Where the touching is touched. The role of haptic attentive unity (HAU) in the dialogue between maker and material
It is often said, by archaeologists, anthropologists and practitioners, that making is a dialogue between maker and material. What does this mean? The tactile mode of communication offers a possible pathway for exploring that question. Drawing on research and using examples from the ‘HANDMADE - Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making’ project, I will attempt to show how a focus on the temporality of touch and the tactility of making can help us disambiguate the dialogue between maker and material. My main thesis is that with increasing levels of skill, tactile perception plays an active role in transforming a mere kinetic interaction (where potter and clay causally respond to each other) into a multi-modal kinaesthetic transaction (where the potter becomes attentive to the expressive affordances of clay and recursively the clay becomes responsive to the creative affordances of the potter’s hand). I call this situational attunement or resonance between the potter and clay haptic attentive unity (HAU). I will explore the links between touch and attentive engagement in the context of pottery making and use the notion of HAU to account for the dialogic character of creative material engagement.