Dancing Clay: On Kinaesthetic Experience and Tactile Materialization

After posting pictures of my clay figurines on Facebook somebody asked whether my dance experience assisted my sculpting. I unprompted replied “Definitely”. Upon reflection, however, I wondered how that could be, my dancing assisting my sculpting, and why he thought he could recognise such in the forms I created. It “definitely” deserved more pondering and exploration than an instance of feeling charmed. Here, I seek to offset the little thought then given with my affirmation by exploring how the bodily awareness of a former dancer could end up in the hands of a novice artist. Richard Sennett makes a case of how hand techniques of craftsmen, “the choreographing movements” of body and hands, have ‘implications for more ordinary experiences,’ but only refers to social undervaluation of craftsmanship in modern times—not to possible influences on other practices of a same craftsman. Since my sculptures do not depict dancing bodies, but clay figurines that emanate from objects added, without prior sketches, there is no explicit link to dance postures or movements nor any kind of visual model. There might be, however, a tacit tactile knowledge of how heads, limbs, and muscles should appear when working with clay that derives from tactile memory fostered by kinaesthetic experience. The investigation, then, takes a sensorial analytical approach as suggested by David Howes in how the brain is largely circumvented when hands trust the knowledge of the body of which they are part. In addition, it seeks to argue against a focus on but one skill, but instead to show how expertise can benefit from a bodily fusion of several skills.