lifting it up, dropping it down. Picking it up as if it’s a piece of clothing.

Now taking the same piece, picking up bits around it, then wanting to stretch it out see what kind of texture or detail comes out of it. I mean maybe my work is about the formless, the lack of form the lack of the start and end the lack of the line rather than just throwing a piece of clay onto another piece of clay and it completely… ‘you sit back, and winding may’ slapping it down, holes being created physical aches in my neck, my head you start to realise the weight of your head its, really heavy.

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Figure 23 - N: 26 Minutes 54 Seconds, Burst by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

Now I’m just awkwardly trying to get my hands underneath it ‘come on you hold me, you never fight back’ Physical aches I have so much cracking in my back and light headedness, bits of clay flopping off. Split in the middle Well its funny how I’ve been making, and I’ve resulted back to the piece I made, stretch it. Especially with the practicality’s of if I want to fire it, I can put it in the kiln, and it will dry etc etc.

O: 41 Seconds Coming to an end and seeing what I’ve kept and what I’ve made from clay is stretched slabs with lots of texture and it goes back in this cycle of what I’ve already done, and I feel this sense of disappointment. Also, its just the thought that there’s no form, formless informe as Georges Bataille says. What can these be formed into and I’m thinking what shape can I drop them on top of, so they just encompass that shape?

I’m just not sure.

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Figure 24 - O: 41 Seconds, Pellicula by Chloe Monks Monks, C (2019)

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