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Handmade: Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making

Objective

Human beings have always relied on the skills of the hand for exploring their creative potential. The process of making by hand lies at the intersection between embodied cognition and material culture – linking the plasticity of the brain to the incredibly variety of bodily techniques, materials and forms of material culture. Still, the full creative dimensions of this process as well as the changing relationship of the human hand with past and present material culture are not well understood and require cross-disciplinary research. This project aims to fill this gap in our knowledge focusing on one specific material with long archaeological history and cross-cultural significance, i.e. clay and the craft of ceramics. The morphogenetic potential and plasticity of clay offers a unique kinaesthetic resource for studying the creative ecology of handmaking and exploring questions about skill, memory, distributed intelligence, material agency, tradition and innovation. Our plan is to study pottery making at first hand through sustained multi-sited participant observation in several traditional ceramic workshops spread around mainland Greece and the Islands. We will use a combination of methods from anthropology, archaeology and embodied cognitive science to record, measure, describe, compare and analyse the exact ways by which craft practitioners use their hands to produce a variety of material forms. We shall be collecting our data using extensive video recording, photography as well as through semi-structured interviews and interaction analysis. Our research procedure, grounded on material engagement theory, is designed to facilitate a heightened responsiveness to the details of action and the properties of the materials and the tools involved. Our broader aim is to use our knowledge about the creative entanglement of the hand and the clay and lay down the basic conceptual foundation for an archaeology of handmaking over the long term.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2017-COG

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Host institution

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 889 292,00
Address
WELLINGTON SQUARE UNIVERSITY OFFICES
OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom

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Region
South East (England) Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Oxfordshire
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 889 292,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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