Paper summary - Dialogue In The Making: Emotional Engagement With Materials, by Ingar Brinck and Vasudevi Reddy

What I read

In this article, authors Brinck and Reddy introduce the idea that a material and an artist have an unspoken dialogue, and that dialogue is a way we make sense of the world around us.

The authors introduce making, related to craft. They indicate that making is typically a hands-on activity that involves both physical (bodily) skills and also more generalized abilities. It is also positioned in a historical context and tradition.

Next, the authors begin their discussion of dialogue with materials. They indicate that there is little existing research describing the relationship between making experiences and dialogue in those experiences, likely because the creation process is often wordless, and dialogue is used entirely in a non-standard use of the word.

The authors then explain their particular focus for the paper and their knowledge generation, which is through an example of making wheel-thrown ceramics. They describe what this involves, and explain that their selection of pottery was because of the traditionally considered strong relationship between the physical material of the clay, and the potter. Clay is “conducive to dialogic engagement,” as it is intimately (physically) connected to the artist. The authors describe that they will use a variety of methods and sources to make their case of the relevance of dialogue, including ethnography, first-hand experience, and personal experience.

In the next section, the authors start by showing the way novice and established potters think of their experience throwing a pot. They describe that the experience has three different types: familiarity and relatedness with material, being in contact with the physical world, and that the clay is communicating with the artist.

In the first experience type, the authors indicate that working with clay is described effusively, with language like “passion” and “the call of my hands.” In the next experience type, the authors show that working with clay provides the artist with an intimacy of belonging in the physical world around them. The last experience type shows that the material is an active participant in the process of using it, and this is the focus of the remainder of the paper and inquiry.

Centering the clay, which is often the most difficult part of the process for novice artists to learn, is described in detail. The authors describe the way centered and off-centered clay feels to artists, not in a physical sense but in a ritualistic or spiritual sense. References to dialogue are cited from training material, such as handbooks that artists might learn from. The authors conclude that dialogue exists between an artist and a material, and both are equal contributors to the creative process.

The next sections explore the existing literature related to how people experience the material world around them.

First, the authors discuss Maurice Merleau-Ponty in some detail, with a focus on Merleau-Ponty’s view that we experience the world around us primarily through motor behavior. Our habits, which are physical, position us in space, and behavior and items in the world are interdependent. We need objects and things as extensions of ourselves for exploring space; a blind man’s stick is used as an example of how the stick itself is transformed into a part of the body. The authors describe that throwing is similar: the wheel acts as the cane, a way of interacting with the world. The equipment disappears so that we can interact directly, at least if the artist has established habits. The authors describe that, while it might feel like an expert and a novice would be different and the motor theory doesn’t work, this is wrong—there are other factors at play than “sensorimotor contingency or affordance-based responsiveness.”

The authors indicate that there may be a weakness in leveraging Merleau-Ponty’s theory, because it doesn’t address or include the social world around the artist. For example, it doesn’t mention the use of ceramic artifacts (what we can do with them,) or more importantly, the use of the tools and the wheel itself. They also explain that acknowledging social practice is important because it introduces “directed discontent” which the artist then tries to minimize or remove. Skilled intentionality framework is a way of thinking that can work together with Merleau-Ponty’s focus on motor behavior.

In the next section, the authors explore another framework within which creativity occurs: Lambros Malafouris’s Material Engagement Theory, which indicates that “materials play a scaffolding role in the historical development of human cognition.” Humans have adapted and changed based on the emergence of new materials around them. Malafouris’s exploration was on actual physical remains, and claims that artifacts are more important than internal representations. A potter has no intermediary between the clay and themselves, and the material participates in the sensemaking process. The engagement with the clay isn’t conscious, and the artist has little agency in the material usage. Malafouris describes that “the shaping of the pot becomes an act of collaboration between the potter and the mass of wet clay…”

Hilda Soemantri, an artist, indicates that the wheel itself is a part of this way of thinking, as the energy of the spinning wheel “counts” within this material exploration. This is different than sculpture, where the material is subservient to the artist.

