| Yhteenveto: | The thesis explores the phenomenology of creative cognition from the viewpoint of a contemporary ceramic workshop. Over five chapters, six clay sculptural projects track the development of a method I call ‘clayful phenomenology’. Informed by Material Engagement Theory (MET), the method takes sculptural development (normally understood to be the realization of an artist’s vision) and reformulates it so that a body of clay becomes a transient, diffuse, knowledge-producing assembly. The reformulation replaces subjective experience with a systemic, phenomenological proposal for extended sentience.
Clayful Phenomenology turns material culture from an object of study into a method for investigating its own creative becoming. Videos, photos and written notes record the materialization and evolution of ideation as it is enacted in the gestural relationship between clay and hand, what Malafouris calls “creative thinging”. This account of sculpting by sculpting gives unique access to the three principles of MET and focuses on how:
1. thoughts, feelings and sensations establish themselves through gestural activity in the workshop rather than neural activity in the brain, thus extending the mind;
2. intention develops through the making and breaking of habitual practices imbuing material with agency;
3. signification, enacted and ideated through material change, enables each project to learn itself into existence.
Clayful phenomenology gives reason to question the meaning of ‘cognitive’ in ‘cognitive archaeology’ by suggesting the discipline might move away from retrofitting cognitive science models to past human thinking and towards using the archaeological study of material culture to challenge neuro-centric conceptions of the mind. The first three chapters develop the method by elaborating five contemporary examples of creative thinging. The final two chapters introduce a form of experimental cognitive archaeology during which clayful phenomenology explores the enactive signification of a prehistoric artefact: a Jōmon flame pot. This diffractive analogical approach does not attempt to uncover past meanings but to make sense of the archaeological record by creating new experiences of its traces in the present. The thesis concludes with a review of extended sentience in relation to the ownership of feelings and letting go of affective intentions.
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