Periodic Reporting for period 5 - HANDMADE (Handmade: Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making)
Reporting period: 2024-04-01 to 2025-01-31
The process of making by hand lies at the intersection between cognition and material culture – linking the plasticity of the brain to the variety of bodily techniques and material forms. Still, the full creative dimensions of this process are not well understood and require cross-disciplinary research. The HANDMADE project aims to fill this gap in our knowledge focusing on one specific material with long history and cross-cultural significance, i.e. clay and the craft of ceramics. Our main research objective is to develop new theoretical and empirical means that will allow the study of handmaking as a way of thinking through and with materials. We have been studying pottery making at first hand through participant observation in several ceramic workshops spread around mainland Greece and the Islands. 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.
The principle aim of the HANDMADE has been to investigate the creative dialogue between maker and material. We have been trying to understand the cognitive ecology of their entanglement focusing on the craft of ceramics. To that end, since 2018 our research group (a team of archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, and psychologists) led by Lambros Malafouris and based in the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, have been conducting research using multi-sited participant observation in more than thirty ceramic workshops spread all across Greece. The workshops have been chosen to provide insights into regional variability and the differences (or similarities) between both hand-building and wheel-thrown techniques.
The philosophy of the HANDMADE project has been participatory. We have been studying handmaking with the potters, by means of their bodies and skills. That means that the potters and ceramists who participated in the study were actively working with our research team, experimenting with multisensory forms of intervention and representation. They have been encouraged to reflect on the process, look at our videos and in general play an active role in the interpretation of the visual and experiential data captured in different transitional phases. We have been constantly learning from the potters the language of clay, and developing a level of mutual involvement or coupling between the observer and the observed. This process allowed us to understand better what questions we could be asking, as well as where we should be looking. The result of this dialogue was Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging.
In particular, our research procedure, grounded in material engagement theory, was aiming, from the start of the project, to facilitate attentiveness to the details of action and the affordances of the materials and the tools involved. Our basic hypothesis has been that pottery making is not just a skilled practice; instead, it is a form of thinking with and through clay. To examine that, we have been experimenting with a combination of techniques to capture, compare and analyse the creative dialogue between hands and clay. These combined methodologies allowed us to follow the hand in action and investigate the phenomenology of human creative gesture in relation to different skills, materials and techniques. Our guiding questions were: How can we explain the transformation of clay into the form of an object? What kind of knowledge, embodied relations, memories or anticipations does this simple transformation entail? The agency of the hand within that process is ambiguous. Anatomically the boundaries of the hand are well defined, but during the handmaking process those boundaries dissolve, raising important methodological challenges. One of the major objectives of the HANDMADE project has been to disambiguate that central issue. One way we have been trying to do this, is by reconstructing the temporal stratigraphy of the experience of making. That is, by carefully observing the different stages of the creative process and the types of agency experienced during those stages. One thing we have learned first-hand, by trying to identify and compare the processes by which the creative potential of clay becomes realised through the potter’s hand (i.e. creative gestures), is that the purity of action and causality is lost. Trying to separate cause from effect inside the loop of pottery making is like trying to construct a pot keeping your hands clean from the mud.
Rooted and informed by these insights our work has been structured along several foundational questions about agency, creativity, memory, skill, selfhood and process, focusing on the cognitive ecology and poetics of clay. The broader aim has been to use that anthropological knowledge about the intelligence of the hand and the affordances of clay in order to lay down the conceptual foundation for a cognitive archaeology of handmaking over the long term. This is valuable in deepening our understanding of human creativity and the significance of the process of making by hand. Handmaking is at the heart of human becoming. This is not a statement just about the past; it is also about our future: It applies to the modern digital designer as it applies to the Palaeolithic tool maker. Perhaps, understanding the meaning of handmaking has never been as relevant and timely as it is today given its ongoing transformation within our modern creative industries and digital forms of fabrication. There are important lessons here about the role of making in our everyday living, contemporary education and mental health.
The philosophy of the HANDMADE project has been participatory. We have been studying handmaking with the potters, by means of their bodies and skills. That means that the potters and ceramists who participated in the study were actively working with our research team, experimenting with multisensory forms of intervention and representation. They have been encouraged to reflect on the process, look at our videos and in general play an active role in the interpretation of the visual and experiential data captured in different transitional phases. We have been constantly learning from the potters the language of clay, and developing a level of mutual involvement or coupling between the observer and the observed. This process allowed us to understand better what questions we could be asking, as well as where we should be looking. The result of this dialogue was Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging.
In particular, our research procedure, grounded in material engagement theory, was aiming, from the start of the project, to facilitate attentiveness to the details of action and the affordances of the materials and the tools involved. Our basic hypothesis has been that pottery making is not just a skilled practice; instead, it is a form of thinking with and through clay. To examine that, we have been experimenting with a combination of techniques to capture, compare and analyse the creative dialogue between hands and clay. These combined methodologies allowed us to follow the hand in action and investigate the phenomenology of human creative gesture in relation to different skills, materials and techniques. Our guiding questions were: How can we explain the transformation of clay into the form of an object? What kind of knowledge, embodied relations, memories or anticipations does this simple transformation entail? The agency of the hand within that process is ambiguous. Anatomically the boundaries of the hand are well defined, but during the handmaking process those boundaries dissolve, raising important methodological challenges. One of the major objectives of the HANDMADE project has been to disambiguate that central issue. One way we have been trying to do this, is by reconstructing the temporal stratigraphy of the experience of making. That is, by carefully observing the different stages of the creative process and the types of agency experienced during those stages. One thing we have learned first-hand, by trying to identify and compare the processes by which the creative potential of clay becomes realised through the potter’s hand (i.e. creative gestures), is that the purity of action and causality is lost. Trying to separate cause from effect inside the loop of pottery making is like trying to construct a pot keeping your hands clean from the mud.
Rooted and informed by these insights our work has been structured along several foundational questions about agency, creativity, memory, skill, selfhood and process, focusing on the cognitive ecology and poetics of clay. The broader aim has been to use that anthropological knowledge about the intelligence of the hand and the affordances of clay in order to lay down the conceptual foundation for a cognitive archaeology of handmaking over the long term. This is valuable in deepening our understanding of human creativity and the significance of the process of making by hand. Handmaking is at the heart of human becoming. This is not a statement just about the past; it is also about our future: It applies to the modern digital designer as it applies to the Palaeolithic tool maker. Perhaps, understanding the meaning of handmaking has never been as relevant and timely as it is today given its ongoing transformation within our modern creative industries and digital forms of fabrication. There are important lessons here about the role of making in our everyday living, contemporary education and mental health.
The HANDMADE project has significantly advanced the state of the art by demonstrating that thinking emerges through making, and by offering a compelling, empirically supported model of cognition as an embodied, interactive, and material process. The constant development and refinement of the material engagement approach is already having an impact across the cognitive sciences changing the way we understand the boundaries of mind and offering alternative ways to conceptualize the dialogue between maker and material. Our study of pottery making activities provide a rich source of information about the cognitive ecology and phenomenology of craft which have wider societal implications especially in relation to issues of mental health and human wellbeing. Understanding the process of handmaking has never been as relevant and timely as it is today, in a world whose aesthetics and daily activities are increasingly determined by digital media and disembodied forms of expression and fabrication. HANDMADE help us make better sense of the changing craft’s relation to digital design and to modern art. There are practical considerations, ethical considerations and ontological considerations here, not just about creativity and the human hand, but also, for the ways we relate to and touch the environment, how we understand and experience time and, above all, for how we make sense of the world and ourselves.