The idea of habit doesn’t do justice to the idea of the clay as a part of the experience, because it views throwing only as a means to an end. But the authors describe that when taken together, the ideas presented by Malafouris and Merleau-Ponty effectively describe the artistic process. Interaction as a term is insufficient to capturing the way an artist works with a material, and coupling is used instead.

In the next section, the authors describe the way artists express the emotion of making things with material. The authors indicate that the way potters feel when discussing clay is similar to dialogue in human communication. Emotion is a guide for engaging in the creative process itself. The authors relate throwing (and this emotional engagement) to human development, and the way infants engage with the world around them. Infants need dialogue to develop in the world, and responsiveness (I do this, you do that as a result) is a way of engaging. If the world “does not reciprocate actions and expressions in some ways, engagement does not happen.”

In the last section, the authors make their primary case for a sense of dialogue that occurs during making things; what matters most is the relationship between a person and the world around them. There are similarities between clay and a person, and the world and an infant. Clay is open to engagement, responds, is unpredictable, demands attention, reacts to “maltreatment”, and requires recognition. Emotion is central to these ideas, both with a child and with the material.

The fundamental argument that the authors make is that “The potter’s experience of a dialogic relation with clay while throwing emerges from moving with the clay and thereby being moved emotionally.” The clay is presented as an actor in the process; it “speaks” and communicates, and as a result, needs to be spoken to and communicated with. “Dialogue… constitutes the primary means for making sense of and reaching out into the world at large, animate and inanimate.”

What I learned and what I think

I agree, strongly, with the fundamental argument: that an artist has a dialogue with the thing they are making, or that the interactions between the artist and the material can be thought of as dialogue. The dialogue is subdued, because if there really is an idea of “flow” and tranquility in making (and there is, at least when expertise is considered), there is no conscious conversation. The dialogue is more like an unspoken glance from someone with whom you have a really meaningful, long relationship—where you can sort of know what they are thinking without attending to it very strongly. Not surprisingly, it’s how I feel with Jess; after almost 30 years of daily and hourly contact, we can really speak without speaking.

I would (and have) extend the idea of dialogue between an artist and a material to the idea of a dialogue between anyone and the built environment. This isn’t my idea to claim; it’s pretty fundamental to what I learned from Dick Buchanan, and it fits really well with a semiotic theory. If things are signs, those signs are communicating (at least one way.) Interactions are ways we engage with the signs (“talk to them”). Consumption, really, is the most gross form of that dialogue, but it still “counts.”

I don’t know why this view of dialogue might be contentious, but I’m thinking of and trying to position this in the context of the previous paper I read that views creativity as a constant negotiation with affordances. That paper seems to indicate that the communication is a monologue—the material is speaking, and the artist is adapting based on what they see or hear. If that’s a legit read on it, it would make some sense why I thought that paper was pretty wrong.

There’s a part of this that’s missing, and I think the authors sort of gesture to it and then write it off without a lot of consideration: the role of expertise. When someone isn’t able to center clay, they have a dialogue with the material, and it’s one that makes them feel terrible; in many ways, it really is a monologue, with the material being mean and the artist feeling small. But an expert has intuited that dialogue, or internalized it, or maybe even exhausted it. When I have a blank mind during making things, I’m not thinking or talking or listening, and so if the material is talking, I don’t hear it. That’s not much of a dialogue, and the material has become sort of irrelevant or subservient. Maybe there’s a bellcurve of discussion as compared to expertise, where the conversation sucks when you are a novice, is strong as you grow your skills, and then is silent when you have expertise.

I’m more and more pondering the nature of non-art-based creations and these various theories. I’m presently writing new ideas, so I’m making things and “being creative.” I don’t think there’s much dialogue going on here, because I’m so intimately aware of how the keyboard works and what to expect from Word. I’m having dialogue with my own words, as representation of my thoughts. The “material” may be pixels on the screen, but that feels dumb.

I’m feeling a little aimless with these articles that are so fundamentally grounded in theory, too. I get it, and I know why it’s important to make a case for something new in the context of something old and respected, but I want to read and consider things that are more pragmatic or practical. I will try to find some well-known and recent articles on how people grow creative confidence, but that may also be highly theoretical.